Swedish court reduces sentence for Pirate Bay founder

A Swedish appeals court today halved a jail sentence on hacking charges handed down to a co-founder of the popular file-sharing site The Pirate Bay.

Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, 28, saw his sentence reduced to one year, from the two years ordered by a district court in June.

The appeals court upheld the lower court's ruling that Svartholm Warg had illegally accessed information at the companies Applicates and Logica, which store the Swedish tax authority's census data, between 2010 and 2012.

However, it found him not guilty of illegally accessing data belonging to Nordea, the largest Nordic bank.

Svartholm Warg had pleaded innocent on the Nordea charge, arguing that his computer had been hacked or used without his permission.

The Pirate Bay co-founder has appealed a separate one-year jail sentence for copyright infringement in 2009 for his role in administering the file-sharing site, and has been behind bars since September 2012 when he was expelled from Cambodia.

He is also wanted by Denmark for hacking into outsourcing group CSC's servers to access files belonging to the police.

Founded in 2003, The Pirate Bay makes it possible to skirt copyright fees and share music, films and other files using bit torrent technology, or peer-to-peer links offered on the site.