ThePirateBay.org closed down this morning
According to Indymedia UK, and backed up by a visit to The Pirate Bay, the swedish based offices of the BitTorrent hosting site have been raided this morning.
To say it's a massive turning point in illegal internet sharing is somewhat of an understatement.
On the bright side (or dark side, depending on your point of view) the owners have promised to relocate in order to get round the law…again..
Read the story here.
I saw that, I was actually going to post about it earlier. One interesting thing about it is that there is still some dicussion about whether they have taken the equiptment of the pirates party, who are a legitimate political party (see link), according to the link just there the party's equiptment wasn't taken, although accoring to other reports they have not only taken party equiptment, they also raided the homes of the people who run it. (I still don't know what is true)
I might just point out that what they were doing was not illegal in Sweden; they only host links to "Pirated" (gedit?) material and therefore break no Swedish law. For a long time international companies have wanted to shut down the site but normally get told to "go away" (and other unmentionable things involving batons). This seems to me like the big corporations have put pressure on the Swedish government to arrest people and take their property when there is no evidence of them breaking a law. Shame.
Finally I will close with one of my favourite comments from the legal threats page "As you may or may not be aware, Sweden is not a state in "the United States of America", therefore your jurisdiction doesn't apply…" seems a shame if this has now become untrue (although for all of us who are residents in the UK full time its been that way for a long time).
31 May 2006, 20:31
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