The statement, which promised that the site would be functional
again within a day or two, said that those behind the site "can
receive compensation from the Swedish state [if] the upcoming legal
processes show that [Piratebay] is indeed legal."
However, a Swedish legal expert has denounced their intended
defence as "silly".
Swedish police staged a spectacular simultaneous raid on a
series of premises holding the servers hosting Piratebay.org,
confiscating the servers holding the site and bringing the site
down.
The site was accused of being a source of global internet piracy
and itself claimed to be the world's largest BitTorrent search
index. BitTorrent is a technology which makes it easier to transmit
large files, such as music or films, over the internet. In itself
it is not illegal, and Hollywood studio Warner Bros has just agreed
to use BitTorrent to distribute its material.
One pressure group associated with the site claims that the
Swedish police were misled and incompetent in their actions.
"[Anti piracy group] Antipiratbyran has clearly misled the
police in this case," said Tobias Andersson of Piratbyran, a
spin-off of Piratebay.org dedicated to promoting file-sharing.
"They seem to have convinced incompetent police that the servers in
question are filled with copyright protected materials." The
Piratbyran statement said that there is "no illegal material on the
actual server".
The servers contained not media files but links to BitTorrent
files containing material. Christopher Wallin of the IT group of
Swedish law firm Delphi & Co said that this is not likely to be
a successful defence. "Our opinion is that that is silly. That is
an argument they have been making for the last two or three years,"
said Wallin. "They have committed a contributory offence, it is a
contribution to copyright infringement."
Though no direct representative of the site could be contacted,
a statement on the site 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."
The copyright law in Sweden has been more lax than in other
European countries, though recent changes have brought the law more
closely in line with that in other nations. Sweden used to be known
as a music and film pirate's haven because downloading copyrighted
material without a licence was not an offence until last
summer.
"Uploading was always an offence but downloading was not," said
Wallin. "That changed last summer. The law was not so much changed
as clarified."
"This is a very important development for Sweden, a country
which has recently acquired a reputation as a haven for copyright
infringement," said John Kennedy, chief executive of recording
industry representative body the IFPI. "The Pirate Bay has damaged
the legitimate music industry on an international scale and I am
very pleased that the Swedish authorities have today taken such
decisive action against it."
