Piratebay.org raided by the Swedish police
The Pirate Bay (Piratebay.org), Bittorrent tracking website, was raided today by the Swedish police. This time it’s not a hoax. You can read the latest Pirate Bay news from here. The Pirate Bay owners always thought that they would not get any trouble from the authorities because the Swedish copyright laws are quite liberal. The site was quite famous for publishing e-mails from companies who threatened them with lawsuits. We shall see can they add this action by the police to their list of legal threats or is this the last we will hear of them.
This is the announcement from their website:
In the morning of 2006-05-31 the Swedish National Criminal Police showed a search warrant to Rix|Port80 personnell. The warrant was valid for all datacentres of Rix|Port80 and was directed at The Pirate Bay. The allegation was breach of copy-right law, alternatively assisting breach of copy-right law.The police officers were allowed access to the racks where the TPB servers and other servers are hosted. All servers in the racks were clearly marked as to which sites run on each. The police took down all servers in the racks, including the non-commercial site Piratbyrån, the mission of which is to defend the rights of TPB via public debate.
According to police officers simultaneously questioning the president of Rix|Port80, the purpose of the search warrant is to take down TPB in order to secure evidence of the allegations mentioned above.
The necessity for securing technical evidence for the existance of a web-service which is fully official, the legality of which has been under public debate for years and whose principals are public persons giving regular press interviews, could not be explained. Asked for other reasoning behind the choice to take down a site, without knowing wether it is illegal or not, the officers explained that this is normal.
The TPB can receive compensation from the Swedish state in case that the upcoming legal processes show that TPB is indeed legal.
Source: Piratebay.org
