Pirate Bay Walks The Plank June 01, 2006

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Swedish police have swooped on BitTorrent search site, The Pirate Bay, shutting it down, making arrests and confiscating hardware. For those of you out there that love to er, share, Pirate Bay was one of the largest BitTorrent search sites which must be why it took 50 cops to confiscate some PCs and servers and arrest – wait for it – three whole people.

The entertainment industry were obviously delighted but the actual legality of seizure, not to mention the murky legality of being a search site and not a hosting site for potentially illegal content, has not yet been determined. A statement on the site highlighting the ‘grey’ legal status of the raid said:

“The necessity for securing technical evidence for the existence 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. Asked for other reasoning behind the choice to take down a site, without knowing whether it is illegal or not, the officers explained that this is normal.”

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