and Neij questioned the request but eventually removed the site. The Pirate Bay Svartholm Warg co-founded The Pirate Bay in 2003 with Fredrik Neij and Peter Sunde. At the time, it was part of the Swedish anti-copyright group and think tank Piratbyrån (Piracy Bureau) and became a platform for sharing audio, video, software and electronic games. According to Svartholm, Piratbyrån was mainly involved with political operations such as rallies, petitions and lobbying for changes to copyright law. While The Pirate Bay's stated goal is to "help people freely exchange information". Svartholm also created the BitTorrent tracker software Hypercube (which is an open source software under no specific license) which was used to run The Pirate Bay website. Legal issues The Swedish police first raided The Pirate Bay on 31 May 2006 on suspicion that it operated as a business infringing on copyrights. The police confiscated servers and questioned its administrators including Svartholm. On 31 January 2008, The Pirate Bay operators – Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Carl Lundström (CEO of The Pirate Bay's former ISP) – were charged with "promoting other people’s infringements of copyright laws". The trial began on 16 February 2009. Svartholm, along with Neij and Lundström, defended Piratebay by arguing that they did not profit from piracy since users were not charged for its services and merely relied on website advertising as their source of revenue. On 17 April 2009, Sunde and his co-defendants were found to be guilty of "assisting in making copyright content available" in the Stockholm District Court. Each defendant was sentenced to one year in prison and they were ordered to pay damages of 30 million SEK (approximately €3,390,317 or US$4,222,980), to be apportioned among the four defendants. The defendants lawyers have appealed to the Svea Court of Appeal together with a request for a retrial in the district court because of the recent suspicion of bias by judge Tomas Norström. Under Swedish law, the verdict is not lawful until all appeals have been processed. In April 2009, Svartholm was the subject of an investigation by Swedish prosecutors looking into his role in The Student Bay, a file sharing site specializing in academic texts. Svartholm claimed he had no knowledge of the site. The site was reported by the Swedish Association for Educational Writers in December 2008 claiming it violated copyright law. In October 2009, Stockholm District Court ordered that Svartholm