ThePirateBay.org Raided - Servers Seized

[Burzhui]

For those of you who use torrent networks:

May 31, 2006
Thomas Mennecke


In their native Sweden, ThePirateBay.org enjoyed a level of immunity from copyright prosecution rarely seen in the file-sharing world. Often defiant in the face of those wishing to enforce their intellectual property rights, ThePirateBay.org would go on to become one of the premier BitTorrent indexing and tracking sites.


As one of the largest trackers, ThePirateBay.org largely replaced the search engine SuprNova.org. SuprNova.org met its demise in late 2004, when it was under pressure from the entertainment industry to shut it operation down. Conversely, such pressure has been ineffective against ThePiratebay.org.

When such political pressure fails, the use of force is typically the next course of action. In a move that many thought would never come, Slyck.com learned this morning that ThePirateBay.org was raided by Swedish police.

“…The police right now is taking all of our servers, to check if there is a crime there or not (they are actually not sure),” ThePirateBay.org spokesperson “brokep” told Slyck.com.

The seizure of ThePirateBay.org’s entire server farm will guarantee this BitTorrent tracker will remain offline until the police complete their investigation. The uncertainty on the part of the police may stem from the fact ThePirateBay.org's servers only host .torrent files, not actual copyrighted material. As a tracker, ThePirateBay.org's function is to index .torrent files and to direct BitTorrent traffic and maintain the swarm (uploads and downloads.) The downloaded .torrent file contains all the necessary information to locate and download the queried file. The legality of indirectly linking to copyrighted material has yet to be tested by Swedish courts.

Whether this will keep ThePirateBay.org offline indefinitely is another matter.

“We are not sure when it will return, but we are moving it to another country if necessary,” brokep said.

According to The Pirate Party, a Swedish copyright reform organization, the raid also seized Piratbyrån's (the Pirate Bureau) servers. Piratbyrån is a educational and quasi-political organization which performs a public servic role similar to The Pirate Party. In addition, The Pirate Party reports "...the servers where located in a protected area, to which the police had no legal right to enter..." Approximately 50 police participated in the raid, which placed into custody two PirateBay.org personnel.

The premature departure of ThePirateBay.org marks a significant turning point in the BitTorrent community. Although it's not currently known what, if any, entertainment entity is behind this raid, failure to secure ThePirateBay.org's permanent removal will only bolster this tracker’s position of defiance.

[SnowSurfer]

http://wiredfire.org/index.php?q=node/63

response from the leader of the pirate party


t will come as little surprise to many that The Pirate Bay has been hit hard by the Swedish authorities, ending a long period of apparent immunity from IFPI attention.

This defiant immunity from legal action has long baffled observers, but the site has become the flagship of intense debate both inside and outside of their native Sweden. It has even spawned a credible pro piracy movement, the Piratbyrån, and a political party, Piratpartiet (The Pirate Bureau).

Founded in 2003, The Pirate Bay evolved from its’ original Swedish language site into the world’s premier indexing site, largely as a result of the demise of torrent indexing legends such as Suprnova and LokiTorrents between 2004-5. Boasting over a million unique page hits per day and between 1,000 – 2,000 HTTP requests per second, The Pirate Bay
This is exactly the kind of raids the Pirate Party wants to put an end to, when society sends its police at the young generation for their listening to music and watching movies, it's not the young that are in error. It's society that needs to get a grip.

Rickard Falkvinge - Head of the Swedish Pirate Party
has attracted the constant wrath of the recording industries for openly flouting their relative immunity from prosecution.

Given that the site had widely reported that it had been the focus of legal attention only a year previously in what turned out to be little more than a publicity stunt, we have refrained from reporting this as factual news until we were able to speak to authoritative sources. And none better than the leader of Piratpartiet itself, Rickard Falkvinge.

According to first hand reports, the servers have been confiscated by Swedish police, who are looking to see if the site operators have broken any criminal laws. The raids are reported to have included removing Piratbyrån's servers, as well as The Pirate Bay’s. According to initial reports, around 50 police were involved in the raids, and three staff arrested, with two being taken into custody. In an exclusive and understandably brief initial exchange with WiredFire, Falkvinge said “(we have) “no idea what's happening in the near future, other than us fighting this”. Falkvinge went on to describe the unfolding events as like being trapped in “a circus”, adding that it was impossible to do anything with all the media attention.

In an extended exclusive interview, Falkvinge said “Oh, I know who are behind it. It's IFPI and the Swedish Antipiratbyrån (Anti-piracy bureau) both… because they (the Antipiratbyrån) told me when I asked”. During the course of the interview, Falkvinge translated the text of their press release, and said that the police were seeking a test case, “The thing about seeking a test case is just an excuse for raiding and shutting down the world's largest torrent server. The Swedish APB have been under considerable international pressure from their international counterparts to make this move”.

Having timed this to coincide with an election campaign Antipiratbyrån will have seriously aggravated a high percentage of Sweden's population in their use of police tactics to deal with what is essentially a civil dispute, and almost guaranteed PiratPartiet's entry into government this fall. The police action involved the entire ISP (PRQ), resulting in widespread disruption to a number of small businesses in addition to those servers targeted.




Whilst it does not necessarily follow that there will be any criminal convictions arising from all this, the PiratPartiet see this more as a means of harassing The Pirate Bay and Piratbyrån, as well as attempting to put political pressure on them. However, they are confident that these current problems will be favourably resolved, although this will obviously result in a protracted downtime.

In the meantime, every cloud has a silver lining and Swedes are flocking to join the PiratPartiet as a result of this unprecedented action.

Full text of press release (personally translated by Rick Falkvinge, leader of PiratPartiet) follows:

Pirate party criticizes police for unlawful and immoral raid

Swedish Police today staged a raid and seized computers and equipment belonging to the Pirate Bay, one of the world's largest search engines and file-sharing communities.

Despite repeated case law showing that the operations conducted by the Pirate Bay are not in violation of Swedish law, the Police chose to give in to media interests who were feeling threatened, and set due process aside.

They say, according to an operator on the site, that the police desire to test the legality of the operations.

"Which corporation would stand for this?", asks Rickard Falkvinge, head of the Swedish Pirate Party. "Which corporation would stand for having the police raid their facitilies and shut down operations, before they were proven guilty of a crime? In this case, the Pirate Bay has commited no crime. They are disliked by large media interests, that's correct. But it's not illegal to be disliked..., and definitely not cause for the Police to raid and shut down one of the world's largest gathering places for our young generation."

"This is exactly the kind of raids the Pirate Party wants to put an end to", Rick concludes. "When society sends its police at the young generation for their listening to music and watching movies, it's not the young that are in error. It's society that needs to get a grip."



(Thanks to member DaBlade for his help, and Rickard Falkvinge, head of the Swedish Pirate Party)

[Kevster]

I used them quite a bit for my TV show viewing. I have alternates, of course. They're just not as complete as Piratebay.org (like Suprnova) was. I'm sure they will be back soon after the police 'investigation' is over. It will be like when they moved the servers last year.

[zero2dash]

:agree:
They'll be back; there's no case against them.

RIAA + MPAA will never win the battle of downloading; now that the act has gone to something that goes from computer to computer with no server interaction and doesn't even require trackers anymore (versus the old days when it was centralized and required a server/tracker), it's a futile effort on their part. If they take away one method, another pops up and succeeds it. First it was Napster and Morpheus, then Kazaa, then BearShare, now it's BitTorrent. Take away everything and all the ones of the future and you're still left with newsgroups (that companies as powerful as Microsoft can't even shut down).

Lesson: Where there's a will, there's a way. :shrug:

[clutchy]

i was wondering why all the seeds and leeches dried up suddenly sometime b/w yesterday and today.

[BigJon]

I read on digg.com that they're supposed to be back in a couple of days now.

[Airencracken]

:agree:
They'll be back; there's no case against them.

RIAA + MPAA will never win the battle of downloading; now that the act has gone to something that goes from computer to computer with no server interaction and doesn't even require trackers anymore (versus the old days when it was centralized and required a server/tracker), it's a futile effort on their part. If they take away one method, another pops up and succeeds it. First it was Napster and Morpheus, then Kazaa, then BearShare, now it's BitTorrent. Take away everything and all the ones of the future and you're still left with newsgroups (that companies as powerful as Microsoft can't even shut down).

Lesson: Where there's a will, there's a way. :shrug:

:stupid:

Not to mention IRC.

[johnnymk]

I am surprised that no one commented on this important thread I posted in the Software Forum which relates to this matter:

http://forums.gotapex.com/showthread.php?t=100124

[Maarchk]

I am surprised that no one commented on this important thread I posted in the Software Forum which relates to this matter:

http://forums.gotapex.com/showthread.php?t=100124

Are you trying to deem your self as important? ;)

Both threads are interesting and a little frightening. Especially when the police decided to take all servers in the rack and not just the ones that belonged to TPB... Does that mean if someone is playing pirated music in the car next to me, they can impound my car too cause you know... the bad things may have jumped over to my unrelated car... :shake:

[Airencracken]

http://www.xmule.ws/node/51

This is a list of all civil rights violations that happened in relation to the raid on The Pirate Bay’s Servers 5 days ago. The list is, despite the title, only of currently known civil rights violations and wrongs, which means that if there are any unknown ones at this point, they aren’t covered in this article.

1. This was ordered by the MPAA through the White House through the Swedish Government. Prosecutors and police knew they couldn’t act against TPB, but were ordered to anyway. Double or triple fault.
2. Thomas Bodström, minister of justice, gives direct orders regarding specific cases. (This may be a bit odd for foreigners to understand, but ministers aren’t heads of their departments here; they represent the departments to the government, which writes general rules. It is absolutely forbidden for a minister to interfere in a specific case). He has later gone on record denying this.
3. In direct violation with Swedish judiciary custom, the raid takes place.
4. From an investigatory point of view, there is no reason at all to close down TPB. They are completely open and transparent with what they are doing, and the BitTorrent protocol description is public. From an investigation standpoint, there is nothing additional to be gained by shutting down TPB.
5. At the raid, not only TPB’s servers were seized; ALL servers were seized. The server room is emptied. This has caused 200-300 individuals and businesses to have their machines and servers seized for the indefinite future for the crime of being in the same room as an accused.
6. At the raid, the Pirate Bureau’s servers were seized, too. The Pirate Bureau is a forum for public debate and a think tank in copyright related issues. In this case, the media industry has used the Swedish police force to shut down an opponent in the public debate.
7. At the raid, Mikael Viborg is arrested. Mikael Viborg is TPB’s legal counsel, and has nothing to do with the operations of the site.
8. Mikael Viborg was forced to give a DNA sample during interrogation. While this is allowed when one is accused of a crime that can result in a prison term, the law says that every such privacy violation must always be weighed against the investigative need. In this case, a DNA sample is impossibly necessary to investigate a copyright infringement case. It must only have been used for pure harassment.
9. At the raid, one of the servers seized was the one hosting the Chechen site Kavkaz Center. This site is a registered news site, and as such, enjoys constitutional freedom-of-the-press protection. Seizing it was a direct violation of the Swedish Constitution. When confronted with this fact, police say that they will prioritize searching this server in order to return it quickly. This statement is later nullified as a court slaps the prosecutor forcibly on the wrist by voiding the seize effective immediately.
10. Henrik Pontén, spokesman of the Anti-Pirate Bureau, claims that the real target was the opinion building community the Pirate Bureau, that TPB was at the bottom of the barrel anyway. This has later been publicly denied as a misquote.
11. Gottfrid Svartholm, one of the operators of TPB, was denied a public defender, on the reason that he did not risk a jail term. However, to stage a raid like this, you need jail term on the scale or the police can’t do it. Additionally, compare Mikael Viborg’s DNA sample, which was motivated by the possible jail sentence.
12. Håkan Roswall, the public prosecutor, responded on national television about what will happen to all of the unrelated servers: “We will mirror all of them and start looking through the information. If there is no interesting information to us there, we will return them.”. The police has no right whatsoever to search servers unrelated to the raid for which they had a warrant. So, not only are innocent bystanders’ servers seized; the police also intend to search them thorougly.
13. Henrik Pontén from the Anti-Pirate Bureau was present at the raid. What gives him the right to be present at a police action?
14. During the raid, the police covered up the surveillance cameras, which can be seen on videos available online now. Fortunately, these videos were transferred to other locations beforethe police siezed them. Why did the police cover the cameras, if the raid was legal and constitutional?

The list was originally compiled by Anders Gardebring and translated and expanded by Rickard Falkvinge, the leader of The Swedish Pirate Party. Thanks to both of you.

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Interesting if true. I'm using torrentspy right now. :shrug:

Another interesting link with a speech by Rickard Falkvinge, the leader of the Swedish Pirate Party.

http://www.p2pconsortium.com/index.php?showtopic=9500

I don't know about his take on it. It's interesting if nothing else.

[Jeffbx]

This should have huge impact on the future of file sharing and copyright violation law & lawsuits. This will be a banner case on not who is right, but who can win - the deep pockets of the RIAA & MPAA or the laws protecting the average citizen.

I'd take the above list with a grain of salt, considering the source. But if nothing else, the fact that they took 200 other websites down at the same time should have a huge imact on this case. I have no idea how Swedish law works, but I know in the states there would already be 200 lawsuits pending against this action, and I bet it would be easy for many of them to show actual monetary damages.

[SnowSurfer]

I am trying to find the article of some gaming site that had over 100,000 users and they were taken down.

The site did advertising by the week and it was hot commodity, so the people who payed for last week and then the site wasnt up got screwed too, not to mention that people will go to a different site now.

[zero2dash]

Back up and running (apparently since Saturday)
The logo on their front page is priceless, and their blog (http://www.daemon-tools.cc/dtcc/announcements.php) entry is equally hilarious.


Just some stats...

... here are some reasons why TPB is down sometimes - and how long it usually takes to fix:

Tiamo gets *very* drunk and then something crashes: 4 days


Anakata gets a really bad cold and noone is around: 7 days


The US and Swedish gov. forces the police to steal our servers: 3 days


.. yawn.

I love these guys. :heh: :bigmouth:

[mechmike0034]

Click the link, and read the hostname at the destination:

http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools/tracert.ch?ip=thepiratebay.org

:heh: :lmfao:

[MikeD]

Priceless. Man, those guys do have a great sense of humor. :hehehmm:

[redcolours]

Click the link, and read the hostname at the destination:

http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools/tracert.ch?ip=thepiratebay.org

:heh: :lmfao:


BENDER!

[Prisoner 24601]

Like they say, if there's a will, there's a way!!
Napster gets busted but then we have Limewire. Like someone mentioned previously, I'm sure they are back up already