Swedish Law Enforcement Delivers Long-Awaited Pirate Bay Raid Sequel; Seizes Servers And Knocks Site Offline

from the TPB-Raid-II:-Sony's-Revenge dept

For whatever it's worth and for however long it actually lasts, The Pirate Bay is down. After a hiatus of nearly a decade, the long-running bane of the MPAA/RIAA's existence has again been raided by Swedish law enforcement.

The Pirate Bay portal went down Tuesday morning after Swedish police raided a server room in Stockholm over alleged copyright violations. In addition to its file-sharing section, Pirate Bay’s forum Suprbay.org was also down.



“There were a number of police officers and digital forensics experts there. This took place during the morning and continued until this afternoon. Several servers and computers were seized, but I cannot say exactly how many,” Swedish prosecutor Fredrik Ingblad told Radio Sweden.

Today’s raid comes after Pirate Bay was found to be hosting some of the leaked movie files stolen from Sony Pictures Entertainment in its recent hack. It’s unknown if the raid and takedown were instigated by the distribution of those Sony files.

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community. Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis. While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

This follows the arrest of the last Pirate Bay co-founder, Frederik Neij, who was picked up last month near the Thailand-Laos border. That last arrest may have been a boon for Swedish authorities, but this raid may have been prompted more by a recent high-profile hacking than a culmination of the long battle against the Pirate Bay.That the Pirate Bay is indeed down is still somewhat surprising. As Wired points out, the operators claimed to have moved their operations to the cloud and away from centralized servers. Not only that, but its ditching of torrents in favor of magnet links essentially makes any takedown more symbolic than useful. And while there have been reports that the site is back up under a new domain , it appears those reports are exaggerated for the time being.Hollywood -- and the law enforcement agencies that run interference for it -- will take all the symbolic victories they can get, though. The endless attempts to block the Pirate Bay have been completely ineffective. And while the very occasional raid usually manages to knock a target completely off the air, it's rarely, if ever, permanent.Not to restate the obvious, but every action taken against the Pirate Bay only sends it more traffic when it inevitably returns to life. High-profile raids carried out by local law enforcement seemingly at the behest of American studios does little to raise the estimation of either entity in the eyes of the general public.

Filed Under: police, raid, sweden

Companies: the pirate bay