Swedish Police Raid Major BitTorrent Site
June 01, 2006 | by Geoff Duncan
Swedish police closed down ThePirateBay.org, a major BitTorrent site accused of pointing users to pirated software, movies, and music
In a move sure to raise legal hackles in Europe, Swedish police have executed raids in 10 locations with the intent of shutting down ThePirateBay.org, which claimed to be the largest search index site for the BitTorrent file sharing technology. The raids were carried out at data centers of Rix|Port80, a large Swedish Internet and colocation provider. Reportedly, servers belonging to The Pirate Bay as well as other hosted sites were taken down by police, and three people were detained for questioning.
Unsurprisingly, studios and entertainment industry groups like the IFPI see the raids as an appropriate measure in their fight against piracy. IFPI Chairman and CEO John Kennedy said: "This is a very important development for Sweden, a country with a fantastically rich music culture yet which has more recently acquired a reputation as a haven for copyright infringement. The Pirate Bay has damaged the legitimate music industry on an international scale and I am very pleased that the Swedish authorities have today taken such decisive action against it."
Operators of The Pirate Bay maintain they have done nothing wrong, since they do not host any copyright-restricted material, instead merely directing users to other systems which claim to have material matching their search criteria. they have operated in public and, thusfar, have successfully resisted industry pressured to shut down, even running their own political campaign around copyright issues.
The legality of the search-and-seizure move hasn't been tested in Swedish court. Sweden has been targeted by the Hollywood entertainment cartel for harsh criticism; the country has no laws barring filesharing, which the entertainment industry argues has turned the nation into a hotbed of piracy. Last year Sweden barred the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted movies and music
The Pirate Bay currently claims it will be back online in a few days.
Post Your Comment...Comments
Lisa Forest on Jun 1st, 2006 at 3:38 PM:
Sounds like the pressure from the RIAA and MPAA is finally starting to effect governments outside the US. I think it's a pretty sad day. This goes back to a rights issue. Obviously, not just by the name, but by the content they linked to that this site caters to certain people that are not willing to pay for products, but the fact they can be raided and arrested when they themselves dont host anything is pretty scary. What's next? Will we be able to arrested because we talk about pirating, or how one could possibly do it? Will they arrest journalist for naming sites/applications that enable people to do it?
Karl Viklund on Jun 2nd, 2006 at 2:27 AM:
50 police men were involved in the raid! Berlive it or not. Don't know where they got all the resources from because otherwise the always complainf about having too little resources. This raid is after pressure from MPAA, it's confirmed yes. 3 people have been arrested and heard and they even took DNA-test on one of them, I can't belive it... The Media coverage from the Swedish site IDG.se is massive. Alot of other sites have had their servers confiscated that had nothing to do with Birate Bay like www.fragbite.com Swedens biggest site about Counter-Strike, a computer-game. And now it seems like the police have done a bigger raid then they can handle and people that have had their servers confiscated unfairly will have to wait a long time to get them back and they will get no money for the damages they have been suffering. Loosing trafic and more. The funny part of this whole scandal is that the police isn't sure whether a crime have been comitted or not. But if it's not a crime they will make it a crime, I guess. The Swedish police homepage have been under a DDoS-attack thta even have led to internal communication problems.
It now seems like The Birate Bay will be upp and runing shortly. This time from outside Sweden. We will see if that's is true.
IDG.se have written an article about The Pirate Bay on English named: "Pirate Bay - three years of provocations, piracy and publicity"
Digg it here:
http://digg.com/technology/Pirate_Bay_-_three_year...
Read it here:
http://www.idg.se/ArticlePages/200606/01/200606011...
Karl VIklund on Jun 2nd, 2006 at 2:28 AM:
Mind my spelling errors in the post above :P
Karl Viklund on Jun 3rd, 2006 at 6:47 AM:
They are actually back up again, as they said they would be. But this time from The Netherlands it seems and with a brand new Logo ^^
http://thepiratebay.org/ If you want to take a look.
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Jeff on Jun 1st, 2006 at 3:38 PM:
I like torrentspy.com personally. Kinda sucks how these sites do not really host the files, just point to them, and that its illegal to do that.