Pirate Bay Has Been Raided and Taken Down: Here's What We Know

The popular file-sharing service Pirate Bay was taken down today following a raid in Sweden by police who seized servers and computers.

The Pirate Bay portal went down Tuesday morning after Swedish police raided a server room in Stockholm over alleged copyright violations. In addition to its file-sharing section, Pirate Bays forum Suprbay.org was also down.

There were a number of police officers and digital forensics experts there. This took place during the morning and continued until this afternoon. Several servers and computers were seized, but I cannot say exactly how many, Swedish prosecutor Fredrik Ingblad told Radio Sweden.

Pirate Bay may not be the only target. According to TorrentFreak, other sites related to file sharing such as EZTV, Zoink, and Torrage went down today as well, though its not yet known if they were also raided.

Founded in 2003, Pirate Bay has been in the legal crosshairs for years, but has managed to stay afloat despite efforts by governments, anti-piracy groups and the music and film industries to close it down. Todays raid comes after a number of recent events have occurred around the service, putting it in the spotlight once again.

The Timeline of Pirate Bays Recent Troubles

In October, Pirate Bays co-founder, the Swedish national Gottfrid Svartholm, was found guilty in Denmark and sentenced to 3.5 years in prison. Although the conviction this time was unrelated to file-sharing, it follows a previous 2009 conviction on copyright violations related to the file-sharing service. Svartholm had been convicted on the copyright charges along with his Pirate Bay co-founders, Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde, and Swedish telecommunitations owner Carl Lundstrom. While all three had been apprehended, Neij went on the lam, however.

But just last month, Neij was arrested at the Thailand-Laos border on the 2009 conviction.

And last week a French court ordered ISPs in that country to block access to Pirate Bay, as well as any of its mirror sites, from within French territory.

Then days ago Google removed and banned a number of third-party Pirate Bay file-sharing apps from the Google Play store. The apps help users circumvent blocks instated by ISPs to prevent users from accessing Pirate Bay.

Todays raid comes after some of the movie files stolen from Sony Pictures Entertainment in its recent hack became available for download through links at Pirate Bay. Its unknown if the raid and takedown were instigated by the distribution of those Sony files.

Todays raid comes after some of the movie files stolen from Sony Pictures Entertainment in its recent hack became available for download through links at Pirate Bay.

Despite the previous convictions, Pirate Bay has managed to forge ahead without its founders, catering to millions of daily users. Although todays raid is not the firstPirate Bay was also raided in 2006in 2012 its operators bragged that they had moved their operations to the cloud to make the service virtually impervious to police raids. By hosting their operation from multiple cloud hosting providers located in a number of countries, a single police raid would not be able to disrupt their operation. Or so they thought.

Its unclear how long authorities can keep Pirate Bay down this time before it pops up again.

Source: http://www.wired.com/2014/12/pirate-bay-raided-taken-down/

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