Acting on the initiative of
Antipiratbyrån (Sweden's lobby organization for the media/software megacorporations), Swedish police today entered the server storages and homes of the maintainers of
The Pirate Bay, confiscating any servers and computers and bringing in the people for questioning.
Piratbyrån (Swedish grass roots organization arguing for the right of free sharing) and other, unrelated web hotel customers also found themselves shut down since their servers were in the same physical location as The Pirate Bay. Fifty police officers were involved in the raids, which occured simultaneously at several places in the country. This happening at the same time as tons of investigations into
actual theft, beatings and murders remain unsolved or simply abandoned due to lack of police manpower.
The Pirate Bay's activities have been take to court on earlier occassions and found to be
legal according to Swedish law, but warrants to search the various premises were still issued, statedly in order to "put The Pirate Bay's legality to the test".
If you ask me, as an observer I cannot help but think that the earlier rounds in
court already tested what needed to be tested in terms of legality, and until those laws are rewritten to make generic distribution of information illegal (or make data providers responsible for the legality of all contained traffic), the police should have better things to do than harass
legal businesses on the order of foreign corporate interests. What organization would tolerate having their people and property detained and put out of business "just in case" they are
later deemed illegal? No, first you suspect people of a
crime,
then you call the police. You don't detain people at whim while you try to figure out how to make them criminals. "Violating copyrights" my ass; that has already been in court, and unless I'm very much mistaken, nothing has changed since then -- neither the relevant laws nor Pirate Bay's activities.
Regardless of which side you support in the "filesharing is good/bad" debate, it becomes rather apparent that this has been a travesty of justice, where the courts and police have bypassed their own laws for the sake of a "greater good" dictated by lobby organizations. Shame on you!