HiGame

The Pirate Bay has been raided by Swedish police and shut down — possibly forever, according to its co-founder Peter Sunde. According to some initial reports coming out of the Sweden, Stockholm police seized computers and equipment belonging to The Pirate Bay, and have detained “at least one man connected to the site.” At this point, it’s unknown if the current operators of The Pirate Bay (TPB) plan to reopen the site — there were reportedly redundant Pirate Bay servers located in other countries, to mitigate against raids like this, but now we’ll see if that redundancy actually exists.

As far as we can tell, today’s raid on TPB is a pretty standard case of copyright law violation. TorrentFreak has a statement from Sweden’s chief intellectual property police officer, Paul Pintér, saying “There has been a crackdown on a server room in Greater Stockholm. This is in connection with violations of copyright law.” The previous raid on TPB, way back in 2006, was the same deal. Back then, the movie industry — the MPAA — was involved in the raid; it’s fairly safe to assume that commercial interests are behind today’s raid and shutdown, too.

Really, it was only a matter of time until The Pirate Bay was raided again; it’s one of the biggest websites in the world, with tens of millions of users — almost all of which are there to, in most jurisdictions, download stuff illegally. The shift away from hosting torrent files, in favor of magnet links, probably bought the site a little more time — but clearly, given today’s raid, the magnet links weren’t a complete panacea.

This morning, Pirate Bay’s co-founder Peter Sunde had some interesting remarks to make about the shutdown:

“News just reached me that The Pirate Bay has been raided, again. That happened over 8 years ago last time. That time, a lot of people went out to protest and rally in the streets. Today few seem to care. And I’m one of them. Why, you might ask? Well. For multiple reasons. But most of all, I’ve not been a fan of what TPB has become.”

Sunde goes on to talk about how TPB has “become an institution” that people took for granted. He hates the spam of “distasteful” ads that now blanket the site, and the site’s ugly design — but perhaps most tellingly, he is upset by how the site goes “against the ideals that I worked for during my time as part of TPB.”



Basically, The Pirate Bay was meant to be a breath of fresh air. It was meant to be some kind of vehicle for the ideology of the founders and its first users. Sunde even says that the original plan was to close TPB down on its tenth birthday — job done, it would be time to get out of the way and let other smaller, faster, fresher sites take over. Instead, The Pirate Bay has become this lumbering beast — an institution that millions of people idolize, an institution that is essentially a glorified Viagra ad.
Some new Pirate Bay mirrors are already starting to pop up, but they are probably not “official” — rather, they’re most likely just a cloned version of the original site, with many (but probably not all) magnet links still in tact. That isn’t to say that any Pirate Bay clones aren’t useful, but it probably isn’t fair to call them The Pirate Bay; they’re most likely just set up by people who saw an opportunity to raise some fat advertising revenues.

Sunde, for his part, hopes that The Pirate Bay is gone for good — and is hopeful for the future of file sharing. “From the immense void that will now fill up the fiber cables all over the world, I’m pretty sure the next thing will pan out. And hopefully it has no ads for porn or viagra. There’s already other services for that.”


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