In addition to facing the wrath of content owners around the world, The Pirate Bay's administrators have recently been facing a much more local threat: camera-toting investigators following them around in cars marked with Danish plates. Is Prince to blame?

Prince loves sticking it to the man—this is the guy who changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol and performed with the word "slave" written on his face when he was unhappy about his recording contract. But when "the man" is Prince himself and the one doing the sticking is BitTorrent search site The Pirate Bay, Prince reaches for the lawyer stick. He has declared himself out to "reclaim the Internet," and The Pirate Bay is at the top of his list (fan sites appear to be on the list as well).

Peter Sunde, a Pirate bay admin, tells Ars that the Purple One's legal team has already started leaning on some advertisers to drop support for the site. "We're not even worried, since the Internet is too big for morally upset people to get it their way," Sunde said in an e-mail. "I'm just sad that Prince—whose music I really like—can't understand that he's the new Metallica versus Napster. And we all know who lost that..."

Comparing his site to the original Napster seems a bit strange, since Napster was eventually shuttered and then retooled after legal pressure. Sunde doesn't want to go the way of the original Napster, of course, but similar legal pressures on the site are ratcheting up. The newest wrinkle in the long saga of The Pirate Bay: investigators following Pirate Bay members around in cars with Danish plates. Sunde says that the investigators are taking pictures from inside the car "with a flash, so I'm not sure how smart they are." He notes that something similar happened last year before a police raid on Pirate Bay servers.

He is "quite sure" that this is related to Prince's own announced plan to sue the site (though a Swedish prosecutor has also announced plans to sue the administrators in the next couple of months). "What do they think they can find out by following us around?" Sunde asks. "Everything we do is digital."

It's just another strange day in the increasingly strange life of a Pirate Bay admin.