Today, exactly seven years have passed since The Pirate Bay was raided by the Swedish police. While the entertainment industries hoped that this would be the end of their troubles, in hindsight they’ve created one of the most resilient websites on the Internet. The Pirate Bay has declared the raid anniversary "Independence Day," alongside a determination to continue an ongoing battle worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster script.

The Pirate Bay has undergone some drastic changes over the years, moving from a fully-fledged BitTorrent tracker to a trimmed down torrent index.

First the tracker was removed, then the torrents followed and a few months ago the infamous torrent site canceled nearly all central servers as it moved to the cloud. In addition, the site switched domain names on multiple occasions.

All these changes were carried out to make the site more resilient and less likely to be shut down by the authorities. This determination to escape the long arm of justice was first brought to the forefront seven years ago.

Most of the site’s current users are probably unaware that without a few essential keystrokes in the site’s early years, The Pirate Bay may have not been here today.

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

While the police were about to raid the datacenter, Pirate Bay founders Gottfrid and Fredrik got wind that something was up. In the months before the raid they were already being watched by private investigators day and night, but this time something was about to happen to their trackers.

At around 10am in the morning Gottfrid told Fredrik that there were police officers at their office, and asked him 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 realized that the problems might be linked to their tracker. He therefore decided to make a full backup of the site, just in case.

When he later arrived at the co-location facility the concerns turned out to be justified. There were dozens of policemen floating around taking away dozens of servers, most of which belonged to clients unrelated to The Pirate Bay.