ThePirateBay.org Raided - Servers Seized

Found on Slyck on Tuesday, 30 May 2006
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In their native Sweden, ThePirateBay.org enjoyed a level of immunity from copyright prosecution rarely seen in the file-sharing world. Often defiant in the face of those wishing to enforce their intellectual property rights, ThePirateBay.org would go on to become one of the premier BitTorrent indexing and tracking sites.

The seizure of ThePirateBay.org's entire server farm will guarantee this BitTorrent tracker will remain offline until the police complete their investigation. Whether this will keep ThePirateBay.org offline indefinitely is another matter.

"We are not sure when it will return, but we are moving it to another country if necessary," brokep said.

According to The Pirate Party, a Swedish copyright reform organization, the raid also seized Piratbyran's (the Pirate Bureau) servers. In addition, The Pirate Party reports "...the servers where located in a protected area, to which the police had no legal right to enter..." Approximately 50 police participated in the raid, which placed into custody two PirateBay.org personnel.

Let's just wait a bit and see if anyone from the industry takes the responsibility for the raid. It's similar to a terrorist attack: you also have to wait until some newssite receives a claim of responsibility. The reason for the raid would be interesting, since Piratebay seems to be perfectly legal under swedish law.