The Pirate Bay raid
Upon reopening, the site's number of visitors more than doubled, the increased popularity attributed to greater exposure through the media coverage, which is an example of the Streisand effect.
[1] On 31 January 2008, Swedish prosecutors filed charges against four of the individuals behind The Pirate Bay for "promoting other people's infringements of copyright laws".
At roughly 11:00 UTC on 31 May 2006, a major raid against The Pirate Bay and people involved with the website took place, prompted by allegations of copyright violations and formally ordered by judge Tomas Norström, who later presided on the 2009 trial.
Mikael Viborg, the legal advisor to The Pirate Bay, was arrested at his apartment, brought in for questioning, forced to submit a DNA sample and had his electronic equipment seized.
[6] A letter titled "Re: The Pirate Bay" from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) to Dan Eliasson, State Secretary at the Swedish Ministry of Justice, was dated two months before the raid and hinted at trade reprisals ("It is certainly not in Sweden's best interests to earn a reputation as a place where utter lawlessness is tolerated") and urged him to "exercise your influence to urge law enforcement officers in Sweden to take much-needed action against The Pirate Bay".
The reincarnated website was, as stated by "Peter" in the Chaosradio International interview with Tim Pritlove,[10] running on servers located in the Netherlands.
The Pirate Bay attributed these issues to increased traffic resulting from the recent publicity and promised that the website would soon be running smoothly again.
TPB thereafter fixed a number of minor software bugs and brought new servers online to handle the increased traffic load.
On 14 June 2006, the Swedish news agency TT reported that The Pirate Bay was back in Sweden due to "pressure from the Department of Justice [in the Netherlands].
According to a Swedish article in the IT news website IDG, the downtime resulted from many requests for a specific url—which had been widely circulated via IRC chatrooms and internet forums.
[18] In mid-January 2008 Peter Sunde told Ars Technica: "I'm quite sure we won't be convicted anyhow" and "[If we are], we'll just appeal all the way to the European Union court.
"[19] On 31 January 2008, Pirate Bay operators Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström were charged with "promoting other people's infringements of copyright laws.
Their legitimacy has hit rock bottom[28]These matters have not been resolved in court and even though Keyzer was scheduled to be a witness in the Pirate Bay trial, he was not called.
