2006: Swedish police raid The Pirate Bay website and shut it down.

“Pirate Bay was a huge source of pirated films for people around the world, and today they are no longer.”

That was a statement issued exactly five years ago Tuesday by Kori Bernards, a spokeswoman for the Motion Picture Association of America.

After all, Swedish police that day had just raided the file sharing site’s offices and carted away a boatload of servers.

Dan Glickman, the MPAA’s chairman at the time, also said something ironic that day.

“The actions today taken in Sweden serve as a reminder to pirates all over the world that there are no safe harbors for internet copyright thieves,” he said.

But the site was back online three days later, after finding hosting in the Netherlands.

And today, after playing cat-and-mouse games to defy court orders to shutter, the site is hosted by the Pirate Party — despite the raid leading to the arrest and convictions of the site’s four founders who face prison and multimillion-dollar fines.

The Pirate Bay, now 8 years old, sports some 25 million unique users. The site, at one point up for sale, acts as a conduit enabling the online pirating of videogames, movies, music and software, using the BitTorrent protocol.

Torrent Freak notes that the site is upgrading its hardware, housed in an undisclosed mountain cave in southern Sweden, “in order to keep serving the ever-growing number of users.”

Pirate Bay administrators Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Peter Sunde were found guilty of facilitating copyright infringement in 2009, along with Carl Lundström, who was convicted of funding the operation. They were each sentenced to a year in prison and $3.8 million in fines. They said the court system was biased against them.

The Stockholm prosecution was brought by the Swedish government and Hollywood, in what’s best described as a joint civil-criminal trial. The defendants were charged with facilitating copyright infringement. They remain free, pending appeal to Sweden’s highest court.

See Also: