The founders of The Pirate Bay built the world's most famous torrent site in 2003. Three Swedish guys. Peter Sunde. Fredrik Neij. Gottfrid Svartholm. Their stated goal: help people freely exchange information. The entertainment industry's goal: destroy them. What followed is one of the most chaotic legal stories in internet history. 2006: Swedish police raid the servers. Took everything away. the site is back online within three days. the founders publish the cease-and-desist letters they receive from Hollywood studios on the site with mocking responses. They become folk heroes. 2009: trial begins. Hollywood shows up with lawyers. then things get interesting. it emerges mid-trial that the lead police investigator in the case had secretly taken a job with one of the plaintiff studios while the investigation was ongoing. the appeal judge was a member of the Swedish Copyright Association. the defendants screamed corruption. the court said it didn't matter. guilty. one year each. $4.2 million fine. None of them went. Gottfrid fled to Cambodia. Cambodia has no extradition treaty with Sweden. The Swedish government reportedly leveraged a $59 million aid grant to Cambodia to get him deported anyway. he came back in handcuffs. While evading his copyright sentence in Cambodia, he hacked Danish government systems police records, social security numbers, the Schengen border database. six months of access. When he was finally deported to Sweden and serving his copyright sentence, the Danish charges caught up with him. extradited again. convicted again. ended up doing three years across Swedish and Danish jails Fredrik fled to Laos. Then Thailand. arrested in 2014. deported. served 10 months. Peter stayed. served 8 months. came out and built Njalla — an anonymous domain registration service — because he said: "We're going the wrong way in society regarding people's right to be anonymous." The guy who ran the world's most pirated site came out of prison and built a privacy company. The Pirate Bay is still online.