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Pirate Bay cofounder and computer hacker Anakata freed

Swedish swashbuckler sprung from Scandanavian cellblock

Pirate Bay cofounder Gottfrid Svartholm Warg has been released from prison in Sweden following three years behind bars, we're told.

Svartholm Warg, who went by the online handle Anakata, was sent down in Sweden and Denmark for various computer hacking offenses. He is best known, however, for cofounding the famed Pirate Bay torrent search website.

His release was reported by Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter, and confirmed today on Twitter by Warg's mother Kristina Svartholm.

Warg was arrested in Cambodia in 2012 and extradited to Sweden, where he was convicted in 2013 for hacking a government tax contractor. He was convicted in Denmark, where he served another two years (cut from three and a half for good behavior) for hacking IT contractor CSC before returning to Sweden to complete his sentence.

Warg was one of four men to cofound the Pirate Bay, and the third (along with Peter Sunde and Fredrik Neij) to complete time behind bars. Site financier Carl Lundstrom avoided jail time by spending four months under electronic monitoring.

Once the most notorious file-sharing search engine in the world, the Pirate Bay allowed users to find torrent files for free and pirated software, video files and other stuff. The site was subject to numerous takedowns and continues to operate despite the threat of police raids. ®

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