The Pirate Bay (TPB) was knocked offline on Tuesday after cops in Sweden raided a server room in Stockholm over suspected copyright infringements.
Servers and computers were seized in the raid, an act that resulted in the popular file-sharing website going down.
Speaking to Radio Sweden on Tuesday about the authorities’ action, Fredrik Ingblad, a local prosecutor specializing in file-sharing cases, said: “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.”
According to TorrentFreak, which first reported the incident, at least one man has been arrested in connection with the raid.
A report back in September confirmed that for some time TPB – the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker – had been operating from a cloud-based “raid-proof” system, running its operation from 21 “virtual machines,” up from four machines two years earlier when it first switched to the cloud. The site apparently had no “crucial” bits of hardware to its name, so it’s not entirely clear what “servers and computers” cops took on Tuesday.
The fact is, however, that the file-sharing site has gone down, and remains down at the time of writing.
The movie and music industry-backed Swedish Rights Alliance is claiming the raid took place in response to a recent complaint it made.
On its website the organization said, “The Pirate Bay is an illegal commercial service that earns big sums on posting other people’s films and music.”
TorrentFreak said in its report that while it was clear TPB had been targeted on Tuesday, “several other torrent related sites including EZTV, Zoink, Torrage and the Istole tracker” have also been taken down.
Arrest
Last month police in Thailand nabbed Fredrik Neij, the third and final co-founder of TPB. Days after his arrest, BayFiles, another file-sharing site co-founded by Neij, went offline.
After hearing about Tuesday’s raid, Peter Sunde, another co-founder of TPB and former spokesperson for the site, said in a blog post titled “Pirate Bay, down forever?” that he cared little that the site had been raided.
Wishing it had been closed on its 10th anniversary last year in line with “the original deal,” he said the TPB site had become overrun with ads and was now “ugly, full of bugs, old code and old design” adding that no one seemed willing to develop the technology behind it.
Users of the site will now be wondering if this latest raid has taken down the world’s most famous file-sharing site for good, or if it’s only a matter of time before it pops up again somewhere else on the Web.
[Via TorrentFreak, TheNextWeb]
