The upcoming Pirate Bay documentary TPB AFK will highlight some under-reported details about the connection between the BitTorrent site and Wikileaks. Among other things, Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm was credited for his involvement in getting the “Collateral Murder” video out to the public. Daniel Domscheit-Berg, the former spokesman of WikiLeaks, further recalls travelling to Sweden with Julian Assange to pay server fees . A meeting he will not forget anytime soon.
This Friday will see the release of TPB AFK, a dark documentary that will follow the three Pirate Bay founder during their trials in Sweden.
TorrentFreak has seen an advance screening of the film and we can say that it’s not a hero story, not at all. It is a unique documentary about three totally different individuals with personalities that often clashed. They had their own motives for becoming involved in The Pirate Bay, and defended them till the bitter end.
Gottfrid Svartholm, the youngest of the three, made the news last year when he was deported from Cambodia to Sweden, where he’s currently serving his prison sentence for his involvement in The Pirate Bay.
In the film Gottfrid comes across as a witty person who likes to challenge the status quo. Known online as Anakata, he can be credited for many of the bold responses to copyright holders that are still published in Pirate Bay’s legal threats section.
Gottfrid also founded Internet company PRQ which provided hosting to many controversial sites including Wikileaks. In TPB AFK this connection is brought up as well, with Daniel Domscheit-Berg saying that Julian Assange has a lot of respect for the Pirate Bay founder.
The former Wikileaks spokesman recalls that he and Julian Assange made a quite an unusual trip to Sweden to hand over the hosting fees in 2008. The Wikileaks duo were surprised by Gottfrid apparent paranoia, and Domscheit-Berg remembers it as one of the weirdest experiences he ever had.
“He came to the hotel. And had someone waiting outside in a car. They had some kind of agreement that Gottfrid would always be near a window. So he stood there in the lobby and behaved really strange. Every half a minute he turned around to see if the guy in the car was still there,” Domscheit-Berg explains.
Gottfrid declined an offer to hang out for a drink, simply accepted the money and which he took off quickly.
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