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It has worked reasonably well in Sweden, where the think-tank The Pirate Bureau formed shortly after the copyright industry had created the Anti-Pirate Bureau, an organisation consisting mostly of lawyers and paid P2P network infiltrators that tries to track down people distributing copyrighted material. The Pirate Bureau became rather well-known and popular, and was often invited to TV debates on copyright law, and interviewed and asked for comments when newspapers published articles about the subject - and were so successful that the copyright lobbyists adopted a policy a few years ago to refuse debates where representatives from the Pirate Bureau were participating. And then there's the Pirate Party, which didn't get enough votes to take seats in the parliament this time but was treated as a serious candidate by most of the media, despite its name.

When someone is calling you names, it's usually a lot more effective to embrace it than to try and distance yourself from it.

Actually, no. That domain is not registered to the Anti-Piracy Bureau. The real address is http://antipiratbyran.com/ and that site has not been defaced.

"The Pirate Bay nedstängd

Polisen genomförde idag en rad husrannsakningar mot lokaler där The Pirate Bay bedriver sin verksamhet. Klockan 12 30 stängdes sidan thepiratebay.org ned.

The Pirate Bay var fram tills igår knutpunkten för en stor del av världens illegala fildelning. Enligt egna uppgifter fanns det en dryg miljon användare som kunde laddade upp och ned främst filmer, spel och musik. Genom sin storlek och uttalade målsättning att hänga ut och håna berörda upphovsmän gjorde man The Pirate Bay känd över hela världen. Sverige blev internationellt känt som en fristad för dem som begick upphovsrättsbrott på Internet. Detta utnyttjades ekonomiskt för en omfattande försäljning av annonser, porreklam och insamling av donationer.

Det är bra att den svenska polisen nu prioriterar denna typ av brottslighet. Det är upphovsrätten som finansierar nyskapandet inom film, datorspel, musik och övrig kultur. Den som bryter mot upphovsrättslagen stjäl från framtidens kreatörer och biopublik. Därför är stängningen av The Pirate Bay bra för alla oss som uppskattar ny film och underhållning säger Henrik Pontén, jurist på Antipiratbyrån.

Svenska produktioner drabbas i hög grad av den illegala nedladdningen, säger Per-Erik Wallin, Föreningen Sveriges Filmproducenter. Om svenska filmer finns tillgängliga på nätet före premiären innebär det minskade chanser att filmerna ska spela hem produktionskostnaden och mindre medel för att göra nästa film. Det drabbar både manusförfattare, regissörer, skådespelare och filmarbetare."

Roughly translated

"The pirate bay closed

Today the police raided multiple places were The Pirate Bay conducts its operations. At 12.30 the site thepiratebay.org was closed.

The pirate Bay was until yesterday the center for a large part of the worlds illegal filesharing. According to piratebay itself there was over a million users who could upload or download foremost movies, games and music.

By its size and outspoken goal of ridiculing authors The pirate Bay got known all over the world.

Sweden got known internationally as an asylum for those who commited copyright crimes on the internet. This was use economicaly for a large scale sale of adds, pornadds and donations.

It is good that the swedish police now priority this kind of crime. It is the copyright that finances creation in movies, computergames, music and other culture. Whoever breaks the copyright steals from future auothors and cinema audience. Therefore the closing of The Pirate Bay is good for all of us that apreciate new Movies and entertainment says Henrik Pontén, legal advisor at Antipiratbyrån.

Swedish productions are very much affected by illegal downloading, say Per-Erik Wallin, Föreningen Sveriges Filmproducenter. If swedish movies are availible on the net before the premiere chances are smaller that the movies will get the production cost back and less means to make the next movie. It affects both scriptwriters, directors, actors and filmcrews."

Note that this truly is a crappy translation.

Antipiratbyrån, which is a site representing the music industry reports that the piratebay har been shut down. Apparently not a hoax.

(The text is in swedish but mostly useless propaganda, so I won't bother to translate)

Sorry, the correct link is here

Hmmm, are we sure this isn't a joke?

This line in particular sounds a little dubious :

"This probably means the end of The Pirate Bay and we, the crew, apologize for all loss of income caused by our activity over the years."

Also, can anyone read Swedish? Because if you follow the link to http://www.antipiratbyran.com/, all you get is the following text :

Svenska Antipiratbyrån är snart tillbaka

Ny site kommer inom kort.

Here in Sweden they do, sort of.
We have a law which protects how personal information like name, address, and so on should be handled on the Internet and after a much noticed raid of the ISP Bahnhof the swedish anti piracy agency APB got much criticism. Among other things it was said that an IP-address could actually be considered personal information, which makes the PUL (PersonUppgiftsLagen, Personal Information Law) kick in. Which for instance makes it illegal to spread that information in whatever way you feel for without permission from the person it matters. And also we have a law to protect someones privacy called Sekretesslagen.

Anyway, it all ends up in that for a small crime (which "regular" fileshareing seems to belong to) the ISP aren't allowed to share the name and other things with APB. If the crime is considered large the Police could probably get the information, but anyway.

Also APB have sent out a large amount of letters to scare people who uses common P2P programs, they haven't done that directly thought, they have given the IP-address to the ISP which have forwarded the message to the costumer. However noone I know using the ISP Bredbandsbolaget have gotten any mail/letters, and it's said Labs2 doesn't send out any either, because they don't care about what the private APB wants. Labs2 have also said they have gone one step longer only logging what is required by law and stop logging the rest to protect the privacy of their users.

More information can be found at:
http://www.piratbyran.org/
APBs webpage http://www.antipiratbyran.com/ is down since they got hacked.

Sorry for my bad english :)

These guys are more the antiantipiratbyran.org,
just abbreviated with some basic boolean logic.

The first site is www.antipiratbyran.com,
and it is the local Swedish branch of the BSA "police".
(along with a few movie/music/etc representatives)

Here's the coverage (in Swedish) from all the four major newspapers:
Expressen
DN.
SvD
Aftonbladet

Some great quotes from Mr BodstrÃm (Minister for Justice) include:
"We have not done this to satisfy the big record companies"
"The police will not come running into people's homes looking for these things"
He is clearly completely clueless. I bet he has no idea that it's even possible to trace people with their IP address.

This law is unenforceable and will not be enforced. The police can't even keep child porn off the p2p networks here, so really, this is ridiculous.
The real enforcers will be Antipiratbyrån, the anti piracy bureau, a group of lawyers representing a number of companies. You can see a list of the member companies here. Most should be familiar to non-swedes too.
This is the only organisation activiely looking for copyright infringement online. (and their efforts so far has been very sporadic, even they have the sense to mostly go after CD bootleg sellers). In practice this all means that if you are careful not to share anything from the member companies of Antipiratbyrån on your favourite p2p network, you will not get caught.

Here's the coverage (in Swedish) from all the four major newspapers:
Expressen
DN.
SvD
Aftonbladet

Some great quotes from Mr BodstrÃm (Minister for Justice) include:
"We have not done this to satisfy the big record companies"
"The police will not come running into people's homes looking for these things"
He is clearly completely clueless. I bet he has no idea that it's even possible to trace people with their IP address.

This law is unenforceable and will not be enforced. The police can't even keep child porn off the p2p networks here, so really, this is ridiculous.
The real enforcers will be Antipiratbyrån, the anti piracy bureau, a group of lawyers representing a number of companies. You can see a list of the member companies here. Most should be familiar to non-swedes too.
This is the only organisation activiely looking for copyright infringement online. (and their efforts so far has been very sporadic, even they have the sense to mostly go after CD bootleg sellers). In practice this all means that if you are careful not to share anything from the member companies of Antipiratbyrån on your favourite p2p network, you will not get caught.