TPB Prosecution Stalled

More than 2 years ago, Swedish police seized dozens of servers believed to belong to The Pirate Bay. Although an investigation involving copyright crimes is still ongoing, not much progress has been made – meanwhile, the statute of limitations for several key crimes is expiring.


The largest BitTorrent platform went offline in December 2014 after the raid at the Nacka station – a nuclear-proof datacenter built into a mountain complex next to Stockholm. It was believed that the hosting facility offered services to TPB, EZTV and other “pirate” websites, which went dark. It is known that 50 servers were seized during the raid. As a result, The Pirate Bay experienced the longest ever period of downtime (almost 2 months), which caused chaos and a revolt among the TPB staffers.

Currently, The Pirate Bay is operating as usual despite a new criminal investigation. Apparently, the raid may not result in any future prosecutions. The prosecutor admits that time is simply running out – some of the alleged crimes date back more than 5 years, which is already outside the statute of limitations. Although the police provided the prosecutor with some updates, it remains unclear when the investigation will be completed. And even if it is finalized, it will take more time and efforts to get any indictments ready. In other words, the prosecutor is not really optimistic in this regard, in part because the oral evidence gets worse over time with people forgetting things.

Industry watchers say that it isn’t the first setback for the authorities – for example, they have already had to drop one of the main suspects from the case due to lack of sufficient resources needed for analysis of the data seized in the raid. At the same time, the TPB team believes that if they were the targets, the police didn’t have much on them, because only one of their servers was confiscated during that raid, and it was hosted at a different location. It was operated by the moderators and used as a communication channel for the tracker’s matters.

The TPB team said at the time that they pulled their actual website offline as a precaution. However, relocating to a new home appeared to be harder than expected, which prolonged The Pirate Bay’s downtime.

Thanks to TorrentFreak for providing the source of the article.