Pirate Bay (Sweden): Legal threats (reading-performance)

The Pirate Bay is “the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker” (with over 2 million users). BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol that allows large amounts of data to be shared quickly and reliable.The Pirate Bay an open tracker, where anybody can download .torrent files, and registered members can upload torrents and add comments or personal messages. Registration is, of course, free.The Pirate Bay only removes files if the name doesn’t match the content. People should be able to know whatthey are dowloading

On May 31, 2006,  approximately 50 members of the Swedish National Criminal Police Force raided the data centre that housed The Pirate Bay’s servers. All its servers were confiscated under allegation that they stored illegal content. Three people, aged 22, 24 and 28, were arrested. The reasons for the raid are still not clear. However, a Swedish television channel suggested that it may have been due to pressure from the US government. In any case, one of the effects of the operation was to increase membership of the Pirate Party, which was openly critical of the raid.
The web was back up and operational on June 2nd.
Only the .torrent files are stored on servers, which means that they don’t store copyright-protected and/or illegal material. Therefore, the people behind The Pirate Bay could not be held responsible for material distributed using the tracker. Complaints about copyright and/or by industry lobbies are ridiculed and published on the site.
Some of these comments and threats will be publicly presented at the OXCARS.
http://thepiratebay.org/