Digital World News

The Pirate Bay (often abbreviated TPB) bills itself as the world's "largest BitTorrent tracker", and also acts as an index for .torrent files that it tracks. It was started by the Swedish anti-copyright organization Piratbyrån in early 2004, but since October 2004 has been a separate organization.

The server which runs Hypercube Tracking Software is located in Stockholm, Sweden. On June 1, 2005, The Pirate Bay updated its website in an effort to reduce bandwidth usage, which was reported to be at 2000 HTTP requests per second on each of the four servers, as well as create a more user friendly interface for the frontend of the website. On May 31, 2006, the site's servers were raided by Swedish police, taking it offline indefinitely. However, the replacement site up as of June 1 stated that The Pirate Bay would "BE UP AND FULLY FUNCTIONAL WITHIN A DAY OR TWO", and a Pirate Bay spokesperson claimed that the Pirate Bay would move to another country if necessary to continue service.

Legal threats
The Pirate Bay is known in the online file sharing community as one of the more prominent websites which distributes torrents that point to copyrighted material. In much of the world, offering such torrents would be illegal, but due to the nature of Swedish law, this is not the case. In July 2005, new anti-piracy legislation was enacted in Sweden; however, this did not affect The Pirate Bay which only offers .torrent files, which in and of themselves do not contain copyrighted material. The Pirate Bay is well known for the "legal" page it hosts featuring mockery of organizations sending copyright infringement notices and cease and desist letters to them.

A hardcopy of a reply from The Pirate Bay to Web Sheriff, in response to faxed legal threats, was sold on eBay June 8, 2005, for US $255.

May 2006 police raid
At around 11 a.m. [1] on May 31, 2006, a major raid against The Pirate Bay and people involved with the site took place, prompted by allegations of copyright violations.


"Site Down" message on 31 May, 2006.The raid, in which some 50 police officers participated, shut down the site and its servers were confiscated, as well as all other servers hosted at The Pirate Bay's Internet service provider, PRQ Inet.

Three people, aged 22, 24, and 28, were held by the police for questioning, but were released later in the evening.

Special attention has been brought to the fact that even though only the servers running The Pirate Bay were eligible for possible copyright violations, all servers in the server room were seized, even those running Piratbyrån, an independent organization fighting for file-sharing rights, as well as servers that are unrelated to The Pirate Bay or other filesharing activities.


"Site Down Hoax" message on 1 June, 2005.It is not clear why the raid was carried out at this particular time. The Swedish public broadcast network Sveriges Television cited unnamed sources claiming that the raid was prompted by political pressure from the United States.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) wrote in a press release: "Since filing a criminal complaint in Sweden in November 2004, the film industry has worked vigorously with Swedish and U.S. government officials in Sweden to shut this illegal site down". Dan Glickman, CEO of MPAA, also stated that "Intellectual property theft is a problem for film industries all over the world and we are glad that the local government in Sweden has helped stop The Pirate Bay from continuing to enable rampant copyright theft on the Internet".

The closure message initially caused some minor confusion, because on June 1, 2005 The Pirate Bay had posted a remarkably similar message stating that they were permanently down since they had been raided by the Swedish Anti-Piracy Bureau and IFPI, which was later admitted as a prank. The BitTorrent community, once assured of the story's truth, quickly spread the announcement across online news sites, blogs, and discussion forums.


Picture from one of PRQ's "emptied" data centers. PRQ is the hosting company that hosts the Piratebay.org website.The Pirate Bay was brought back online on a temporary server, and now displays a "SITE DOWN" message, in which they confirm that the police were in possession of valid search warrants alleging either breach of copyright law or assisting such a breach. The Pirate Bay recently posted pictures of the alleged empty servers raided by the police.

Source From Digital World News Blog at http://digitalworldnews.blogspirit.com/