The Pirate Bay Raided By Police, Site Down

[xjeepguy]

Swedish police have reportedly raided The Pirate Bay. The portal has been down for several hours. The site has long hidden behind the relatively lax laws of Sweden, but it appears it's exhausted the leniency.

The embattled torrent tracker went down this morning, and Swedish Police confirmed to TorrentFreak that some servers were seized in connection with a broad intellectual property operation of some kind.

There has been a crackdown on a server room in Greater Stockholm. This is in connection with violations of copyright law," read a statement from Paul Pintér, police national coordinator for IP enforcement.

According to Metro in Sweden (bastardized translation by Google):

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.

So while we don't have a definite confirmation, it's probably fair to draw a line between the intellectual property operation and the outage. TorrentFreak notes that several other trackers like EZTV are down. The Pirate Bay forum at Suprbay.org is also down.

Earlier this year it was reported that The Pirate Bay set up a network of virtual servers to keep the tracker up and running in the case of a raid but that obviously didn't work.

The Pirate Bay has been in hot water for aiding piracy for long time. The first raid on the service goes all the way back to 2006. Opponents say that the service willfully aids in wholesale piracy by linking to torrents for copyrighted movies, music, TV shows, etc. And though the founders have been successfully prosecuted, the service has continued to exist. What claims it has to legitimacy are couched behind freedom of speech.

As for the future, it's hard to imagine that this is The Pirate Bay's final act. Two of the Pirate Bay's founders are in prison, and the only one who isn't, Peter Sunde was recently released after being arrested earlier this year. Even if it dies in name, torrents and piracy will live on under some other name. There are plenty of alternative trackers, and indeed, because The Pirate Bay has been shutdown and raided before, people are used to looking other places for their torrent links.

Updating with more information as we get it. Let us know if you know anything.


This post has been updated. It originally said that all of the Pirate Bay founders were in jail. Peter Sunde was recently released after being arrested earlier this year.


http://gizmodo.com/swedish-police-raid- ... 1668902014

[Captain Awesome]

For some reason I thought they hosted everything in Sealand, outside of everyone's jurisdiction.

[GordonH]

Knowing how popular these sites are I'm sure a replacement is either already up & running or will be.

[StraitTalk]

For those interested, most of TPB is hosted/run off of virtual servers. For those not familiar with what this means, it means you can't raid any one, two or even 20 locations and shut them down. What you can do is hit the Achilles heel of the operation such as what they did here, seizing load balancers (from what I've read).

I gather that all IP information is held on RAM (volatile memory) which means it is lost when powered down. It is very likely that the people operating this have security features in place to ensure nobody access' that IP information if the servers are reached by authorities. This means, you cannot necessarily determine the locations of other server infrastructure.

They've been hit hard before. They'll be back.

[oscillate_wildly]

Good. Although I doubt it will stop the flow of file sharing/P2P in general.

I started doing something punk rock about a year ago, and:

Buying things I like. <gasp>

[DANSPEED]

It's up again in Costa Rica!

CBC news had some guy on explaining the penalties for downloading movies. He said that if a kid downloaded four movies the parents could face a $200K fine! It should work in reverse too! Universal Pictures should give me $50K for buying Neighbors the movie! What a piece of crap! Imagine serving jail time for downloading A Merry Friggin' Christmas! lol

[StraitTalk]

It's up again in Costa Rica!

CBC news had some guy on explaining the penalties for downloading movies. He said that if a kid downloaded four movies the parents could face a $200K fine! It should work in reverse too! Universal Pictures should give me $50K for buying Neighbors the movie! What a piece of crap! Imagine serving jail time for downloading A Merry Friggin' Christmas! lol

Wasn't the maximum monetary penalty set at $5,000.00 to prevent frivolous lawsuits?

http://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/crp-prda.n ... 01184.html

[vinnied]

It's up again in Costa Rica!

Did you happen to click on the link?
there seems to be a lot popping up, but the content isnt there. This particular one you posted claims my PC is infected in another pop up. it probably is now..
The only one ive found thats working is http://oldpiratebay.org/ brought to you from isohunt.to team
they copied the original database and reproduced it for you all. Tried and tested

[rekabis]

When there is a gap between how people want to use a product and how tightly the manufacturer locks that product down, you will have piracy and similar issues. What most big businesses fail to grasp is that the harder they lock down products against “unauthorized” use, the harder people will find a way around that restriction, either by cracking and hacking that restriction, or going around it entirely to use non-restricted products.

And yet, despite this, what most big businesses fail to understand is that those that pirate the most, are also the ones most likely to spend as well. The biggest movie pirates are also those with the biggest legitimate collections. The biggest music pirates tend to be those who buy from iTunes the most, and have paid Spotify accounts. And yet, these big businesses continue to attack their greatest supporters in the mistaken belief that money is being “lost” to piracy.

Idiots.

[DANSPEED]

Did you happen to click on the link?
there seems to be a lot popping up, but the content isnt there. This particular one you posted claims my PC is infected in another pop up. it probably is now..
The only one ive found thats working is http://oldpiratebay.org/ brought to you from isohunt.to team
they copied the original database and reproduced it for you all. Tried and tested

Hmm ... went to http://thepiratebay.cr/ for me. Link in first paragraph.

[vinnied]

Interesting. The link you've just posted is working. The one I tried earlier didn't. Not sure why, clicked something wrong maybe. I'm on my tablet now, I'll try on the PC again a little later.
ETA. Ok so this is what happens to me. When I click on the box to enter my search text it automatically opens a new window to some other page. A pop up. Not sure how its getting past the pop up blocker though.

virus warning

[vinnied]

Does the same thing in IE. Except I have to force close the window. On the tablet it also opens a new window. not a virus warning though.
Id be very skeptical about trying to download a torrent from the piratebay.cr
Just sayin...

[Captain Awesome]

I haven't been on PirateBay in months by now - all bittorent searches can be done through browser plug-in.

[DANSPEED]

Interesting. The link you've just posted is working. The one I tried earlier didn't. Not sure why, clicked something wrong maybe. I'm on my tablet now, I'll try on the PC again a little later.
ETA. Ok so this is what happens to me. When I click on the box to enter my search text it automatically opens a new window to some other page. A pop up. Not sure how its getting past the pop up blocker though.

FF is showing a number to call? I think you should scan your system for adware and other crap. Try SAS free.

[Captain Awesome]

ETA. Ok so this is what happens to me. When I click on the box to enter my search text it automatically opens a new window to some other page. A pop up. Not sure how its getting past the pop up blocker though.

You have a virus.

Try calling the number if you'd like to speak with somebody from India.

Or just get rid of it.