Nicknamed “Anakata,” Gottfrid Svartholm is a Swedish computer specialist who has an estimated net worth of $12 million. Born Per Gottfrid Svartholm Warg on October 17, 1984 in Sweden, he is known as the former co-owner of the web hosting company PRQ and co-founder of the BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay along with Fredrik Neij and Peter Sunde. He also created the tracker software Hypercube, an open source software under no specific license, which was used to run The Pirate Bay web site and tracker. He was the one who started the website Americas Dumbest Soldiers which listed deceased US soldiers in the Iraq War and asked the site users to rate how “dumb” the soldiers were based on how they died.
On January 31, 2008, The Pirate Bay operators were charged with “promoting other people’s infringement of copyright laws.” They are Sunde, Neij, Svartholm and Carl Lundstrom, CEO of The Pirate Bay’s former ISP. The trial began on February 16, 2009 and the four were found guilty in the Stockholm district court on April 17, 2009. Svartholm went to live abroad and on August 30, 2012, he was arrested by Cambodia police in Phnom Penh upon the request of the Swedish authorities. In an interview with him commenting on the May 2006 police raid of The Pirate Bay, parts of it were featured in Good Copy Bad Copy and Steal This Film. He also appears in the 2013 documentary TPB AFK.