Peter Sunde | |
|---|---|
 Sunde in 2009 | |
| Born | Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi (1978-09-13)13 September 1978 (age 46) |
| Other names | brokep |
| Occupation(s) | Politician, spokesperson |
| Known for | Co-founder ofThe Pirate Bay Founder ofFlattr Co-founder ofKvittar Co-founder ofIPredator Founder ofNjalla |
| Political party | Pirate |
Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi (born 13 September 1978), aliasbrokep, is a Swedish entrepreneur and politician. He is best known for being a co-founder and ex-spokesperson ofThe Pirate Bay, aBitTorrent search engine.[1] He is an equality advocate and has expressed concerns over issues of centralization of power to theEuropean Union in his blog.[2] Sunde also participates in thePirate Party of Finland and describes himself as asocialist.[3] In April 2017, Sunde foundedNjalla, a privacy orienteddomain name registrar,hosting provider andVPN provider.[4]
Sunde is ofNorwegian andFinnish ancestry.[5][6] Before the founding of the Pirate Bay, Sunde worked forSiemens. In 2003, he became a member of Sweden'sPiratbyrån (The Pirate Bureau) and a few months later Sunde,Fredrik Neij andGottfrid Svartholm startedThe Pirate Bay with Sunde as the spokesperson.[7] He remained The Pirate Bay's spokesperson until late 2009 (three years after the ownership of the site transferred to Reservella). In August 2011, Sunde and fellow Pirate Bay co-founderFredrik Neij launched file-sharing siteBayFiles, that aimed to legally share.[8] Sunde isvegan[9] and speaks Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, English and German.
Peter Sunde ran forEuropean Parliament in2014 election with thePirate Party of Finland.[10]
On 31 May 2014, just days after the EU elections and exactly eight years after the police raided The Pirate Bay servers, Sunde was arrested at a farm inOxie,Malmö to serve his prison sentence for the Pirate Bay case.[11] He was released five months later after having served two-thirds of his eight-month sentence.[12]
On 31 January 2008,The Pirate Bay operators – Sunde,Fredrik Neij,Gottfrid Svartholm andCarl Lundström (CEO of The Pirate Bay's formerISP) – were charged with"assisting [others in] copyright infringement".[13] Thetrial began on 16 February 2009. On 17 April 2009, inStockholm District Court, Sunde and his co-defendants were judged guilty of "assisting in making copyright content available". Each defendant was sentenced to one year in prison and ordered to pay damages of 30 millionSEK (approximately€2,740,900 orUS$3,620,000), to be apportioned among the four defendants.[14] After the verdict a press conference was held where Sunde held up a handwritten IOU statement claiming that is all the damages he will pay, adding "Even if I had any money I would rather burn everything I own and not even give them the ashes. They could have the job of picking them up. That's how much I hate the media industry."[15]
The defendants' lawyers appealed to theSvea Court of Appeal together with a request for a retrial in the district court claiming bias on the part of judge Tomas Norström.[16] The court ruled there was no bias and denied the request for a retrial.
On appeal, the jail sentences were reduced, but the damages increased.
The supreme court of Sweden subsequently refused to hear any further appeal.
TheEuropean Court of Human Rights also later rejected an appeal.[17]
Segments of an interview with Sunde talking aboutcopyright, theInternet, andculture are featured in the 2007 documentarySteal This Film and 2013 documentaryTPB AFK.
The early days of The Pirate Bay, along with the trial, are the basis for the 2024 series The Pirate Bay, with the role of Peter Sunde played by actor Simon Gregor Carlsson. The series was broadcast on the SVT network, a public television network funded by Swedish taxpayers, modelled on the BBC.
Flattr was amicropayments system started by Sunde and Linus Olsson, which enabled viewers of websites to make small donations to the developer by clicking a "Flattr this" button. At the time of the projects's announcement in February 2010, Sunde explained that "the money you pay each month will be spread evenly among the buttons you click in a month. We want to encourage people to share money as well as content."[18] Flattr itself took a 10% administration fee.[18]
AfterWikiLeaks' initial publication of the U.S. Diplomatic Cables, companies including Visa, MasterCard, PayPal and Moneybookers blocked donations and money transfers to the site. Flattr, however, continued allowing donations to WikiLeaks.[19] Sunde commented "We [Flattr] think their work is exactly what is needed and if we can help just a little bit, we will."[20]
On 5 April 2017, Adblock Plus publisher Eyeo GmbH announced that it had acquired Flattr for an undisclosed amount.[21]
On 9 July 2013, Peter Sunde, together with Leif Högberg and Linus Olsson, announced a fundraising campaign for Hemlis.[22] Their goal was to launch a mass market messenger that was secure and private.[23]
On 22 April 2015, the Hemlis team announced that they were discontinuing the development of the Hemlis messaging platform.[24]
On 14 December 2015, Sunde released a video[25] on hisVimeo account of a device called "Kopimashin", a machine made with aRaspberry Pi running aPython routine to produce 100 copies per second ofGnarls Barkley's single "Crazy", redirecting the copies to/dev/null (where the data is discarded), surpassing eight million copies per day.
The following day, Sunde published the full description of the device and project atKonsthack as the first art project of the site's portfolio.[26]
The machine has an LCD screen (as shown in the video) that calculates a running tally of the damages it has supposedly inflicted upon the record industry through its use, accordingly to whatRIAA claims on their website.[27] If RIAA's claims were valid, it also meant that the record industry would soon become bankrupt as a result of Kopimashin,[28] a claim the project seeks to disprove with a physical example.
A few days later, Sunde told news siteTorrentFreak that Kopimashin was created to "show the absurdity on the process of putting a value to a copy", and that "putting a price to a copy is futile."[29]
A similar project called "Strata Kazika" was already launched by Polish activists in 2012.[30][31]
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