The Pirate Bay is often portrayed by copyright holders as a site that has no respect for the law, but that overstates the truth. According to one of its original founders, when the torrent site offered to help the authorities catch some really serious criminals several years ago, the police were completely disinterested.

If The Pirate Bay manages to navigate the stormy waters of the Internet for another couple of years, it will have spent an unprecedented decade-and-a-half thumbing its nose at the authorities. Of course, that has come at a price.

The authorities’ interest in The Pirate Bay remains at a high and, given the chance, police in some countries would happily take down the world’s most prominent copyright scofflaw. However, painting the site as having no respect for any law would be doing it a disservice. In fact, at one point it even offered to work with the police.

The revelations follow the publication of a shocking article by Aftonbladet (Swedish) which details how, over an extended period, its reporters monitored dozens of people sharing images of child abuse online. The publication even met up with some of its targets and conducted interviews in person.

One of the people to comment on the extraordinary piece is Tobias Andersson, an early spokesperson of free-sharing advocacy group Piratbyrån (Pirate Bureau) and The Pirate Bay. Interestingly, Andersson reveals how The Pirate Bay offered to help police catch these kinds of offenders many years ago.

“A ‘fun’ thing about my time at the Pirate Bureau and The Pirate Bay was when the National Police, during the middle of the trial against us, called and wanted to consult about [abuse images] and TPB,” Andersson says.

The former site spokesperson, who also had more recent responsibility at The Promo Bay project, says he went to meet the police where he spoke with an officer and a technician. They had a specific request – to implement a filter to stop certain content appearing on the site.

“They wanted us to block certain [abuse-related] keywords,” Andersson explains.

Of course, keyword filters are notoriously weak and easily circumvented. So, instead, Andersson suggested another route the authorities might take which, due to the very public nature of torrent sharing (especially more than a decade ago when people were less privacy-conscious), might make actual perpetrators more easy to catch.

“I told [the police] how they could see the IP addresses in a [BitTorrent] client belonging to those who were sharing the content,” Andersson explains.

“I showed them how to start a torrent at 0.1kb/s download to be able to see the client list but without sharing anything. Which is not really rocket science,” the TPB and Piratbyrån veteran informs TorrentFreak.

Somewhat disappointingly, however, the police were unresponsive.

“They were not at all interested,” he says.

“Our skilled moderators [on The Pirate Bay] routinely deleted everything that could be suspected to be child porn, but still people tried to post it again and again. I wanted to explain to the police that we could easily identify most of stuff being posted but they were totally uninterested.”

Meanwhile, however, Hollywood and the recording industries were working with Swedish police on a highly expensive and complex technical case to bring down The Pirate Bay on copyright grounds. Sadly, it was to be further copyright-related demands that would bring negotiations on catching more serious offenders to an end.

“Because we refused to censor [The Pirate Bay’s] search to remove, for example, a crappy Stanley Kubrick movie, our ‘cooperation’ with the police ended there. Too bad, because we could have easily provided them with lists [of offenders] like those Aftonbladet reported today,” Andersson concludes.

Today’s revelations mark the second time The Pirate Bay has been shown to work with authorities to trap serious criminals. In 2013, the site provided evidence to TorrentFreak which showed notorious copyright troll outfit Prenda Law uploaded “honey-pot” torrents to the site. The principals of that organization are now facing charges of extortion and fraud.