As already reported a few minutes after the fact and on a few hundred newssites and weblogs, The Pirate Bay is currently offline. As most of you probably know, TPB was one of the biggest BitTorrent trackers and search engines around. They were based in Sweden, where what they did is legal (not seeding the actual files). They had a pretty impressive serverrack as well, I might add.

Now, they’ve had a few complaints and cases but every time it was ruled that they were doing nothing that was against Swedish law. That’s why it’s so strange now that all servers in the rack were confiscated (even ones not powering TPB) and that probably a few crew members are currently in custody. The raid was ordered by Swedish police after complaints from the Swedish anti piracy movement. I wonder how long it will take for them to come back online (not if, because I’m sure this was a desperate measure and everything will be let go once it’s once again proven that they were abiding Swedish laws)…

Although I actually never used it, it looked like a pretty good site – especially since the google-esque internationalized redesign they did, and the letters/emails they sent back to copyright complaints from lawyers were pretty hilarious.