Yesterday afternoon, Swedish Police conducted a raid against the ISP RIX|Port80 that hosts the Bittorrent tracker known as thepiratebay.org as well as it's affiliate piratbyrån, a site dedicated to discussing issues of copyright and patents.

Swedish police confiscated enitre servere racks and thus shut down a number of sites that have no other connection to the piratebay and piretbyrån then having their site in the same server rack.

The reason for the raid was to secure evidence to try the legality of the service the piratebay provided in court, this is odd since a number of rulings have established that the piratebay itself as it hosts only torrent files is legal under the current swedish copyright law.

As it turns out, the raid is the result of frantic lobbying by a group of more or les self appointed vigilantes calling themselves Antipiratbyrån or the Antipiratebureau. This group has been the source of much controversy as they conducted raids themselves that turned out to be the result of evidence planted by antipiratbyrån themselves. The APB has a shady reputation to say the least and it's front man Henrik Pontén(often called the most hated man in Sweden) has on several occations made comments that compare filesharing communities to oragnized crime.

The APB's lobbying is funded by a number of organizations backed by large record companies and movie companies and have shown that they can bully the police and the government into focusing on the filesharing communities rather then put resources to use fighting "real crime".

The combination of blatent lies spread to get the police to raid RIX|port80, the lobbying the APB does and the instatance on the police devoting resources to fighting fileshareers rather then crimes that ahve a much greater cost to society reminds me of the lyrics of a Dead Kennedys song.

"The law don't mean shit if you got the right friends. That's how this country is run!"

This autumm there is an election to the swedish parlament, one of the small parties that will be eligable to vote for is the pirateparty, a party started to raise debate about copyright and patents. I for one know that theer is a signifucant chance that the pirateparty will get my vote this autum. It's avote for a party I sympathize with, which is more then can be said of the established "fat cats" of swedidh politics.

That's so so stupid and pointless. I really hope these guys come out on top again; I'll certainly enjoy reading what they have to say in response to THIS ONE.

Filesharing isn't going to go anywhere for a long, long time, because it's essentially a rebellion against a broken system. Until all these old rich guys decide to change their business models to adapt and embrace technology, they're going to be fighting a losing battle. You'd think they'd have that figured out by now, because every single time they shut down a big site or program, three more spring up and the network grows.

Oh, you missed some of the juciest parts of this one Dante!

Not only did they take down the Pirate Bay, they took down a fuckton of stuff they had no warrant for whatsoever (as I understand it). Their warrant ONLY covered TPB stuff. Not, say, the political party in opposition to the one pressuring for this raid. Guess who's stuff got taken anyway? Guess which political party's membership has like, doubled, since this event? Bingo.

It gets better.

A ton of other torrent sites were dumped too because of proximity (like, an entire building dedicated to hosting servers just up and got emptied for this). So they're all down for the count, but not only that, a lot of legitimate, non piracy related businesses were affected by this.

Oh, and we can't forget that while they were rading TPB and the rest of the servers, they fuckin put black garbage bags overtop of the security cameras. NOTHING SHADY GOING ON HERE!

The kicker?

All the legit sites, all the sites for which they had no warrant, those are still down.

Meanwhile, TPB is back and running again. Way to go, police, bang up job!