ThePirateBay.org Raided and Shut Down

An anonymous reader writes "ThePirateBay.org, a longtime fixture of the BitTorrent community, is currently under investigation. Slyck.com is reporting their servers have been seized by the Swedish police." What's really interesting about them is the strange political power that they held in their homeland. There was much discussion even of a political party. This will be interesting to watch unfold.

Comments

This is the sort of publicity you can't buy.

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

When you're a fledgling political party - you cannot buy this sort of publicity.

What we probably have here is pressure (who doesn't doubt it didn't go down like this) from a foreign organisation to shut down something that's legal under Swedish law. (The torrent files themselves contain no copyrighted information).

Is this going to permanently shutdown thepiratebay.org? I doubt it.

Is this going to help the Pirate Party's chances for election in the September elections and be detrimental to the content oligopolist's interests in the long run? Hell yes.

Mildly offtopic, if TPB is shutdown, the thing I'm going to miss most is their 'legal' section (with legal threats + responses) - here's one of my favorite responses (via google cache):

I have the distinct pleasure of informing you that no Swedish trademark and/or coypyright law is being violated, regardless of how the situation may or may not be under UK law. I would advise you to read up on Swedish trademark law, more specifically Varumarkeslag (1960:644), as this might save you a great deal of future humiliation.

I would also advise you to
a) not write the subject all in UPPERCASE, as it makes spam filters go nuts
b) not attach meaningless data from trademark registrys in PDF format and
c) stop lying.

(in response to a threat from Sega europe)

Re:This is the sort of publicity you can't buy.

[extintor]

The pirate party and thepiratebay are not affiliated in any way. They are to different movements.

Re:This is the sort of publicity you can't buy.

[Arker]

Sweden, until rather recently, had one of the more enlightened copyright laws around. It explicitly required authorisation only for *commercial* reproduction. Making a copy of a cd, book, or whatever and giving it to your friends was never illegal.

Well, of course once the *AA found out about that they had a tizzy fit, and funnelled an unknown, but apparently substantial amount of money to Sweden, funding the Antipirat Byrån and some other organisations, as well as bribing lots of politicians. They haven't had the kind of success they've been hoping for, but they did manage to change the law to prohibit unauthorised non-commercial copying. A rather unpopular move with the voting public, I might add, which is increasingly resentful of the swedish politicians who have a pattern of voting in stuff that's unpopular with the citizenry but popular with wealthy foreign lobbyists. Politicians are traditionally held in VERY high regard in Sweden, and there's an overwhelming tradition of people trusting them, viewing them as experts, and assuming that if they do something like this they must know best. That tradition has been quickly eroding, by incidents like this. Before that law was hustled through in the back rooms, very few people were actively thinking about the issue. Afterwards, a significant movement started to form and demand that their liberty be restored.

Anyhow, they did manage to technically make filesharing illegal there, and there was a test case a few months back. It was reported that, basically, if the court didn't impose a fairly harsh sentence, the police would not enforce the law again. As I recall, the court did not go mad, and therefore it was widely assumed afterwards this was essentially a dead law. They can, of course, write someone up for it if they happen to see it, but they cannot, for instance, breach privacy laws to get your IP over such a minor offense, so in practice it's nearly unenforceable.

I'm guessing this raid will backfire horribly for those behind it. Unless I've horribly misunderstood the law there (and not just me, the pirate bay folks, who have significant legal respresentation and counsel available) hosting the torrent files themselves is still completely legal. If a court winds up agreeing with that assessment, the pirate bay should wind up getting everything returned along with an apology and a nice fat cheque. And I don't mean that in the sense I would in a similar circumstance in the US - it should happen but it never will - I mean it's very likely. The falsely accused are normally compensated for their trouble there. If that happens, it should be rather impossible for this to be spun away - it will become another police scandal coming at a time when the police have way too many already.

So far, every effort the *AA has made in Sweden has backfired in terms of public opinion. The more attention they draw to the issue, the more support for liberty seems to arise. Won't be surprised if that happens again, although I note today that the hacks at dn.se, the nations largest newspaper, are desperately trying to spin this the other way. But then again, they've been doing that all along...

The Political Pirate Party

[eldavojohn]

The lauch of the Pirate Party. The Pirate Party website (in Swedish as far as I can tell). And the English version. As you can see, it's taking forever for those pages to load (if at all). I suspect this to be due to their server reduction. The Wikipedia entry on the Pirate Party. An interview with the founder.

From the first link, the aims of the Pirate Party seem to be:

• Strike out immaterial law. Every last bit of it.
• Disregard WIPO and WTO completely. Even though the US will "go bananas" as they put it.
• Annul any further treaties or policies that hinder the free flow of information.
• Stand up for privacy. No data retention nonsense based on terrorism shills or failed **AA business models.

Re:The Political Pirate Party

[Stentapp]

First comment from the Pirate Party: http://www2.piratpartiet.se/nyheter/the_pirate_bay _and_piratbyran_taken_down_by_police
"Swedish police has today taken all the servers of The Pirate Bay into custody. Two operators of The Pirate Bay are in police custody, and can't be reached.

Swedish police has today taken all the servers of The Pirate Bay into custody. The police chose to do this despite the fact that the services provided by the worlds largest bittorrent tracker are fully legal in Sweden.
The servers where located in a protected area, to which the police had no legal right to enter, but this was ignored.
Piratbyrån (the Pirate Bureau), a swedish pro-pirate lobby organisation, also got their servers seized, since they where located in the same room.
Two operators of The Pirate Bay are in police custody, and can't be reached.
This article will be updated as more news come in.
14:35: 50 policemen participated in the raid."

Re:The Political Pirate Party

[JavaRob]

This is incorrect on two counts -- first, the Pirate Party isn't arguing for abolishing copyright (just limiting it to something like 5 years), second (as mentioned in other posts below) the GPL is *based* on copyright law.

GPL uses copyright protection specifically to stop commercial interests from, say, enhancing the Linux kernel and selling the result as a closed source product. Without copyright protections, the commercial company COULD do this with impunity.

Personally, I agree that current copyright law is ridiculous, but 5 years seems way too short. I would argue for something like 40 or 50 years. There are plenty of examples of creative work that was a dud on initial release, but became a cult favorite a decade later... or creative work that was the product of decades of work, from a creator who would not be able to "just do more" to keep an income stream once copyright ended. We want to support these kinds of "master works" or "life's work" projects, not say, "sorry, but your 5 years is up -- if the word is still spreading, hey; sucks to be you".

TEXT if slashdotted

[Anonymous Coward]

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 demise of the SuprNova.org search engine. 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. 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. 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.

Re:come on, let's face it

[spyrochaete]

Let's face it, it's illegal and they got caught.

Maybe some of the content was illegal, but what Pirate Bay did was not - at least by Swedish law (IANASwedeL). All they did was host tiny text files and provice a search database. They were a tracker, not a host.

This is basically the same as American cops raiding Bell because the Yellow Pages lists the phone number of a paper mill, and paper can potentially be used to write harassing letters.

Re:Strange political power

[pipatron]

Though this should be obvious it deserves to be mentioned: The Pirate Bay and the Pirate Party are not run by the same group of people. They just happen to live in the same country.

Re:odd

[nordicfrost]

I got off the phone with Swedish police, they confirm raids in the Swedish file sharing community and at least two brought in for questioning.

I talkt to the Pirate Party leader, he confirms the raid, confiscated servers (Both Pirate Parties and The Pirate Bay), saying there were 50 policemen in the raid this afternoon (14:00 Cent Eur time).

Re:Legal?

[Eudial]

What changed? Sending letters is one thing, but something pretty heavy must be going on to warrant that kind of response.

Nothing as I can see it. It's still perfectly legal to link to copyright violating material in Sweden. The police probably hopes that they store some violating material on the servers. Which, hopefully, they don't.

That, or they're after the logs so that they can do it the American Way (tm) and start suing blind 90 year olds and quadriplegics.

Story unfolds...

[Jarlsberg]

http://www.aftonbladet.se/vss/nyheter/story/0,2789 ,834356,00.html
For the benefit of those who don't speak swedish, here's a short summary:
3 people have been arrested, age 22, 24 and 28. They have not been charged, but are taken in because they the police suspect they have violated copyright laws. The persons are directly connected to TPB.org. They are as of an hour ago still under interrogation. 50 police men have worked on the case.

What the Swedish antipiracy firm (ATB) has to say

[entoke]

http://www.antipiratbyran.com/index.htm?id=news&p= p19#19

"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.

Re:come on, let's face it

[cpt kangarooski]

The DMCA has nothing to do with it. They are illegal in the US, because the US treats contributory infringement (i.e. knowingly helping someone infringe), vicarious infringement (i.e. profiting by another's infringement), and inducement (i.e. strongly encouraging someone to infringe in conjunction with assistance) as being punishable just as much as direct infringement. The idea of secondary liability is fairly common in our legal system.

Whether Sweden has anything like this, I have no idea.

First hand information here:

[giulietta masina]

The Pirate Bureau have set up a temporary news blog to inform the public about this whole incident: http://piratbyran.blogspot.com/

Shutting down The Pirate Bay can be compared to shutting down Google, by Swedish laws. Both sites supply a search engine with which you can find legal and illegal material on the internet. TPB will prevail.

Re:First hand information here:

[giulietta masina]

"The Pirate Bay exists SOLELY for the unauthorized distribution on copyrighted works."

First off, this is so wrong. Until today I was sharing my own independent movie production through TPB. So the "solely" part is incorrect.

But in any case, it is still not illegal to link to copyrighted material in Sweden. There are several precedental legal cases from the past years that establishes this. And this is the main point.

Re:Strange political power

[Politburo]

American Idol loves to say "That's more votes than the last election" or some other bullshit. What they conveniently leave out is that you're allowed to vote more than once for American Idol.

Re:come on, let's face it

[zerocool^]

And here's where you're wrong and trolling:

We're not talking about the DMCA, we're talking about basic theft.

NO, NO, NO, WRONG.

Theft is when YOU HAVE SOMETHING, SOMEONE ELSE TAKES IT, and YOU NO LONGER HAVE IT.

This is copyright infringement. It is NOT the same thing as theft. In a way, the copyright owner has something, someone else takes (an exact replica of) it, but the copyright owner STILL HAS IT.

It is not as simple as "reduce the problem down to something you can understand and digest easily", and "repeat it often enough, it becomes true". You can't make a simple analogy out of this; it is not a simple problem. Attempt to understand it. Bring yourself to it's level; not vice versa. This works for all complex problems, be it micro v. macro kernel, evolution v. creation, pro-choice v. pro-life, etc. Elevate your understanding.

~Wx

The Pirate Party

[Christian Engstrom]

Unfortunately our server has gone down right now (overload, not police raid), so I'll post the English description of our political agenda here.

The Pirate Party

The Pirate Party is a newly formed political party in Sweden. We want to fundamentally reform copyright law, get rid of the patent system, and ensure that citizens' rights to privacy are respected. With this agenda, and only this, we are making a bid for representation in the Swedish parliament in the upcoming national elections in September.

Not only do we think these are worthwhile goals. We also believe they are realistically achievable on a European basis. The sentiments that led to the formation of the Pirate Party in Sweden are present throughout Europe. There are already similar political initiatives under way in several other member states. Together, we will be able to set a new course for a Europe that is currently heading in a very dangerous direction.

The Pirate Party only has three issues on its agenda:

Reform of copyright law
The official aim of the copyright system has always been to find a balance between the interests of publishers and consumers, in order to promote culture being created and spread. Today that balance has been completely lost, to a point where the copyright laws severely restrict the very thing they are supposed to promote. The Pirate Party wants to restore the balance in the copyright legislation.

All non-commercial copying and use should be completely free. File sharing and p2p networking should be encouraged rather than criminalized. Culture and knowledge are good things, that increase in value the more they are shared. The Internet could become the greatest public library ever created.

The monopoly for the copyright holder to exploit an aesthetic work commercially should be limited to five years after publication. Today's copyright terms are simply absurd. Nobody needs to make money seventy years after he is dead. No film studio or record company bases its investment decisions on the off-chance that the product would be of interest to anyone a hundred years in the future. The commercial life of cultural works is staggeringly short in today's world. If you haven't made your money back in the first one or two years, you never will. A five years copyright term for commercial use is more than enough. Non-commercial use should be free from day one.

We also want a complete ban on DRM technologies, and on contract clauses that aim to restrict the consumers' legal rights in this area. There is no point in restoring balance and reason to the legislation, if at the same time we continue to allow the big media companies to both write and enforce their own arbitrary laws.

An abolished patent system
Pharmaceutical patents kill people in third world countries every day. They hamper possibly life saving research by forcing scientists to lock up their findings pending patent application, instead of sharing them with the rest of the scientific community. The latest example of this is the bird flu virus, where not even the threat of a global pandemic can make research institutions forgo their chance to make a killing on patents.

The Pirate Party has a constructive and reasoned proposal for an alternative to pharmaceutical patents. It would not only solve these problems, but also give more money to pharmaceutical research, while still cutting public spending on medicines in half. This is something we would like to discuss on a European level.

Patents in other areas range from the morally repulsive (like patents on living organisms) through the seriously harmful (patents on software and business methods) to the merely pointless (patents in the mature manufacturing industries).

Europe has all to gain and nothing to lose by abolishing patents outright. If we lead, the rest of the world will eventually follow.

Respect for the right to privacy
Following the 9/11 event in the US, Europe has

Nah, no political power

[Lars Arvestad]

What's really interesting about them is the strange political power that they held in their homeland.

I am Swedish and I don't think that TPB has had much influence at all, laws and attitudes would have been just the same if this was an organization outside Sweden. My guess is that the presence of the organisation is simply reflecting current attitudes in general in Sweden today. It is notable that a minister in the socialdemocratic government downloaded mp3s, burned them to CD, and gave it to friend as a birthday present (Swedish article) already in 2000, without seeing any wrong with it.

An explanation to this phenomenon could be a tradition of relatively strong consumer protection laws (and traditions), and that the "personal use" clauses in copyright have always been defended here.

Official statement from the Pirate Party...

[Stentapp]

...can be read at http://www.piratpartiet.se./ English one to come.
Here is my very rough NON-OFFICIAL translation:
"PRESS RELEASE
For immidiate publication
31 may 2006

For more information, see party webpage at http://www.piratpartiet.se/ or contact Rickard Falkvinge, +46733555293

The Pirate Party critizises the police for illegitimate intrusion

Swedish police has today taken all the servers of The Pirate Bay into custody, along with the servers of a number of other unrelated web hotel customers. The police chose to do this despite the fact that the services provided by the world's largest bittorrent tracker has been deemed fully legal in Sweden.

The police means, according to an operator of the site, that the police wants to test the legality of the activities.

"Which company would have accepted this treatment?", says Rickard Falkvinge, party leader of the Pirate Party. "Which Company would have accepted that the police arrived and ceased all company activity, before proven guilty of crime?. In this case the Pirate Bay has not commited any crime. They are disliked by large american media interests, that is true. But it is not a crime to be disliked, and definately not a reason for the swedish police to enter and shut down one of the worlds' largest communities for youth people."

"This is exactly the kind of raids that the Pirate Party wants to stop", concludes Rickard. "When the society sends the police on its youth population because they listen to music and watches movies, then it is not the youth that are wrong. Then it is the society that has to do better."

About the Pirate Party:

The Pirate Party is the largest of the new parties for the national elections in Sweden 2006. The party was founded 1 january this year and promotes an open information society, shared culture, and protected private life.

English quotes from Swedish police, Pirate Party

[praps]

Full article in English here with recent quotes direct from the Swedish police and the leader of the Pirate Party. Apparently it's a very early stage in the investigation - so maybe more arrests to come?

An alternative to pharmaceutical patents

[Christian Engstrom]

And what is this plan?

Basically this.

I apologize for not having a more complete translation of our proposal ready, but this is the basic idea.

At least in Europe, over 80% of the pharma companies' revenues come from the government (since we have universal medical coverage). The pharma companies claim that they have to charge several times more than the production costs in order to fund research. But they only spend 15% of their revenues on research. Most of the money they receive from the government actually goes to marketing (around 50%) and profit (around 15%).

If the government would fund research and the buying of the pills separately, the total bill would drop by at least 50%, since there would be no need for the excessive marketing any more. And there would be no need to keep the research results blocked by patents, since they would have been paid for already.

So there would be no need to threaten third world countries with economic sanctions just because they try to do what they can to provide AIDS medicine to their own population.