There are a handful of traditions we have at TorrentFreak, and remembering the first raid on The Pirate Bay is one of them.
It was not only the first major story we covered, it also shaped how the piracy ecosystem evolved over the years. And it changed the lives of the site’s co-founders, who were eventually convicted.
What many people may not realize, however, is that without a few keystrokes in the site’s early days, it would be a distant memory today.
This is what happened.
On May 31, 2006, less than three years after The Pirate Bay was founded, 65 Swedish police officers entered a datacenter in Stockholm. They had instructions to take the site’s servers offline as part of a criminal probe, following pressure from the US government.
As the police were about to enter, Pirate Bay co-founders Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij knew something wasn’t quite right. Both men said they had noticed being tailed by private investigators. This time, however, their servers were the target.
At around 10:00 in the morning, Gottfrid told Fredrik that there were police officers at their office. He asked his colleague to head down to the co-location facility and get rid of the ‘incriminating evidence’, although none of it, whatever it was, related to The Pirate Bay.
A Crucial Backup
As Fredrik was leaving, he suddenly realized the problems might be linked to their torrent tracker. Just in case, he decided to make a full backup of the site.
When he arrived at the co-location facility, those concerns turned out to be justified. Dozens of police officers were floating around, taking away dozens of servers, most of which belonged to clients unrelated to The Pirate Bay.
Footage from The Pirate Bay raid
In the days that followed, it became clear that Fredrik’s decision to back up the site was probably the most pivotal moment in its history. Because of that backup, the Pirate Bay team managed to resurrect the site within three days.
“The Police Bay”
The entire situation was handled with the mockery TPB had become known for.
Unimpressed, the operators renamed the site “The Police Bay”, complete with a new logo shooting cannonballs at Hollywood. A few days later the logo was replaced by a Phoenix, a reference to the site rising from its digital ashes.
Logos after the raid
Instead of shutting it down, the raid propelled The Pirate Bay into the mainstream press, not least due to its swift resurrection. The publicity also triggered a huge traffic spike, exactly the opposite of what Hollywood had hoped for.
The US Pushed Sweden
Although the raid and the subsequent criminal investigation were carried out in Sweden, the US Government played a major role behind the scenes. For many years the scale of that involvement was unknown. However, information obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request in 2017 helped to fill in some blanks.
The trail started with a cable sent from the US Embassy in Sweden to Washington in November 2005, roughly six months before the raid. The Embassy wrote that Hollywood’s MPA met with US Ambassador Bivins and, separately, with the Swedish State Secretary of Justice. The Pirate Bay was one of the top agenda items.
“The MPA is particularly concerned about PirateBay, the world’s largest Torrent file-sharing tracker. According to the MPA and based on Embassy’s follow-up discussions, the Justice Ministry is very interested in a constructive dialogue with the US. on these concerns,” the cable read.
From the US Embassy Cable
The Embassy explained that Hollywood would like Sweden to take action against a big player such as The Pirate Bay.
“We have yet to see a ‘big fish’ tried, something the MPA badly wants to see, particularly in light of the fact that Sweden hosts the largest Bit Torrent file-sharing tracker in the world, ‘Pirate-Bay’, which openly flaunts IPR,” the cable writer commented.
Fast forward half a year and, indeed, 65 police officers were ready to take The Pirate Bay’s servers offline. While there is no written evidence that US officials were actively involved in planning the investigation or raid, indirectly they played a major role.
This is backed up by further evidence. In a cable sent in April 2007, the Embassy nominated one of its employees, whose name is redacted, for the State Department’s Foreign Service National (FSN) of the year award. Again, The Pirate Bay case was cited.
“REDACTED skillful outreach directly led to a bold decision by Swedish law enforcement authorities to raid Pirate Bay and shut it down. This was recognized as a major achievement in Washington in furthering U.S. efforts to combat Internet piracy worldwide.”
We don’t know if the employee in question received the award. In hindsight, however, the raid did very little to deter piracy.
The Aftermath
The swift comeback turned the site’s founders into heroes for many. The story made headline news around the world, and in Stockholm people waved pirate flags in the streets, a sentiment that benefited the newly founded Pirate Party as well.
The raid eventually resulted in negative consequences for the founders. It was the start of a criminal investigation, which led to a trial, and prison sentences for several of the site’s key players.
This became another turning point. Many of the people involved from the early days decided to cut their ties with the site, which was handed over to a more anonymous group, ostensibly located in the Seychelles.
The outspokenness of the early years was replaced by the silent treatment. While some moderators have spoken out, the anonymous operator nicknamed ‘Winston’ remains behind the scenes at all times.
This was made obvious in 2014, when the site disappeared for weeks following another raid at a Stockholm data center. At the time, even the site’s staffers had no idea what was going on.
The Pirate Bay recovered from that second raid too, and remains seen as a piracy icon by many. These days the site bills itself as ‘the galaxy’s most resilient torrent site’, a title it arguably earned on May 31, 2006.
For now, the site remains online, twenty years after Hollywood thought it had seen the last of it. And whoever is in charge today, will likely do everything possible to keep it that way.