Pirate in prison

At the end of May, in the south of Sweden, a special police unit captured Peter Sunde, one of the founders of Pirate Bay, the creator of the Flattr micropayment service and the developer of the Hemlis communicator, which has not yet been put into operation. Immediately after his arrest, Sunde was transferred to the Västervik Norra prison, which houses criminals who have committed non-violent crimes. Until August, not a sound came from Sunde because of the prison walls.

Västervik Norra Prison is a grey, gloomy six-story building with barred windows. Previously, this building housed a hospital. Peter Sunda will have to stay here for eight months. In 2010, he received a year in prison at the Pirate Bay Trial, but after several appeals, the sentence was reduced to eight months. He was also sentenced to a huge fine, but refused to pay it for two reasons: lack of money and unwillingness to pay.

Sunde is the second of the arrested founders of Pirate Bay. The first, Gottfried Svartholm, was issued by Cambodia to Sweden and Sweden to Denmark. Now Svartholm, nicknamed Anakata, is awaiting trial in a Danish prison, the trial will not take place until September. He is about to be tried in the case of hacking Danish police computers from a laptop in Cambodia. The third founding father of the most notorious pirate site, Fredric Neige, lives with his Thai wife and children in Thailand and has no intention of returning to Europe until the statute of limitations expires.

The three Swedish freaks who created Pirate Bay and teased the whole world for several years had different personalities and each had their own role in the big game they were playing. Svartholm was a computer genius who wrote software for a pirated torrent tracker, Fredrik Neige alias TiAMO was a gloomy beer drinker who was always digging through computer hardware, and Sunde alias brokep was the speaker of the Bay and a smiling face facing the world. He gave hundreds of interviews and dozens of press conferences, including in the European Parliament, explaining the meaning of the piracy movement and the harm of copyright in the hands of mega-corporations. In the last elections to the European Parliament, this Swede with Finnish roots and experience of living in Norway put forward his candidacy, collected 3,000 votes and failed. After that, he was arrested.

Peter Sunde, who was convicted by a Swedish court, has been living in Germany for the past few years and periodically, without much hiding, came to Sweden on business. He has always had beautiful and witty ideas. The Flattr micropayment service, which allows anyone to pay directly to an artist, writer, artist, programmer, is an ideal thing in its execution, which attracted thousands of people, but for some reason did not gain popularity in Russia. Maybe some major publication will undertake to try to increase the fees of their authors with the help of Flattr? His Hemlis - translated from Swedish, this word means "secret" - is conceived as a response to special services, eavesdropping and spying on a person from every corner. After the story with Snowden, this thing, which guarantees the complete secrecy of the conversation, is especially relevant. Hemlis is currently in beta, which is undergoing closed testing. The Swedish police, having put Sunda in prison for eight months, caused great irritation among the network masses, who are waiting for the news.

After looking around the prison and, apparently, regaining his balance of spirit, Peter Sunde took up his usual business of cheerful struggle for rights. He is a vegetarian. Prison food is not good for him. He wrote an appeal in which he asked to pay attention to the rights of vegetarians in prison and claimed that due to inadequate nutrition he had already lost 5 kg in weight. But it was only a warm-up, only a search for a topic. In a recent recent address, Peter Sunde told the prison administration that he was a follower of the Kopimi church. Such a church really exists, it was registered in Sweden in January 2012 and has its head named Gustav Nipe. The church community consists of computer freaks, programmers, pirates, network activists, underground authors, avant-garde directors and other motley people living on the Internet. Kopimism has tenets ("All knowledge for all", "The search for knowledge is sacred", "Sharing knowledge is sacred") and sacred symbols corresponding to the "copy" and "paste" actions (Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V). The sign of Kopimi - the letter K against the backdrop of a rainbow pyramid - is also a religious symbol.

Peter Sunde, sitting in a gray gloomy house, now demands a meeting with the priest of the Kopimi church, which confuses the prison authorities. It has no reason to refuse a prisoner a meeting with a representative of an officially registered church, but does not know where to get such a priest. Since there is no meeting in real life, Sunde insists on meeting with the priest online, and claims that P2P technology is peer to peerP2P is a decentralized network without dedicated servers. An example of P2P is torrents. The Internet underground, the I2P network, is built on the same technology. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies also work on the basis of P2P. - in the field of pirate theology, it means priest to priest, that is, a secure communication channel for communication between a believer and a priest. He demands to provide him with such a channel.

The latest tweet from Sunde is dated May 10th. This was before the arrest. Since then, his Twitter has gone silent. Sunde calls himself a "socialist and vegetarian", and his blog in Swedish has the motto Copy me happy. There are few people on Earth who have done so much to create a new world of free and uncensored communications as Sunde. And he was never a gloomy renegade fanatic, but always created and communicated with a smile, and even smiled at the trial of himself, because in the backpack with which he appeared everywhere, he always had a couple of CDs with software and music and - an inexhaustible supply of optimism, fun, irony and faith in the rightness of their cause. So hang on Peter, hang on brokep, we're waiting for you and it's only just getting started!