Swedish Authorities Shut Down World's Largest BitTorrent Index

by Ulrika Lomas, for LawAndTax-News.com, Brussels

02 June 2006

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry on Wednesday praised action by the Swedish police to shut down The Pirate Bay, which claims to be the world's largest BitTorrent search index and is allegedly a huge source of internet piracy globally.

The action saw raids by 50 police officers on 10 separate locations across Sweden. Police collected evidence and have detained three individuals for questioning.

According to the IFPI:

"The Pirate Bay, available in 25 language versions, has been a large-scale engine of copyright theft of movies, music, audio books, televisions broadcasts, games and software. The site boasted one million visits a day, facilitating the downloading of a vast range of copyrighted material by users around the world and acting as a tracker for the world's top 100 BitTorrent sites."

"The Pirate Bay has consistently defied legal warnings by copyright holders over recent months, its Swedish operators making no secret of their contempt for copyright laws. The site was nonetheless a commercially-run operation, running banner advertising on its pages."

IFPI Sweden Director-General Lars Gustafsson announced that:

"This is a very good development for the Swedish music industry and for the real innovators and entrepreneurs who are trying to build a legal online digital business"

Chairman and CEO John Kennedy added that:

"This is a very important development for Sweden, a country with a fantastically rich music culture yet which has more recently acquired a reputation as a haven for copyright infringement. The Pirate Bay has damaged the legitimate music industry on an international scale and I am very pleased that the Swedish authorities have today taken such decisive action against it."

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