Swedish cops shut down The Pirate Bay again
Anyone trying to access the popular torrent sharing website The Pirate Bay is going to be disappointed today. The site has been taken offline following a raid by Swedish police on the premises where its servers are kept, according to reports.
The controversial website went offline sometime around 2AM Pacific Time, and the police confirmed that a number of servers were seized in connection with an intellectual property investigation, said TorrentFreak.
“There has been a crackdown on a server room in Greater Stockholm. This is in connection with violations of copyright law,” said Paul Pintér, the Swedish police’s national coordinator for IP enforcement.
The Swedish language website Metro added more context (via Google Translate):
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.
The Pirate Bay has since reappared with a new URL hosted under the top-level domain for Costa Rica. It’s unclear, however, if the new domain is an official version or an unofficial mirror. Most likely it’s the latter, because so far it’s been largely unresponsive, with most search requests returning 500 Internal Server Errors.
The Pirate Bay has been a target of law enforcement for some time, amid accusations it’s aiding online copyright fraud. The site was raided for the first time way back in 2006, but although its founders have all been prosecuted and jailed, the service has always found a way to reappear online somewhere, usually by transfering to a new domain in new country. Previous safe havens included Peru and Greenland.
Somewhat surprisingly, Peter Sunde, co-founder and ex-spokesperson of The Pirate Bay, isn’t too upset that the site he no longer has anything to do with has gone down. Writing on his personal blog, Sunde said he dislikes what the site has become, with the new owners choosing to fill it with advertising and not making any improvements to its technology.
It feels good that it might have closed down forever, just a real shame the way it did that,” he wrote.
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