The Pirate Bay
The Pirate Bay (often abbreviated TPB) is an Internet site that bills itself as "the world's largest BitTorrent tracker", and also acts as an index for .torrent files that it tracks. Due to BitTorrent's ability to handle extremely large files, it is popular for sharing large music sets, movies and software (legally or otherwise), as well as Linux distribution discs. ThePirateBay.org is ranked in 463rd place on the world's most visited internet pages.[1]
The Pirate Bay was started by the Swedish anti-copyright organization Piratbyrån in early 2004, but since October 2004 has been a separate organization. The page is currently run by "Anakata" and "TiAMO".
The server which runs Hypercube Tracking Software is located in Stockholm, Sweden. On June 1, 2005, The Pirate Bay updated its website in an effort to reduce bandwidth usage, which was reported to be at 2,000 HTTP requests per second on each of the four web servers, as well as to create a more user friendly interface for the frontend of the website. On May 31, 2006, the site's servers were raided by Swedish police, taking it offline until June 3, when it came online with new hosting in the Netherlands. Backup servers are planned to be put up both in Belgium and Russia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_Bay
"US government behind Pirate Bay raid"
Published: 2nd June 2006 09:08 CET
The American film and music industry rejoiced over the raid by the Swedish police on The Pirate Bay. But reports that the US government was behind the action against the Sweden-based file sharing site have now resulted in the Swedish government being reported to the country's Constitutional Committee.
The widescale raid carried out at hosting companies in Stockholm, Västmanland and Västra Götaland targeted one of the world's largest sites for sharing music, games and computer programmes.
According to Swedish Television's news programme, Rapport, the action was the result of contact between the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the White House.
The US State Department then turned to Stockholm, with a demand for Sweden to do something about The Pirate Bay.
In April a Swedish delegation consisting of representatives of the National Police Department, the Police Board and the Ministry of Justice travelled to Washington to discuss The Pirate Bay.
Swedish police and prosecutors were then given the go-ahead to act. According to one prosecutor the legal situation was still unclear, but the state secretary Dan Eliasson gave the order for the operation to begin, according to Rapport.
"I can guarantee that nobody from the Ministry of Justice gets involved in operational work in individual cases. Neither politicians nor civil servants," Eliasson told TT.
He said that the Swedish delegation and the US authorities simply discussed copyright issues and how to deal with file sharing in general terms, and did not focus on The Pirate Bay specifically.
"We have not had any demands [about The Pirate Bay] from the American authorities at a government level. On the other hand, there are often discussions at a civil servant level about the problem of file sharing and copyright breaches," said Eliasson.
"This happened here too, and of course the big file sharing sites were mentioned."
Eliasson also confirmed that the MPAA has lobbied the Swedish government many times.
"But that's not an American authority, it's an interest group. I have met representatives from the MPAA and they were concerned about the file sharing being run from Sweden. I can't remember whether or not The Pirate Bay was mentioned," he said.
The Centre Party's justice spokesman, Johan Linander, has now asked the parliamentary Constitutional Committee to investigate justice minister Thomas Bodström and others in office.
Linander says that American pressure led Swedish politicians to get involved in the police's operations.
On Thursday Bodström said that he found it hard to believe that anyone would try to direct the Swedish police or prosecutors to make arrests.
"But we have discussed how we should continue the work around the copyright issue," he said, referring to a letter urging the police to increase efforts against illegal file sharing.
Bodström was on a flight on Thursday night and was not contactable.
On Wednesday police arrested three men in their 20s following a report from the film and music organisation Antipiratbyrån. They are suspected of breaking copyright laws.
Louis Roper
http://www.thelocal.se/article.php?ID=3 ... e=20060602
Friday, June 02 2006
Contributed by: Anonymous
A raid involving 50 members of the Swedish National Criminal Police has taken the servers of The Pirate Bay and Piratbyrån (the Pirate Bureau) — a Swedish lobby organisation that originally developed The Pirate Bay — into custody. The search warrant was given on grounds of alleged copyright violation and assisting copyright violation. This move comes as a bit of a surprise, as the legality of the site has been under public debate for over three years, with the operators frequently issuing public press releases.
WiredFire, in an interview with Rickard Falkvinge, head of the Swedish Pirate Party, is reporting that police arrested three staff members, ultimately taking only two into custody. The Associated Press, however, is reporting that Ulf Goranzon, a police spokesman, is claiming that none were arrested, they were just under suspicion of violating copyright law.
The site operators speculate that the police wish to test the legality of the operation. Purportedly, this move comes due to political pressure exerted by American media corporations. Swedish public broadcaster Sveriges Television has backed this claim. Rickard Falkvinge has stated that the Svenska antipiratbyrån (Swedish Anti-Piracy Bureau) has admitted to being behind the police action, and he suspects the IFPI is also involved. Tobias Andersson, of Piratbyrån agrees, claiming that The Antipiratbyrån "has clearly misled the police" and "has fooled the police into shutting down its antagonists, the Piratbyrån. The Antipiratbyrån previously gained notoriety by paying an infiltrator to plant copyrighted material on the Swedish ISP Bahnhof's servers.
Dan Glickman, CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America has applauded the move, citing it as a reminder that "there are no safe harbors for copyright thieves". Kori Bernards, an MPAA representative, claimed The Pirate Bay to be "one of our No. 1 targets." The MPAA allege that The Pirate Bay made available over 150 thousand files, including summer blockbusters such as "Mission: Impossible III" and "X-Men 3".
However, The Pirate Bay claimed that as they only host .torrent files and not copyrighted material, they are not in contravention of copyright laws. The Pirate Bay also served as a distribution point for freely-licensed material such as some Linux distributions and independent music and film.
The Pirate Bay claims to be the world's largest BitTorrent tracker.
In the raid, several private servers unconnected to The Pirate Bay were also taken by the police. Some have claimed that there is no legal basis for these seizures.
Initially, there were also rumors that this could be another stunt by The Pirate Bay to promote awareness. This possibility, however, has been already dismissed and only had some credibility given the fact that approximately one year ago today they claimed something similar like this, but instead were simply updating their servers. At current there are already some publications made available by proper officials, (see the MPAA link below) confirming the authenticity of the raid.
On June the 1st The Pirate Bay site changed its "Site down" note to "Site down - will be up and fully functional within a day or two".
Gottfrid Svartholm, owner of webhotel PRQ said "I was arrested for interrogation, and they begun to ask question about Pirate Bay, what I knew and what I had for connections to it. I got no public defender, and my regular legal representative was also also under arrest, so I said nothing at all". According to Mr. Svartholm, the police told him that they were not obligated to provide a public defender, as the crime he was accused for doesn't lead to jail sentence if he is found guilty.
The day after the raid, Mr. Svartholm is trying to limit the damage for PRQ's other customers that also had their servers confiscated, even if they didn't have any connections to The Pirate Bay.
http://www.infoshop.org/inews/article.p ... 2060525970
