[JackSpratts]

private forum post:

"As a co-founder & crew member of Piratbyrån (The Piracy Bureau), the Swedish pro-piracy organization that started The Pirate Bay a couple of years ago, I can confirm that several people were taken for questioning but as far as I know they are all released after being DNA-tested (!) and questioned. The servers seized are not only hosting The Pirate Bay, but also our servers at Piratbyrån (we're just a political organisation in favor of free information exchange) and several sites not related to piracy at all (like the humor site http://istheshit.net/, several private websites & irc shells etc), which were located in the same server farm (belonging to the hosting company PRQ).

The absurdity of this raid is sure to cause alot of debate in Sweden, since we pirates have a strong voice and good experience with dealing with the media. Also, there has been alot of discussions and debates on TV and in news papers, so even people not filesharing alot themselves are somewhat familiar with the terms and understand that it's not "evil hackers" or terrorists or something involved in this.

Even the police admits that they don't know if this is legal or not, so my guess is that they're simply doing this to be a nuisance and cause some problems (the bandwith usage in several Swedish cities has already declined compared to an ordinary wednesday), so the worst thing that will happen is that they keep the servers for a long time claiming "investigations", I doubt that anyone will be convicted. One strong reason to doubt this is that the high court in '96 or something stated that it's NOT illegal to supply links to copyrighted material if you're not hosting it yourself."

edit: then several hours later:

"At least all data on the TPB servers is backed up (rumours are that the site will actually be up soon, hosted in several other countries), so I'm guessing the same goes for the other trackers and sites too."