Today, exactly six years have passed since The Pirate Bay was raided by the Swedish police. At the time the entertainment industries hoped that this would silence the deviant BitTorrent site for good, but in hindsight we can conclude that they had actually awakened a monster. The raid and the ongoing battle that later unfolded reads like a script for an upcoming Hollywood blockbuster. The Pirate Bay team have already coined an appropriate title: Pirate Independence Day.

Two weeks ago The Pirate Bay was offline for more than a day due to a DDoS attack. A rare event for a site that prides itself on being the “most resilient” torrent site on the Internet.

However, looking at The Pirate Bay’s history it is actually a small miracle that the site is still around. Without a few essential keystrokes six years ago, The Pirate Bay may have not been here today. Those same keystrokes marked the beginning of an ongoing battle between a group of fun-loving geeks and a billion dollar entertainment industry.

Let’s look back at what happened…

May 31, 2006, less than three years after The Pirate Bay was founded, 65 Swedish police officers entered a datacenter in Stockholm. The officers were tasked with shutting down the largest perceived threat to the entertainment industry at the time – The Pirate Bay’s servers.

In the months running up to the raid, Pirate Bay founders Gottfrid and Fredrik discovered they were under 24 hour surveillance by private investigators so they had an idea something was amiss. Then on the day of the raid, events rapidly unfolded.

“I got a phone call like 10am in the morning, it was Anakata [Gottfrid],” recalled Fredrik.

Gottfried said that there were police officers at their office and asked Fredrik to get down to the co-location facility and get rid of the ‘incriminating evidence’, although none of it, whatever it was, was related to The Pirate Bay.

As Fredrik was leaving he suddenly had a hunch that the problems might be linked to their tracker, so he initiated a full backup of the site. At the co-location facility there were dozens of policemen, some in civilian clothing. Fredrik asked them: “Who are you? What are you doing here?” To which they responded: “Who are YOU? What are you doing here?” After questions back and forth, Fredrik eventually revealed who he was and a police officer responded, “Oh, we’ve been looking for you.”

Footage from The Pirate Bay raid

While this sequence of events is almost comedic, that split-second decision to backup the site turned out to be the most pivotal moment in the site’s short history. Within days the site was restored online thanks to the backup. Without it, the situation today might look very different.

This determination and defiance from the site’s operators set the tone for the years that followed. Learning from their experiences, safety measures were put in place. Backups were spread around the globe to mitigate any future attacks, and although the site has gone down for 24 hours or more since the raid, the culprit has often been technical or wild party related.

After all their equipment was confiscated by the authorities in 2006, Peter, Fredrik and Gottfrid were escorted to the police station. During their questioning the Pirate Bay trio gave up very little information. Gottfrid quickly confessed to his crime – of killing the Swedish prime minister when he was 2 years old – but that was all they got.

The raid eventually resulted in a lengthy investigation out of which the police generated 4000 pages of evidence against the people involved. The evidence was used by the prosecution during the Pirate Bay trial of 2009 and the appeal of 2010 where four people who were previously involved with the site were sentenced to jail time and significant fines.

Their sentences were eventually made final early 2012, although that is not the end for all involved.

Despite these sentences The Pirate Bay is still online, but not without change. The site’s tracker has since been removed and the default .torrent files were switched for magnet links to make the site less prone to outside attacks. The site also has more registered users than ever before.

At the time of the raid The Pirate Bay had only a few hundred thousand registered users, but with the spotlight on the deviant Swedes, the user count soon skyrocketed. At the start of July 2006 the site broke the magical milestone of one million registered users, and that was just the beginning.

Today, despite numerous court cases, court-ordered blockades by ISPs and two full trials at the Stockholm Court, The Pirate Bay has 5,741,691 registered members. Quite a remarkable achievement for a site that doesn’t even require registration to download.

Remembering their survival, The Pirate Bay today celebrates Pirate Independence Day, an initiative they started back in 2008.

“To celebrate today, we encourage you to keep on sharing. Keep on uploading, downloading, swapping bits of information,” they announce.

“Let today be the pirates independence day! Today we celebrate the victories we’ve had and the victories that will come. Today we celebrate that we’re united in our efforts. Keep on waving that black flag!” they conclude.