Notes that it was back up and running a mere 3 days later, and that despite no court date still having been set it has yet to see the return of its confiscated servers.
It was 2 years ago yesterday that the famed Swedish BitTorrent tracker site The Pirate Bay was raided at the apparent behest of the MPAA, IFPI, and the American embassy.
Authorities seized not only The Pirate Bay’s servers, but also those of 10 unrelated companies who had the apparent misfortune of simply sharing the same hosting services of PRQ.
The Pirate Bay decided to mark the event in a blog posting on their site that emphasizes that after all the threats, raids, and outright harassment by the entertainment industry it is still around and arguable stronger and more popular than ever before.
It reads:
Today we celebrate! Two years ago on this day, the 31st of May, the Swedish police raided our facilities. They worked hard and long and tried stealing all of our servers, all of our backups and all of our admins. As usual, they did not succeed. After our opponents dropped their victory in their press releases we just got the site back online in no time. After three days the site was running almost like before – we could have been faster but we had to do alot of interviews and we had to drink some beer.
Today, even two years after the raid there is still not even a date set for the court case. We still haven’t got our servers back and the MPAA and their friends in Ifpi wants us to pay them 115.000.000 SEK (about 12.000.000 EUR). We want them to pay for our damages instead since what we do has never been illegal. To be frank, we’re not worried about the court case, we’re quite happy with it since it will prove our innocence.
In the meantime we have grown a bit. From 2.5 million peers at the time of the raid to 12 million peers. From 1 million registered users to 2.7 million. We used to be ranked just among the top 500 websites in the world – now we’re top 100. And when we write that _we_ are growing, we mean the community. It’s awesome to see the support the community show us. Even in our bad moments, we get your support. We’re really happy that you do this, every fan letter we get, every time someone say something nice to us, we really understand that we do something important, something that is more important than ourselves.
We haven’t done everything right. We’re amateurs in a lot of fields. But we’re experts in having fun and making a lot of file sharing happening. And we keep on improving on the areas we find our flaws. And you guys help us out. Thank you so much!
To celebrate today, we encourage you to keep on sharing. Keep on uploading, downloading, swapping bits of information. Let today be the pirates independence day! Today we celebrate the victories we’ve had and the victories that will come. Today we celebrate that we’re united in our efforts. Keep on seeding!
The ironic thing about the whole affair is that the raid and accompanying press releases praising it by the entertainment industry simply served as free advertising for The Pirate Bay who have little to fear from since the site hosts no actual copyrighted material. BitTorrent trackers are not copyrighted.
So let us all take a moment and celebrate the occasion in The Pirate Bays suggested fashion, which is to "keep on sharing…uploading, downloading, [and] swapping bits of information."
Congrats!
Related Posts
- The Pirate Bay Celebrates 5th Anniversary
- ‘Pirate Bay server raid was legit but, irregular.’
- Companies Sue Sweden Over Pirate Bay Server Confiscation
- “US government behind Pirate Bay raid”
- Hackers Hit Swedish Police Site over Pirate Bay Raid
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Yarrrrr!