After a year of frustrated digging, Swedish law enforcement says it needs more time to look for "incriminating evidence."
Now as may of you remember, the Pirate Bay’s servers along with 100 others unrelated to the site were confiscated over a year ago, and despite coming up empty handed they have asked for more time to continue searching.
The tricky detail for Swedish prosecutors lies in the fact that the Pirate Bay essentially hosts no copyrighted material whatsoever, it is simple a facilitator for users to share such content with one another nothing more.
The ".torrent" torrent tracker file extensions which users run with BitTorrent clients is the only material hosted by the Pirate Bay, which to the RIAA and MPAA’s chagrin I’m sure, is NOT copyrighted material, and previous Swedish court cases have ruled as much.
Hakan Roswall, the Swedish prosecutor behind it all, has also stated that he is about to start going through the "…encrypted material on many computers," which according to Brokep means that he can’t be referring to their servers since they had no encrypted material and instead must be that of other servers confiscated in the raid.
The 100+ servers of other PRQ customers who have yet to get their servers back are in for another rude awakening because apparently they are about to have their data opened up for the prying eyes of law enforcement even though they had no association with the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker site.
As usual, when law enforcement gets frustrated in its inability to make a case it goes on a witch hunt to try and make somebody, anybody pay. In this case he has the full pressure of the WTO and the US govt on his back and its clearly making him do whatever it takes to appear as though he’s exhausting all means at his disposal to make life hard for the Pirate Bay and anybody with even the remotest links to it.
Brokep writes:
The prosecutor Håkan Roswall has publicly stated in Ny Teknik that he is going to file for an extension in the case against The Pirate Bay since the work of going through the servers is still not done.
After almost one full year the police has still not come up with any evidence against The Pirate Bay. Wasting more of the tax payers money and not returning the over 100 servers from unrelated PRQ customers is nothing but a big scandal by the Swedish authorities.
Further, he states that they are about to start going through the encrypted material on many computers.
There was no encrypted harddrives, partitions or even loop files on the servers that belong to The Pirate Bay. The encrypted data he is talking about must therefore belong to the PRQ customers.
It is our firm believe that either Håkan Roswall is using The Pirate Bay raid as a cover-up for going through other peoples data or that he is about to take a long holiday and do not want to work this summer.
There is no reason for not just copying the data from the hard drives and returning the hardware to the many organisations that need them to function. The justice ombudsman apparantly believes that these servers are already returned, months ago, and he based his decisions partly on that false information.
If the court grants Håkan Roswall any more time extension on this case it is clearly for going through other data than The Pirate Bay’s. This should not be accepted as this was not the reason for the [unnecessary] raid. Being computer experts (and the owners of the data, we know what we have on the computers) we cannot se any reason for any more time being used on this. Honestly, we would have copied the data in less than a day, but then again we are really good at copying.
The Pirate Bay is a file sharing network where users put up content to share with other users. No content is hosted on any server at The Pirate Bay besides the .torrent file which contains no copyrighted material what so ever. According to previous similar court cases this is not illegal.
It does bring up a good point though, how, as merely a facilitator of illegal file-sharing and not an actual host of copyrighted material, is the Pirate Bay breaking any laws?
digg_url = ‘http://digg.com/tech_news/Swedish_prosecutors_to_extend_search_of_Pirate_Bay_servers’;
Looking for more stuff to watch or download?
The Pirate Bay to launch new ‘Playble’ music subscription site
The Pirate Bay to launch YouTube-style video streaming site
‘Pirate Bay server raid was legit but, irregular.
3 Quick Ways to Watch Movies for FREE!
3 quick ways to watch TV shows for FREE
BitTorrent torrent sites & search engines
Azureus – A Beginner’s Guide to BitTorrent Downloading
Watch The Simpsons, The Office, Jackass, South Park, Lost, X-Men, and More, On-Demand For Free
Related Posts
- The Pirate Bay to be Charged by Swedish Prosecutors
- Swedish prosecutor gets an extension to figure out a case against the Pirate Bay
- (Prosecutor)…compares Piratbyrån with terrorists, and the Pirate Bay with… something even worse
- “Avast ye scurvy file sharers!”: Interview with Swedish Pirate Party leader Rickard Falkvinge
- Swedish Police Seize Massive Piracy Server
Loading ...
they’ve run out of time and are now grasping at straws just like anyone with mud on their face not to mention the fact that the only card they can play is to keep some 60k worth of gear in hock to stick it to good ol’ tpb
granted they probably took tpb down only to route all the requests through the swed gov backbone in a way that can be tracked….
whats really gonna be a threat by 2010 is all this trusted computing garbage
your graphics card will have one as will your core duos and your amd64s right down to your hard disk having embedded tpm’s all in the name of DRM which btw is being paid for by every buyer/tax payer
frankly I’m sick of these major labels tying up the civil system with bullshit when that cash is ours
if you pay taxes of any sort you have a right to tell these anal copyright dickwads to go bite it because it’s not your job as a tax payer to fund wars on anything be it terror drugs or copyright infringment against yourselves!
As ccs_dude put it intellectual property right holders are going too far. Copyright was only supposed to last for a sort length of time before companies started butting in and now the system is completely broken. Further that they are trying to limit what you can do with the products you buy and remove all the rights you currently enjoy. Yet for some reason the general population is oblivious and by the time they raise a stink it will be too late.