It will come as little surprise to many that The Pirate Bay has been hit hard by the Swedish authorities, ending a long period of apparent immunity from IFPI attention.
This defiant immunity from legal action has long baffled observers, but the site has become the flagship of intense debate both inside and outside of their native Sweden. It has even spawned a credible pro piracy movement, the Piratbyrån, and a political party, Piratpartiet (The Pirate Bureau).
Founded in 2003, The Pirate Bay evolved from its’ original Swedish language site into the world’s premier indexing site, largely as a result of the demise of torrent indexing legends such as Suprnova and LokiTorrents between 2004-5. Boasting over a million unique page hits per day and between 1,000 – 2,000 HTTP requests per second, The Pirate Bay
Given that the site had widely reported that it had been the focus of legal attention only a year previously in what turned out to be little more than a publicity stunt, we have refrained from reporting this as factual news until we were able to speak to authoritative sources. And none better than the leader of Piratpartiet itself, Rickard Falkvinge.
According to first hand reports, the servers have been confiscated by Swedish police, who are looking to see if the site operators have broken any criminal laws. The raids are reported to have included removing Piratbyrån's servers, as well as The Pirate Bay’s. According to initial reports, around 50 police were involved in the raids, and three staff arrested, with two being taken into custody. In an exclusive and understandably brief initial exchange with WiredFire, Falkvinge said “(we have) “no idea what's happening in the near future, other than us fighting this”. Falkvinge went on to describe the unfolding events as like being trapped in “a circus”, adding that it was impossible to do anything with all the media attention.
In an extended exclusive interview, Falkvinge said “Oh, I know who are behind it. It's IFPI and the Swedish Antipiratbyrån (Anti-piracy bureau) both… because they (the Antipiratbyrån) told me when I asked”. During the course of the interview, Falkvinge translated the text of their press release, and said that the police were seeking a test case, “The thing about seeking a test case is just an excuse for raiding and shutting down the world's largest torrent server. The Swedish APB have been under considerable international pressure from their international counterparts to make this move”.
Having timed this to coincide with an election campaign Antipiratbyrån will have seriously aggravated a high percentage of Sweden's population in their use of police tactics to deal with what is essentially a civil dispute, and almost guaranteed PiratPartiet's entry into government this fall. The police action involved the entire ISP (PRQ), resulting in widespread disruption to a number of small businesses in addition to those servers targeted.
Whilst it does not necessarily follow that there will be any criminal convictions arising from all this, the PiratPartiet see this more as a means of harassing The Pirate Bay and Piratbyrån, as well as attempting to put political pressure on them. However, they are confident that these current problems will be favourably resolved, although this will obviously result in a protracted downtime.
In the meantime, every cloud has a silver lining and Swedes are flocking to join the PiratPartiet as a result of this unprecedented action.
Full text of press release (personally translated by Rick Falkvinge, leader of PiratPartiet) follows:
Pirate party criticizes police for unlawful and immoral raid
Swedish Police today staged a raid and seized computers and equipment belonging to the Pirate Bay, one of the world's largest search engines and file-sharing communities.
Despite repeated case law showing that the operations conducted by the Pirate Bay are not in violation of Swedish law, the Police chose to give in to media interests who were feeling threatened, and set due process aside.
They say, according to an operator on the site, that the police desire to test the legality of the operations.
"Which corporation would stand for this?", asks Rickard Falkvinge, head of the Swedish Pirate Party. "Which corporation would stand for having the police raid their facitilies and shut down operations, before they were proven guilty of a crime? In this case, the Pirate Bay has commited no crime. They are disliked by large media interests, that's correct. But it's not illegal to be disliked..., and definitely not cause for the Police to raid and shut down one of the world's largest gathering places for our young generation."
"This is exactly the kind of raids the Pirate Party wants to put an end to", Rick concludes. "When society sends its police at the young generation for their listening to music and watching movies, it's not the young that are in error. It's society that needs to get a grip."
(Thanks to member DaBlade for his help, and Rickard Falkvinge, head of the Swedish Pirate Party)