The Pirate Bay Remains Resilient, 20 Years After The Raid

Twenty years after Swedish police raided The Pirate Bay's Stockholm data center and seized its servers, the site remains online. In fact, the 2006 crackdown arguably made it more famous, helping turn it into "one of the most resilient and iconic websites on the internet," reports TorrentFreak. From the report: 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. 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. 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 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. 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.

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