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Pirate Bay Blockaded By Police
David Utter
Staff Writer
2006-06-01
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Swedish police have seized the servers belonging to one of the most popular BitTorrent trackers in the world as part of an investigation into illicit file sharing.
 | | Pirate Bay Shut Down |  |
Visitors to the Pirate Bay website will not see the latest gleeful putdown of someone's cease and desist letter. Instead, a "site down" message describes what happened to the notorious site:
In the morning of 2006-05-31 the Swedish National Criminal Police showed a search warrant to Rix|Port80 personnel. 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.
Should the investigation prove that the Pirate Bay operates legally, as it has long contended, its organizers would be entitled to compensation from the Swedish state for its losses.
Authorities in Sweden raided 10 locations throughout the country. The Motion Picture Association of America claimed in a statement that millions of users traded up to 2 million files illegally each day.
"The actions today taken in Sweden serve as a reminder to pirates all over the world that there are no safe harbors for Internet copyright thieves," said Chairman and CEO of the MPAA, Dan Glickman.
The Pirate Bay has long argued that under Swedish law its function as a search engine and not a host of copyrighted material was legal. According to an interview on WiredFire with Richard Falkvinge, head of a pro-piracy political party called the Swedish Pirate Party, the IFPI and the Swedish anti-piracy bureau were behind the raid.
"The Swedish APB have been under considerable international pressure from their international counterparts to make this move," Falkvinge said. With this being an election year, he believes there will be fallout from the raids that could drive younger Swedes to back his party and possibly give his party an entry into the Swedish government.
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Tag: Pirate Bay
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About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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