The Justice Ombudsman (JO) found that overall the raid was lawful, that despite rumors that the MPAA, IFPI, and the American embassy had unduly pressured Swedish authorities to act against the Pirate Bay, no evidence could be found that authorities acted unlawfully.

The report does confirm however, that the IFPI, MPAA and the American embassy had contacted the current Minister of Justice Thomas Bodström and the Secretary of State Dan Eliasson about doing something in regards to the Pirate Bay’s blatant disregard for copyright infringement. But, it also concluded that the lobbying carried out by the organization was “an accepted part of the political decision-making process”.

Secretary of State Dan Eliasson replied to their requests by noting:

(a)ccording to the Swedish constitution, it is not possible for the Government or the Ministry to intervene in a specific case. I can however assure you that I follow closely the actions taken by the police and the prosecutors in respect of copyrights infringements on the Internet and I will not, if necessary, hesitate to initiate further measures to improve their effectiveness.

The real “irregularities” it turns out, are not because of undue pressure by the US govt or media lobbying corporations but, concern the actual server confiscations by the police.

When the web hotel PRQ and The Pirate Bay were raided almost every server in the place was confiscated. There were total of 186 servers that were confiscated from PRQ’s server rooms, causing a large number of companies unrelated to the Pirate Bay to be shut down and essentially locked out from their livelihood.

The Justice Ombudsman found that in this aspect the police could’ve returned the confiscated servers that were unrelated to the Pirate Bay much sooner than the week it took them to do so.

The police and the prosecutor were charged for official misconduct, but none of the charges led to an investigation. The judge came to the conclusion that during the circumstances it was justified to confiscate all of the servers.

The Swedish Pirate Party’s leader, Rickard Falkvinge, takes umbrage with the report’s conclusions and says that “I find it astonishing that the JO’s investigation leaves out everything that was a flagrant violation of the constitution.”

Unsatisfied with the report’s conclusions, the Pirate Party is apparently considering taking the case to the European Court of Justice.

digg_url = ‘http://digg.com/tech_news/Pirate_Bay_server_raid_was_legit_but_irregular’;

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SOULXTC: “walkin’ the streets of P2P”

ThePirateBay.org had become one of the premier BitTorrent trackers, filling the void the ensured after the demise of SuprNova.org.

Details are still sketchy but sometime this morning ThePirateBay.org was raided by police, and the servers seized, meaning that the PirateBays tracker is offline and will remain offline for the time being. Whether this will keep ThePirateBay.org offline indefinitely is another matter. The Police also arrested 3 people, aged 22, 24 and 28, who were directly involved with ThePirateBay.org

The Swedish police also seized the “Pirate Party” servers, a swedish political party created to represent the file-sharing community politically (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_Party)

Up-to-date details are being posted on the “current event” page on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirate_Bay

More News:
http://www.thelocal.se/article.php?ID=3955&date=20060531
http://wiredfire.org/index.php?q=node/63