Today it was revealed that a Swedish prosecutor is trying to force the .SE registry, via a court case, to ban ThePirateBay.se and PirateBay.se from being in use. He even wants to go so far as to claim the domains for the state in order to put up a 'stop' logo on them.

The .SE registry targeted in the prosecutor’s case does not want to take this action. They look at it as removing a street address on the basis that a crime was committed there.

But they’re all making it so simple. The fact is that, even though I despise the current version of The Pirate Bay, nothing illegal happens there. And actually, no such case has even been tried as the case against me and the others a few years back was about a totally different version of TPB.

The technology back then was different and the verdicts handed down referenced the fact that three separate parts of the system were in play in order to breach copyright. First the search engine (which is still there), then a tracking system (which was removed many years ago) and a database of .torrent files (which was removed years ago too).

This means that TPB today is in a totally different technical state than it was in the previous (and also very corrupt) court case. It also means that there’s no relevant court case to reference today, the system just looks the same to the users – and the prosecution and judges might have a hard time to understand that.

Essentially today’s TPB is similar to any other search engine. The court case in Sweden could just as well talk about Google.se as a domain name instead, since they also link to material that might breach copyright. But, actually, Google show you parts of that content, not just metadata about it.

Obviously this would be considered a ludicrous case and would be thrown out, but everything regarding TPB scared the shit out of the Swedish government because of pressure from the United States of America. Just look at how the first raid happened.

But the biggest threat against the Internet is that the state is going after the .SE registry and not the “perp” itself. It means that no one can come and defend TPB’s case in a court of law and point out the flaws in the prosecutor’s thinking. The .SE registry has no interest (and should not have any either) in going into details about the actions of their customers.

The points I’ve mentioned here, and the fact that, at least during my time, most material on TPB was not violating copyright, will not be mentioned in this court case, because the people who should have a right to defend themselves are not invited to the case. Where’s the democracy in that?

These court cases where the real defendants are not invited have only happened a few times in The Pirate Bay’s history as I can recall – in China, Denmark and Saudi Arabia. All world-renowned champions of free speech and democracy.