Pirate Bay co-founder's sentence is reduced

Court reduces Gottfrid Svartholm Warg's sentence by one year.

One of the masterminds behind the file-sharing website The Pirate Bay Wednesday had his prison sentence reduced after a Swedish appellate court said one of the charges lacked sufficient evidence for a guilty verdict.

Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, 28, was sentenced to two years in prison by a Swedish district court in June for his alleged role in hacker attacks. He was found guilty of accessing computers that were hosting several Swedish government agencies' registers, and for hacking into data owned by Nordea AB, NDA.SK +1.10%a major Swedish bank.

Mr. Svartholm Warg has admitted to less serious offenses, but fought most of the allegations by saying his computer could have been hacked or used by someone visiting his home.

In a ruling issued Wednesday, a Stockholm appellate court concluded that Mr. Svartholm Warg's computer was indeed used in the breaches, but said it couldn't rule out the possibility that his computer had been hacked in connection with the Nordea intrusion.

The court reversed the Nordea conviction, finding Mr. Svartholm Warg not guilty of obtaining data belonging to the bank. This resulted in a one-year reduction of his sentence.

Mr. Svartholm Warg—known in file-sharing and hacking communities under his "anakata" alias—has already served a sentence in a Swedish prison in relation to a separate conviction for copyright-infringement crimes related to The Pirate Bay and is now being held in a detention center in Stockholm.

The Pirate Bay was established in 2003 by Mr. Svartholm and fellow hacker Fredrik Neij, and has been steeped in controversy ever since. In 2009, the co-founders, along with company spokesman Peter Sunde and businessman Carl Lundström, were sentenced to prison and received multimillion-dollar fines in a separate case.

(Published by WSJ - September 25, 2013)