Peter Sunde and Gottfrid Svartholm - Agenda Setters 2008

Name: Peter Sunde and Gottfrid Svartholm

Title: The Pirate Bay operators

Position: 28    Last year: Not ranked

Why? Taking on the music and film industries

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Peter 'brokep' Sunde and Gottfrid 'anakata' Svartholm are two of the operators running Swedish website The Pirate Bay, the world's largest BitTorrent tracker.

The site, initially established in 2003, claims it is a not-for-profit group that does not store copyrighted material on any of its servers.

The film and music industry disagrees. Throughout its history the Pirate Bay has been subject to repeated legal threats and 'cease and desist' orders for enabling the sharing of pirated works - but has survived all of them.

Digital file-sharing has started a war between copyright holders and consumers - and at the frontlines are Sunde and Svartholm.

The site operators face fresh charges for facilitating copyright infringement in what could prove a landmark trial for intellectual property - but whatever the outcome, Sunde and Svartholm are setting an agenda by refusing to give in to the powers that be.