Sunday, June 04, 2006

www.thepiratebay.org reopen!

The Pirate Bay, one of the world's most popular websites for the illegal downloading of movies through filesharing, said it planned to reopen two days after Swedish authorities shut the site down.

"We should have the site up and running again this (Friday) evening," one of those behind the site, Fredrik Neij, told AFP.

"We are not worried about further police action because we have hired servers in the Netherlands," Neij added.

The site was to keep the same Internet address, www.thepiratebay.org.

Police on Wednesday arrested and later released three people, one of them Neij, in several raids involving more than 50 police officers. Some 200 servers were also seized.

Neij continued to maintain his innocence on Friday.

The Pirate Bay provides instructions on how to share music and film files using links offered on the site, which attracts 1.5 million users throughout the world everyday, 29 percent of them in Sweden, Neij said.

The Scandinavian country last year passed a law banning the sharing of copyrighted material on the Internet without payment of royalties, in a bid to crack down on free downloading of music, films and computer games.

Filesharing carries a maximum sentence of two years in prison.

A Swedish film and music copyright lobby organisation, the Anti-Piracy Agency, had reported The Pirate Bay to police.

Swedish Justice Minister Thomas Bodstroem denied media reports on Friday that he ordered the police operation at the behest of US authorities and under pressure from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).

According to the MPAA, The Pirate Bay is a so-called pirate "tracker" that directs people to pirated movies and music, making available over 157,000 illegal files including recent releases such as "The Da Vinci Code," "Mission Impossible: III," and "Poseidon."

According to Alexa.com, which rates millions of websites around the world, The Pirate Bay was the 479th most visited website in the world, ranking 21st in Sweden and 312th in the United States.

Via Netscape

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