Peter Sunde

Sunde is of Norwegian and Finnish ancestry. Before the founding of the Pirate Bay, Sunde worked for Siemens. In 2003, he became a member of Sweden's Piratbyrån (The Pirate Bureau) and a few months later Sunde, Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm started The Pirate Bay with Sunde as the spokesperson. He remained The Pirate Bay's spokesperson until late 2009 (three years after the ownership of the site transferred to Reservella). In August 2011, Sunde and fellow Pirate Bay co-founder Fredrik Neij launched file-sharing site BayFiles, that aimed to legally share. Sunde is vegan and speaks Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, English and German.

Peter Sunde ran for European Parliament in 2014 election with the Pirate Party of Finland.

On 31 May 2014, just days after the EU elections and exactly eight years after the police raided The Pirate Bay servers, Sunde was arrested at a farm in Oxie, Malmö to serve his prison sentence for the Pirate Bay case. He was released five months later after having served two-thirds of his eight-month sentence.

On 31 January 2008, The Pirate Bay operators – Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Carl Lundström (CEO of The Pirate Bay's former ISP) – were charged with "assisting [others in] copyright infringement". The trial began on 16 February 2009. On 17 April 2009, in Stockholm District Court, Sunde and his co-defendants were judged guilty of "assisting in making copyright content available". Each defendant was sentenced to one year in prison and ordered to pay damages of 30 million SEK (approximately €2,740,900 or US$3,620,000), to be apportioned among the four defendants. After the verdict a press conference was held where Sunde held up a handwritten IOU statement claiming that is all the damages he will pay, adding "Even if I had any money I would rather burn everything I own and not even give them the ashes. They could have the job of picking them up. That's how much I hate the media industry."

The defendants' lawyers appealed to the Svea Court of Appeal together with a request for a retrial in the district court claiming bias on the part of judge Tomas Norström. The court ruled there was no bias and denied the request for a retrial.

On appeal, the jail sentences were reduced, but the damages increased.

The supreme court of Sweden subsequently refused to hear any further appeal.

The European Court of Human Rights also later rejected an appeal.

Segments of an interview with Sunde talking about copyright, the Internet, and culture are featured in the 2007 documentary Steal This Film and 2013 documentary TPB AFK.

The early days of The Pirate Bay, along with the trial, are the basis for the 2024 series The Pirate Bay, with the role of Peter Sunde played by actor Simon Gregor Carlsson. The series was broadcast on the SVT network, a public television network funded by Swedish taxpayers, modelled on the BBC.