23.6.2006
Prosecutor: "Charges against Pirate Bay operators earliest next summer"
Sydsvenskan reports that possible charges against Pirate Bay operators based on material captured in the May 31 raid will be delayed at least to next summer, according to Håkan Roswall, the prosecutor in the case.
In the police strike against Pirate Bay and its service provider PRQ the police confiscated 186 servers. The raid hit also a number of innocent third party businesses who had rented server space from PRQ. Of the 186 seized servers so far only 45 have been returned, "as they contain no relevant information to the inquiry". The police still holds 140 servers and claims that mere copying of information from these servers for further investigations will take 3-4 months.
The three Pirate Bay activists who were briefly arrested during the raid might be later charged for copyright crimes, hints prosecutor Roswell.
Pirate Bay servers not in Sweden?
Sydsvenskan's story also brings up an interesting piece of technical information. The Swedish police has seemingly gone and checked Pirate Bays present server arrangements and they have found out that the site has only a single computer running at their Swedish host, apparently acting as a proxy to the real operational servers located totally elsewhere. The police does not have any idea where the servers might really be located, and they suspect Pirate Bay playing hide-and-seek game with them, trying to lure them into another raid that would cause yet another PR backslash for both the police and the Justice Ministery.
Peter Sunde, one of the activists behind Pirate Bay, admits Roswall being partly right. "That's also what we have. But we really have several different solutions for the site. We are setting up a number of different systems to have more alternatives."