May 2006 raid On 31 May 2006, a raid against The Pirate Bay and people involved with the website took place as ordered by Swedish judge Tomas Norström, later the presiding judge of the 2009 trial, prompted by allegations of copyright violations. Police officers shut down the website and confiscated its servers, as well as all other servers hosted by The Pirate Bay's Internet service provider,
PRQ. The company is owned by two operators of The Pirate Bay. Three peopleNeij, Svartholm and Mikael Viborgwere held by the police for questioning, but were released later that evening. All servers in the room were seized, including those running the website of Piratbyrån, an independent organisation fighting for file sharing rights, as well as servers unrelated to The Pirate Bay or other file sharing activities. Equipment such as hardware routers, switches, blank CDs, and fax machines were also seized. The
Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) wrote in a press release: "Since filing a criminal complaint in Sweden in November 2004, the film industry has worked vigorously with Swedish and U.S. government officials in Sweden to shut this illegal website down." MPAA CEO
Dan Glickman also stated, "
Intellectual property theft is a problem for film industries all over the world and we are glad that the local government in Sweden has helped stop The Pirate Bay from continuing to enable rampant copyright theft on the Internet." The MPAA press release set forth its justification for the raid and claimed that there were three arrests; however, the individuals were not actually arrested, only held for questioning. The release also reprinted John G. Malcolm's allegation that The Pirate Bay was making money from the distribution of copyrighted material, a criticism denied by The Pirate Bay. After the raid, The Pirate Bay displayed a message that confirmed that the Swedish police had executed search warrants for breach of copyright law or assisting such a breach. The closure message initially caused some confusion because on 1 April 2005,
April Fools' Day, The Pirate Bay had posted a similar message as a
prank, stating that they were unavailable due to a raid by the Swedish Anti-Piracy Bureau and IFPI. Piratbyrån set up a temporary news blog to inform the public about the incident. On 2 June 2006, The Pirate Bay was available once again, with their logo depicting a pirate ship firing cannonballs at the
Hollywood Sign. The Pirate Bay has servers in both Belgium and Russia for future use in case of another raid. According to The Pirate Bay, in the two years following the raid, it grew from 1 million to 2.7 million registered users and from 2.5 million to 12 million peers. The Pirate Bay claimed over 5 million active users in 2007. Sweden's largest technology museum, the
Swedish National Museum of Science and Technology, acquired one of the confiscated servers in 2009 and exhibited it for having great symbolic value as a "big problem or a big opportunity".
Autopsy photos In September 2008, the Swedish media reported that the public preliminary investigation protocols concerning a child murder case known as the
Arboga case had been made available through a torrent on The Pirate Bay. In Sweden, preliminary investigations became publicly available the moment a lawsuit is filed and can be ordered from the court by any individual. The document included pictures from the autopsy of the two murdered children, which caused their father Nicklas Jangestig to urge the website to have the pictures removed. The Pirate Bay refused to remove the torrent. The number of downloads increased to about 50,000 a few days later. On 11 September 2008, Sunde participated in the debate program
Debatt on the public broadcaster
SVT. He had agreed to participate on the condition that the children's father, Nicklas Jangestig, would not take part in the debate. Jangestig ultimately did participate in the program by telephone, which made Sunde feel betrayed by SVT. This caused The Pirate Bay to suspend all of its press contacts the following day. "I don't think it's our job to judge if something is ethical or unethical or what other people want to put out on the internet", Sunde said to TV4.
Legal issues In September 2007, a large number of internal emails were leaked from
anti-piracy company
MediaDefender by an anonymous hacker. Some of the leaked emails discussed hiring
hackers to perform
DDoS attacks on The Pirate Bay's servers and trackers. In response to the leak, The Pirate Bay filed charges in Sweden against MediaDefender clients
Twentieth Century Fox Sweden AB,
EMI Sweden AB,
Universal Music Group Sweden AB,
Universal Pictures Nordic AB,
Paramount Home Entertainment (Sweden) AB,
Atari Nordic AB,
Activision Nordic,
Ubisoft Sweden AB,
Sony BMG Music Entertainment (Sweden) AB, and
Sony Pictures Home Entertainment Nordic AB, but the charges were not pursued. Later, Sunde accused police investigator Jim Keyzer of a conflict of interest when he declined to investigate MediaDefender. Keyzer later accepted a job for MPAA member studio
Warner Brothers. The leaked emails revealed that other MPAA member studios hired MediaDefender to
pollute The Pirate Bay's torrent database. In an official letter to the Swedish Minister of Justice, the
International Olympic Committee (IOC) requested assistance from the Swedish government to prevent The Pirate Bay from distributing video clips of the
Beijing Olympics. The IOC claimed there were more than one million downloads of footage from the Olympics – mostly of the opening ceremony. The Pirate Bay, however, did not take anything down, and temporarily renamed the website to The Beijing Bay. The
trial against the men behind the Pirate Bay started in Sweden on 16 February 2009. They were accused of breaking Swedish copyright law. The defendants, however, continued to be confident about the outcome. Half the charges against The Pirate Bay were dropped on the second day of the trial. The three operators of the site and their one investor Carl Lundström were convicted in Stockholm district court on 17 April 2009 and sentenced to one year in jail each and a total of 30 million kronor ($3.6 million, €2.7 million, £2.4 million sterling) in fines and damages. The defendants' lawyers appealed to the
Svea Court of Appeal and requested a retrial in the district court, alleging bias on the part of judge Tomas Norström. On 13 May 2009, several record companies again sued The Pirate Bay's founders as well as their main
internet service provider Black Internet. They required enforcement for ending The Pirate Bay's accessory to copyright infringement that had not stopped despite the court order in April, and in the complaint listed several pages of works being shared with the help of the site. The suit was joined by several major film companies on 30 July. The Stockholm district court ruled on 21 August that Black Internet must stop making available the specific works mentioned in the judgment, or face a 500,000 kronor fine. The company was notified of the order on 24 August, and they complied with it on the same day by disconnecting The Pirate Bay.
Computer Sweden noted that the judgment did not order The Pirate Bay to be disconnected, but the ISP had no other option for stopping the activity on the site. It was the first time in Sweden for an ISP to be forced to stop providing access for a website. A public support fund fronted by the CEO of the ISP was set up to cover the legal fees of an appeal.
Pirate Party leader
Rickard Falkvinge submitted the case for
Parliamentary Ombudsman review, criticising the court's order to make intermediaries responsible for relayed content and to assign active crime prevention tasks to a private party. On 28 October 2009, the Stockholm District Court ordered a
temporary injunction on Neij and Svartholm with a penalty of 500,000 kronor each, forbidding them from participating in the operation of The Pirate Bay's website or trackers. On 21 May 2010, the
Svea Court of Appeal decided not to change the orders on Black Internet or Neij and Svartholm. On 1 February 2012, the
Supreme Court of Sweden refused to hear an appeal in the conviction case, and agreed with the decision of the Svea Court of Appeal, which had upheld the sentences in November 2011. On 2 September 2012 Svartholm was arrested in Cambodia. He was detained in
Phnom Penh by officers executing an international warrant issued against him in April after he did not turn up to serve a one-year jail sentence for copyright violations. On 24 December 2012, administrators of TPB changed the homepage to urge users to send Warg, in jail, "gifts and letters". In March 2013, The Pirate Bay claimed in a blog post that it had moved its servers to
North Korea. The incident turned out to be a hoax. In December 2013, the site changed its domain to
.ac (
Ascension Island), following the seizure of the
.sx domain. On 12 December, the site moved to
.pe (
Peru), on 18 December to
.gy (
Guyana). Following the site's suspension from the .gy domain, on 19 December The Pirate Bay returned to
.se (Sweden), which it had previously occupied between February 2012 and April 2013.
Trial The Pirate Bay trial was a joint
criminal and
civil prosecution in Sweden of four individuals charged for promoting the
copyright infringement of others with The Pirate Bay site. The criminal charges were supported by a consortium of
intellectual rights holders led by
IFPI, who filed individual civil compensation claims against the owners of The Pirate Bay. Swedish
prosecutors filed charges on 31 January 2008 against the founders along with Carl Lundström, a Swedish businessman who through his businesses sold services to the site. The prosecutor claimed the four worked together to administer, host, and develop the site and thereby facilitated other people's breach of copyright law. Some 34 cases of copyright infringements were originally listed, of which 21 were related to music files, 9 to movies, and 4 to games. The case was decided jointly by a judge and three appointed
lay judges. According to Swedish media, the lead judge, judge Norström, was a member of the Swedish Copyright Association and sat on the board of the Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property, but denied that his involvement constituted a conflict of interest. The trial started on 16 February 2009, in the
district court (
tingsrätt) of
Stockholm, Sweden. The hearings ended on 3 March 2009 and the verdict was announced at 11:00 am on Friday 17 April 2009: Neij, Sunde, Svartholm and Lundström were all found guilty and sentenced to serve one year in prison and pay a fine of 30 million Swedish krona (app. €2.7 million or US$3.5 million). All of the defendants appealed the verdict. The appeal trial concluded on 15 October 2010, and the verdict was announced on 26 November. The appeal court shortened sentences of three of the defendants who appeared in court that day. Neij's sentence was reduced to 10 months, Sunde's to eight, and Lundström's to four. However, the fine was increased from 32 to 46 million kronor. On 1 February 2012, the
Supreme Court of Sweden refused to hear an appeal in the case, prompting the site to change its official domain name to thepiratebay.se from thepiratebay.org. The move to a
.se domain was claimed to prevent susceptibility to US laws from taking control of the site. On 9 April 2013, the site changed its domain name to thepiratebay.gl, under the
Greenland TLD, in anticipation of possible seizure by Swedish authorities of its .se domain. The change proved to be short lived, as the site returned to the .se domain on 12 April 2013 after being blocked on the .gl domain by
Tele-Post, which administers domains in Greenland. Tele-Post cited a Danish court ruling that the site was in violation of copyright laws. The founders were all released after having finished serving their sentences by 2015.
Service issues In May 2007, The Pirate Bay was attacked by a group of
hackers. They copied the user database, which included over 1.5 million users. The Pirate Bay claimed to its users that the data was of no value and that passwords and e-mails were
encrypted and
hashed. Some blogs stated that a group known as the AUH (Arga Unga Hackare, Swedish for "Angry Young Hackers") were suspected of executing the attack; however, the AUH stated on the
Computer Sweden newspaper that they were not involved and would take revenge on those responsible for the attack. On 27 April 2009, the website of The Pirate Bay had
fibre IPv4 connectivity issues. There was widespread speculation this was a forced outage from the Swedish
anti-piracy group, accelerated somewhat by TPB adding contact details for the Swedish anti-piracy group's lawyers to its
RIPE database record. The site and its forums were still available via
IPv6 at the time. On 24 August 2009, one of The Pirate Bay's upstream providers was ordered to discontinue service for the website by a Swedish court in response to a
civil action brought by several entertainment companies including
Disney,
Universal,
Time Warner,
Columbia,
Sony,
NBC, and
Paramount. however, some users were unable to access the site immediately following the relocation due to unrelated technical difficulties. The site was fully operational again for everyone within 24 hours. On 6 October 2009, one of the IP transit providers to The Pirate Bay blocked all Pirate Bay traffic causing an outage for most users around the world. The same day, the site was reportedly back online at an IP address at
CyberBunker, located in the
Netherlands. It is not known whether The Pirate Bay is actually located at CyberBunker or whether they are using the CyberBunker service that routes CyberBunker IP addresses to any datacenter around the world. These routes are not visible to the outside world. CyberBunker was given a court injunction on 17 May 2010, taking the site offline briefly; Now former spokesman Sunde commented that it would now be very difficult to stop the site because it would now be seen as political censorship if anyone tries to shut it down. On 8 July 2010, a group of Argentine hackers gained access to The Pirate Bay's administration panel through a security breach via the backend of The Pirate Bay website. They were able to delete torrents and expose users' IP-addresses, emails and MD5-hashed passwords. The Pirate Bay was taken offline for upgrades. Users visiting the website were met by the following message: "Upgrading some stuff, database is in use for backups, soon back again. Btw, it's nice weather outside I think." On 16 May 2012, The Pirate Bay experienced a major
DDoS attack, causing the site to be largely inaccessible worldwide for around 24 hours. The Pirate Bay said that it did not know who was behind the attack, although it "had its suspicions". On 5 May 2015, The Pirate Bay went offline for several hours, apparently as a result of not properly configuring its
SSL certificate.
Acquisition discussion On 30 June 2009, Swedish advertising company
Global Gaming Factory X AB announced their intention to buy the site for 60 million kronor (approximately US$8.5 million) (30 million kronor in cash, 30 million kronor in
GGF shares). The Pirate Bay founders stated that the profits from the sale would be placed in an
offshore account where it would be used to fund projects pertaining to "freedom of speech, freedom of information, and the openness of the Internet". Assurances were made that "no personal data will be transferred in the eventual sale (since no personal data is kept)." Global Gaming Chief Executive Hans Pandeya commented on the site's future by saying "We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site", and announced that users would be charged a monthly fee for access to The Pirate Bay. Global Gaming Factory's letter of intent expired at the end of September 2009, without the transaction having taken place. This may be due to the company's financial difficulties. "PC World" magazine regarded the deal's future as "doomed".
December 2014 raid On 9 December 2014, police in Stockholm raided the company's premises and seized servers and other computers and equipment, which resulted in the website going offline. The raid was in response to a complaint from Rights Alliance, a Swedish anti-piracy group. The Pirate Bay was one of many peer-to-peer and torrent-related websites and apps that went down. though the shutdown had little effect on overall
piracy levels. Sunde commented in a blog post that he was happy to see the website shut down, believing his successors have done nothing to improve the site, criticising in particular the increased use of advertisements.
IsoHunt has since copied much of the original TPB database and made it accessible through
oldpiratebay.org, a searchable index of old Pirate Bay torrents. The tool is responsible for around 372 mirror sites. Since 17 December 2014, The Pirate Bay's Facebook page has been unavailable. On 22 December 2014, a website was resumed at the domain thepiratebay.se, showing a
flip clock with the length of time in days and hours that the site had been offline, and a waving pirate flag. From this day TPB was hosted for a period in
Moldova, On 1 January 2015, the website presented a countdown to 1 February 2015. The website returned with a prominent
phoenix logo displayed at the domain thepiratebay.se on 31 January 2015.
Error 522 downtimes Beginning in October 2018, the
clearnet Pirate Bay website started to be inaccessible in some locations around the world, showing
Error 522. As the result, direct visits to the website dropped by more than 32 percent in October. The incident was found to be unrelated to internet provider
blocking or
domain name problem, but the exact cause has not been determined. The site's
Tor domain and
proxies remained unaffected. The Error 522 problem occurred again in early March 2020, with the site's admins unable to say when it would be resolved. After one month, the site's functionality was restored with an update of the domain records and the Cloudflare
nameservers. == Censorship and controversies ==