Over the weekend, The Pirate Bay "celebrated" its second anniversary of being raided by the Swedish police. On May 31, 2006, law enforcement seized all of the popular torrent tracker's servers and backups, and arrested two of the site's operators. The site didn't stay down for long, though—just a few days later, everything was business as usual for The Pirate Bay. A court date in Sweden has yet to be set, and support for the site appears to be stronger than ever.

Since the raids, the predictable has happened: the site's popularity has exploded. The Pirate Bay says that its number of Bit Torrent peers has grown from 2.5 million to over 12 million, and that registered users have grown from 1 million to 2.7 million. The tracker is more popular than ever, and continues to grow every day. "It's awesome to see the support the community show us. Even in our bad moments, we get your support," said the Pirate Bay's admins in the posting.

The general reaction across the Internet is quite positive—and largely pro Pirate Bay. Commenters on the Pirate Bay's blog post, Digg, and swaths of other blog entries are almost unanimous in their support of the site and its goal of remaining online and operational. TorrentFreak even named the anniversary "Happy Pirates independence day."

Many believe that the Swedish police acted inappropriately when they seized the Pirate Bay's servers, that the police had it in for Pirate Bay before the raid even happened, and that the reason things are taking so long to go to court is because law enforcement can't find any useful evidence.

Of course, not everyone is a friend of the Pirate Bay. The motion picture and movie industries are at war with the site and want it taken down for good. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry is one of its most determined foes, battling the pirates last year over a domain issue and then suing the four main backers for 15 million kroner ($2.5 million) for violating the copyrights on a number of films, PC games, and music. The Motion Picture Association of America has also slapped the site with a claim for $15.4 million in damages for facilitating copyright infringement. The Pirate Bay isn't exactly known for taking these threats seriously, however, and recently declared that "the record companies can go screw themselves."

So, will The Pirate Bay continue to be a safe haven for illicit content in the months and years ahead? It certainly appears so at this point. Industry trade groups trumpeted the 2006 raids as a major victory and claimed that the site had been permanently dismantled, but subsequent events have demonstrated that those celebrations were extremely premature.

Even if the Pirate Bay were eventually taken down, it would live on in the thousands of other torrent trackers that users would divert their attention to. In fact, the Internet's reaction just highlights the futility of Big Content's efforts to take down sites like the Pirate Bay in the first place and why the focus has turned towards deep packet inspection, throttling, and filtering. People love their BitTorrent and will continue to use it—with or without the Pirate Bay.