Swedish police have reportedly raided The Pirate Bay. The portal has been down for several hours. The site has long hidden behind the relatively lax laws of Sweden, but it appears it's exhausted the leniency.


The embattled torrent tracker went down this morning, and Swedish Police confirmed to TorrentFreak that some servers were seized in connection with a broad intellectual property operation of some kind.

There has been a crackdown on a server room in Greater Stockholm. This is in connection with violations of copyright law," read a statement from Paul Pintér, police national coordinator for IP enforcement.


According to Metro in Sweden (bastardized translation by Google):

The effort was initiated by Frederick Ingblad, one of Sweden's special prosecutors file sharing. He confirms that the raid took place in the Stockholm area, on Tuesday morning, without specifying the site further. - There were a number of police officers and Digital forensics there.This took place during the morning and until the afternoon. And there were several servers and computers seized, but I would not say exactly how many, says Fredrik Ingblad.

So while we don't have a definite confirmation, it's probably fair to draw a line between the intellectual property operation and the outage. TorrentFreak notes that several other trackers like EZTV are down. The Pirate Bay forum at Suprbay.org is also down.

Earlier this year it was reported that The Pirate Bay set up a network of virtual servers to keep the tracker up and running in the case of a raid but that obviously didn't work.


The Pirate Bay has been in hot water for aiding piracy for long time. The first raid on the service goes all the way back to 2006. Opponents say that the service willfully aids in wholesale piracy by linking to torrents for copyrighted movies, music, TV shows, etc. And though the founders have been successfully prosecuted, the service has continued to exist. What claims it has to legitimacy are couched behind freedom of speech.

As for the future, it's hard to imagine that this is The Pirate Bay's final act. Two of the Pirate Bay's founders are in prison, and the only one who isn't, Peter Sunde was recently released after being arrested earlier this year. Even if it dies in name, torrents and piracy will live on under some other name. There are plenty of alternative trackers, and indeed, because The Pirate Bay has been shutdown and raided before, people are used to looking other places for their torrent links.


Updating with more information as we get it. Let us know if you know anything.

This post has been updated. It originally said that all of the Pirate Bay founders were in jail. Peter Sunde was recently released after being arrested earlier this year.


Image by Michael Hession