Pirates sunk – for now
June 1st, 2006In the morning of 2006-05-31 the Swedish National Criminal Police showed a search warrant to Rix|Port80 personnell. The warrant was valid for all datacentres of Rix|Port80 and was directed at The Pirate Bay. The allegation was breach of copy-right law, alternatively assisting breach of copy-right law.
“The necessity for securing technical evidence for the existance (sic) of a web-service which is fully official, the legality of which has been under public debate for years and whose principals are public persons giving regular press interviews, could not be explained,” said the statement.
“Asked for other reasoning behind the choice to take down a site, without knowing wether (sic) it is illegal or not, the officers explained that this is normal.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5036268.stm
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Who is behind this? You can bet your last Krona that it isn’t Swedish police or the Swedish government directly. So that leaves external (and most probably) commercial interests directing the activity of a domestic justice system in the complete absence of any legally substantiated wrongdoing.
Sweden, I am ashamed of you.
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Regarding the internet-savvyness of record labels, this interesting piece from the Grauniad sheds some light.
June 1st, 2006 at 11:47 am
First of all, the operators of TPB are not ‘pirates’ as we all know. They do not sell other peoples works; they dont even host them. They merely maintain a list of what OTHER people have, and then tell people where to find those people and their machines.
TPB already have replacement equipment on order, and the last full backup of the system was made 30 minutes before the servers were stolen, so they will be back online precisely as they were in no time.
“The TPB can receive compensation from the Swedish state in case that the upcoming legal processes show that TPB is indeed legal.”
http://wiredfire.org/index.php?q=node/63
And so the Swedish Keystone Kops will have to pay huge compensation to TPB, for disturbing their totally legal and Google like operations.
Imagine the inconvenience they have caused to the millions of people who use that site every day. Should TPB be able to sue for damages, they could reke in millions of SEK from the police.
Imagine the outrage if Google had its servers confiscated ‘just in case there is a crime being committed’. Its a total outrage.
That BBQ piece is wrong in saying that TPB is a ‘major Bittorrent site’ it is THE BIGGEST BT site in the world, with 20% of all BT traffic going through it.
check out:
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1203
http://blog.mininova.org/articles/2006/05/31/the-pirate-bay-down
http://torrentfreak.com/the-piratebay-is-down-raided-by-the-swedish-police/