Torrent Site The Pirate Bay Returns
Popular Swedish BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay came back online Saturday night, after being shut down in a police raid last week and forced to relocate to The Netherlands. The raid prompted a response from Pirate Bay supporters, which attacked the Web sites of the Swedish police and government.
The government Web site was offline Saturday after a flood of requests for a file overloaded its servers. The file requested was a picture of Swedish Justice Minister Thomas Bodstroem, who has fought to make file sharing illegal in a country with traditionally lax copyright laws.
Sweden last year passed a law banning the transmission of copyrighted material over the Internet without paying royalties. It is believed the crackdown on The Pirate Bay came in response to this legislation, although Swedish media outlets accuse the United States of pressuring local authorities to act.
The Pirate Bay surged to popularity following the shutdown of SuprNova.org and LokiTorrents, both large repositories and search indexes for torrent files. It is considered one of the largest online, but so far has been spared much of the legal crackdown on illicit file sharing over BitTorrent.
Although The Pirate Bay, like other torrent sites, hosts no copyrighted material itself, it plays a central role in facilitating the searching for and downloading of such content. It receives about 1.5 million visitors from around the world each day, who use the site to download movies, television shows, music and more.
"The Pirate Bay has damaged the legitimate music industry on an international scale and I am very pleased that the Swedish authorities have taken such decisive action against it," IFPI chairman and chief executive John Kennedy said in a statement last week.
Swedish pro-piracy political group Piratbyrån, says The Pirate Bay has committed no crime, and will be vindicated in the end. The group has also suggested it will sue the Swedish government for damages related to the raid, which involved 50 police officers and resulted in the questioning of three individuals.
Piratbyrån founded The Pirate Bay in 2003, but has not directly operated it since 2004, according to the group. It has since taken an activist role, fighting what it considers "oppressive" copyright laws in Sweden.