Away From Keyboard

What Simon Klose’s documentary captures is that the Pirate Bay trial was never really about copyright—it was about whether three young Swedes could be held personally responsible for what other people chose to do with a website they built. TPB AFK follows Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, and Gottfrid Svartholm through the aftermath: legal costs, house arrest, appeals, the slow institutional grind applied to people who believed they were doing something right. It’s both a character study of three men with very different personalities who somehow built the same thing together, and a clear-eyed portrait of how power deals with disruptions it doesn’t understand. The film was released online for free, immediately upon completion. That tells you everything about where the filmmakers stood.