The Pirate Bay Is Back Online

Many readers have submitted news that The Pirate Bay is back online, operating for now as "The Police Bay." Writes one anonymous submitter: "Pirate Bay got new hardware, moved the servers abroad and used recent backups. So the only bad side-effect of this police raid is that hundreds of clients of the ISP PRQ still have not got their servers back from the police. When the police did the raid on Wednesday, they took Pirate Bay from Bankgirot's secure server room. Then they also took all the servers in PRQ colocation facility STH3, effectively disabling a lot of small companies. The connection between PRQ and TPB? - Same owners, nothing more, this is beginning to become a huge scandal in Sweden with coverage on TV and all newspapers 4 days in a row."

Sucks to be the MPAA...

[oberondarksoul (723118)]

So soon they crowed victory, so soon will they be humbled. By the looks of things the takedown of the Pirate Bay was less than legal, and now with the 'Bay back online the MPAA must be feeling more than a little upset. Personally I'm of the view that the Pirate Bay was perfectly legal - they didn't carry any copyrighted works themselves, just as Google don't carry the materials they link to. What fun this whole affair will turn out to be...

Re:Sucks to be the MPAA...

[Dredd13 (14750)]

Pirate Bay is *more* legal than Google. Google at least exists in this "grey area" -- with things like Google Cache, and things like that, where they actually DO distribute the actual copyrighted content themselves occasionally. Nothing that the Pirate Bay serves up is actually copyrighted, since it's just .torrent files.

The Top ten

[yoharryo (874777)]

Nice to see an illegal copy of Vista is number one...

Re:The Top ten

[Legion303 (97901)]

"* prances around in free Half-Life 2 T-shirt *"

Looking at it from another angle, you paid $40 for a shirt. :)

Re:The Top ten

[Blue Stone (582566)]

Berrating a supporter of copyright infringement: $0.02
Bragging about paying for Half-Life 2: $35.00

Claiming that a bundled t-shirt is free: er ... priceless.

For everything else, there's Pirate Bay.

:-)

Political campaign for the Piracy Party

[paugq (443696)]

Looks like the Swedish Police is making a free, wide and very positive campaign to favor the Piracy Party. I bet they will be getting a lot more votes thanks to this weird operation. Thank you Swedish police officers!

Investigators liability?

[LinuxGeek (6139)]

So, at what point does it become the responsibility of the police to do enough homework to make sure that their investigation dosen't harm many other businesses that are completely uninvolved in the search for evidence? What recourse do the other effected isp customers have?

Re:Investigators liability?

[Depili (749436)]

Remember that this is Sweden, not USA we talking about, in here the police doesn't have any more leeway when it comes to laws than normal citicens. (Ever so often we get to read about wich high up police officer got how big traffic tickets etc [the fines are based on income rather than being a fixed sum]).

So please try to remember that not every contry works the same as America (and I'm really happy that it's so, frankly America and the American mentality scares me.)

Examples Please!

[kwandar (733439)]

I can only hope this is causing a huge scandal s Sweden as stated by the article. Can any Swedish readers provides us a synopsis of some of the reports on tv and in the newspaper?

Re:Examples Please!

[seezer (842248)]

This guy http://tpbeng.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com] is translating local news to english.

Re:Examples Please!

[Caine (784)]

Virtually all major swedish newspapers (http://www.aftonbladet.se , http://www.dn.se/ [www.dn.se] http://www.expressen.se/ [expressen.se] http://www.svd.se/ [www.svd.se] are leading with the "Pirate War" and news that Pirate Bay is back online.

Media coverage have so far been very good, concentrating on the mismanaged raid, suffering of other hosted servers and the fact that the raid was not in line with the popular will.

Swedish state television have also done a news report connecting US lobbying and the swedish minister of justice to the raid, which is seen as extremly bad. Several other politicians and the justice ombudsman have started investigation into the legality of the raid.

Re:Examples Please!

[Hinhule (811436)]

There have been numerous articles showing both sides of the story, often in the same newspaper.

The swedish national TV station (funded by every household with a TV) ran a story based on an informant, basicly saying that the minister of justice was running errands for the white house. Ordering the takedown of the pirate bay even though prosecutors had already looked into it and found that they couldn't justify a takedown. The minister of justice and his departments actions are currently being investigated.

There have been an online poll showing that about 87% think that music copying is ok. Most people also think that music piracy would go down significantly if a music CD had a resonable price.

Oddly there have been no mention what people think of actual programs and games being copied. So as far as the masses are concerned they think TPB is used only to copy music and movies.

I would like there to be an article around the fact that if TPB is found guilty of assisting copyright violations. Where do you draw the line? What about google or any other search engine? What about community sites, several cases of rape and pedophilia has been caused by connections made on such sites, are they assisting these crimes as well?

Lots of people are outraged that the police already low resources are being wasted on copyright violations when people don't want to go alone at night out of fear of rape / muggings.

All in all I think the media coverage have been better than expected.

Amazing!

[Sj0 (472011)]

If it's turning into a major scandal, could this mean that people in Sweden generally don't think gestapo-like tactics are justified to take down a few people downloading video games and TV shows?

Next thing you know, you'll be telling us that talking about war isn't actually talking about peace, and that freedom isn't actually slavery.

Re:Amazing!

[skrolle2 (844387)]

Usually when the police over here is covered in media, they are complaining about lack of funds, there are too few policemen, minor crimes go uninvestigated, and the general feeling is that the police doesn't do its job.

And now the police did a large-scale raid, not against drug smugglers, traffickers or other organized crime which people actually care about, but against file-sharers. As a result of a direct order from the minister of justice (who btw is not allowed to do that), and as a result of pressure from a foreign power.

So we have a situation where the police doesn't have manpower to do what people want, but when the US wants to shutdown a legal Swedish site, there's suddenly plenty of resources available. THIS pisses people off enormously. The average Joe couldn't care less about copyright or filesharing or the Pirate Bay, but this blatant misuse of the police is something a lot of people care about.

CCTV footage from the raid..

[scredda (728677)]

..is available at YouTube [youtube.com]. For some reason the police covered the cameras with plastic bags halfway through.

Thank you, Sweden!

[Atario (673917)]

As an American who's disgusted with the current Copyright Cabal running roughshod all over everyone and everything, I'm glad there's somewhere in the world where this crap inspires the mainstream rage it should. GO GET 'EM.

What's it like in Sweden? What's a nice time of year to visit? Are there programmer jobs available? Do you still have that bikini team [wikipedia.org]?

Be seeing you...

Re:Thank you, Sweden!

[Dr. Cody (554864)]

Sorry, all those gorgeous blonde women are in their 40's. Nowadays, all we have left is chubby girls who look like raccoons.

Demonstrations

[hanssprudel (323035)]

There will be demonstrations [piratbyran.org] in Sweden's largest cities this afternoon, condeming the actions of the Swedish police and department of justice in this matter. It is being co-organized by the Pirate Party, and the youth organizations of several mainstream parties from across the political spectrum.

In Stockholm it starts at 15:00 on Mynttorget (right by parlament). That is in 15 minutes so hurry!

In Gothenburg a demonstration will start at 16:30 on Gustav Adolfs Torg.

Re:Demonstrations

[mkro (644055)]

And if you agree with what they are doing and want to support them, here [thepiratebay.org] is the donation link. SMS donations work from several countries, and makes giving a few bucks quite hassle free. I did, and feel way better than after buying a ring tone this way.

How many..

[by Anonymous Coward]

..cops does it take to change a light bulb?
50. One to do it and 49 to confiscate every other light bulb in the house as evidence.

Two political parties have alread filed complaints

[DaveRexel (887813)]

Representatives from two major political parties in Sweden, Folkpartiet and Vänsterpartiet have filed formal complaints against the Minister of Justice and members of his staff.

This has increased the general publics awareness of The Pirate Bay and probably increased the number of p2p users.

A very nice shot in the foot for the Swedish Justice Dept., the police and our very "customer friendly" **AA organisations.

not to sound like a party pooper

[circletimessquare (444983)]

but if they are in the netherlands now, what is to stop the dutch police from doing the same thing?

yeah sure, it's a giant game of whack-a-mole, but isn't the lesson here to do to thepiratebay what was done to napster?

that is, when the riaa/ mpaa behead these entities, they go underground and become headless

that is: no central server. thus, napster morphed into morpheus, kazaa, edonkey, et al

which is the real lesson for the mpaa/ riaa: you don't kill this "infection", you only make is more resistant to your antibiotics

the mpaa/ riaa is breeding superpiracy

you would think that instead they would coopt the pirate bay, legitimize it

but no, they have to fight where it would be wiser to collude. they just breed a stronger foe, drive this behavior further underground, and not stop one bit of it, and just make it much more difficult to ever stop

their behavior is creating the culture of piracy. if they embraced and extended, instead of exterminate and berserk, the mpaa/ riaa would create a culture that would say "hey, this stuff is cheap, and high quality, and easily organized... why would i want to go to a bad quality copy of my media that is hard to find?"

surely they see that that is all they are doing, no?

they are digging their own graves

you can't fight technological progress

this genie is not going back in the bottle

Pirate Bay admin interviewed (in English)

[by Anonymous Coward]

In Chaosradio International #009 [chaosradio.ccc.de] one of the maintainers of TPB called "Peter" mentions traffic data and server capability of TPB and also comments on the Pirate Bay induced traffic on the Swedish part of the internet. According to Peter, each of the Pirate Bay high end servers handles about 20000 connections per second. This kind of packet flow once brought the main router of one of the biggest Swedish internet service providers to its knees. The traffic volume to and from the Pirate Bay actually isn't very high, just a couple of gigabits per second. The induced traffic between the peers allegedly reaches 50% of the total Swedish internet traffic. Swedes can get 1Gbps connections to their homes and don't have to pay an arm and a leg for it. 100Mbps is quite common.

The interview also covers the political environment and the internet culture of Sweden, and of course the raid.

not a victory

[plams (744927)]

These news may be great for filesharing people worldwide. But from a political point of view the Piracy Party has not won until the the servers are back up on swedish territory.

Re:Location of servers...

[thelost (808451)]

a true pirate starts drinking before the sun hits the yard-arm. yarrrr