http://www.thelocal.se/article.php?ID=3955&date=
20060531
By James Savage
31st May 2006
Police have closed down The Pirate Bay, a Sweden-based file
sharing
site and one of the most popular websites of its kind in the
world.
Three people were taken in for questioning after police
raids in
Sweden on Wednesday. The trio, ages 22, 24 and 28, are
suspected of
violating property rights legislation, police spokesman Ulf
Göranzon
said.
Servers connected to the site have been impounded and the
site was
down on Wednesday afternoon, although the operators of The
Pirate Bay
have set up a temporary website to provide updates on the
situation.
Some fifty policemen and women were involved in raids on ten
homes and
offices in Sweden.
The three men taken in by police were still being questioned
on
Wednesday afternoon. They all have links to The Pirate Bay.
Prosecutors will decide whether to detain the men after they
have been
questioned.
"The suspects are not people who download files, but
are people who
have relations to the website," Ulf Göranzon told The
Local.
He would not reveal anything more about the roles that the
men played.
Police have been monitoring the website and the men behind
it for some
time. Computers were taken during raids on the men's homes
and offices
to secure evidence.
"We are now going to look at how the operation is
structured,"
Göranzon said.
"At the moment we are talking to lots of people about
this case. We
are still at a very early stage in our
investigations," he said.
He would not reveal whether police had their eyes on further
suspects.
Henrik Pontén, lawyer at Antipiratbyrån (The Anti-Pirate
Bureau) in
Stockholm, welcomed the move to close down the site.
"It is good that the Swedish police are now
prioritising this kind of
crime. The copyright laws finance creativity within film,
computer
gaming, music and other culture," said Pontén.
"People who break copyright laws steal from the
creators and
movie-watching public of the future. The closure of The
Pirate Bay is
therefore good for all of us who enjoy new film and
entertainment."
But Tobias Andersson at pressure group Piratbyrån (The
Pirate Bureau),
which founded The Pirate Bay, stressed that there was no
copyright-protected material on the servers.
"The Anti-Pirate Bureau has clearly misled the police
in this case,"
said Andersson.
"They appear to have persuaded police who are
incompetent in IT that
the servers in question are full of copyright-protected
material. This
is a gross misuse of taxpayers' money."
Andersson also condemned the fact that police had closed
down a number
of other websites, including The Pirate Bureau, which he
says is no
longer officially linked to the Pirate Bay.
"This is the greatest infringement. The Anti-Pirate
Bureau has clearly
fooled the police into closing down its antagonists, The
Pirate
Bureau."
"We are very upset that the film industry doesn't
dare to have a
debate, and chooses instead to trick politicians and the
police into
criminalizing their opponents and a large portion of the
Swedish
population."
The Pirate Bay is a BitTorrent tracker, which enables people
to
download large files such as movies from other users.
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