We're proud
The demonstrations against the Swedish Lex Orwell law today was a success!
In Stockholm and Malmö almost 2000 people altogether partied, demonstrated and showed their feelings about the remarkably stasi-alike new law.
We're proud of being a part of this. Brokep talked at the rally in Malmö and we're very happy to be able to promote important things as these. Thank you all for helping spreading the message about the demonstration and for the future help we know we'll get when we need to get important messages out like this. Thanks, from the bottom of our hearts.
Some expected downtime
Tomorrow we're doing a redesign of our network implementation. Expect some downtime - not long though. But the trackers might be unstable during the day.
FRA-pedia
Most of you know that we at The Pirate Bay are really into privacy. The new Swedish law, the FRA-law, is really not something that we enjoy. For that reason we've decided to do everything we can in order to stop it. We of course need the help of the community, otherwise it's utterly hopeless.
Right now we're fighting it by trying to promote some of the sites that are focusing on the matters. FRApedia and stoppa fra-lagen.nu are both totally devoted to the cause. We would love for all people that wants to help out - both Swedes and all others! - to go there and see what can be done. Let's focus on these two sites and stay active!
The law has been voted for, but it doesn't mean that it cannot be overthrown. The internets has done things like this before, now we need to do it again! We'd also like to recommend the book Little Brother by Cory Doctorow that is how our future will be if we do not fight things like this.
Todays frontpage
Today the frontpage is in Swedish again. We're sorry for that but it's important that also people outside of Sweden know what's going on. We hope to raise awareness by doing this.
There is a new law being voted for on the 17th of June here in Sweden. The law would give the government the right to listen to all telephone and internet traffic that crosses the borders outside of Sweden. In reality - it's basically all traffic in Sweden since we're a small nation and Internet is global.
We want to let you understand more and read up on what this means - and make your voice heard about this! This is a major threat against our civil rights and we must act. We must act now! Read more about this on the new webpage started for this! And do it now, after june 17th it's too late!
Jim left the Warner Bros. network - Jim joins the
Sydsvenskan reports today that Jim Keyzer, the police officer that investigated us and later started working for the plaintiff (Warner Brothers) - now is back working for the police after just 3 months of employment. They also report that the Prosecutor has concluded that Jim Keyzer was working for Warner Brothers during the investigation of Pirate Bay.
The prosecutor says he has no intentions of doing any more investigations in this matter. He also does not want to reveal the dates that Warner Brothers and Jim Keyzer started having their initial contacts.
So a special note to the prosecutor - if you call up Domstolsverket in Sweden, you can get the information from them that during Jim Keyzers work at Warner Brothers, one of his first tasks was to go after Anakata and serve him documents in the same case he's been working for at the police for 2 years. He actually used the information he gained at the police force to find Anakata, then acted as a police officer and served him. We have of course filed charges against Jim Keyzer for this which we're certain the police will take serious enough to see to that Jim Keyzer is fired from the police force.
Jim Keyzer is also called as the primary witness in the upcoming court case against TPB. Very objective, right?
Two years and still going
Today we celebrate! Two years ago on this day, the 31st of May, the Swedish police raided our facilities. They worked hard and long and tried stealing all of our servers, all of our backups and all of our admins. As usual, they did not succeed. After our opponents dropped their victory in their press releases we just got the site back online in no time. After three days the site was running almost like before - we could have been faster but we had to do alot of interviews and we had to drink some beer.
Today, even two years after the raid there is still not even a date set for the court case. We still haven't got our servers back and the MPAA and their friends in Ifpi wants us to pay them 115.000.000 SEK (about 12.000.000 EUR). We want them to pay for our damages instead since what we do has never been illegal. To be frank, we're not worried about the court case, we're quite happy with it since it will prove our innocence.
In the meantime we have grown a bit. From 2.5 million peers at the time of the raid to 12 million peers. From 1 million registered users to 2.7 million. We used to be ranked just among the top 500 websites in the world - now we're top 100. And when we write that _we_ are growing, we mean the community. It's awesome to see the support the community show us. Even in our bad moments, we get your support. We're really happy that you do this, every fan letter we get, every time someone say something nice to us, we really understand that we do something important, something that is more important than ourselves.
We haven't done everything right. We're amateurs in a lot of fields. But we're experts in having fun and making a lot of file sharing happening. And we keep on improving on the areas we find our flaws. And you guys help us out. Thank you so much!
To celebrate today, we encourage you to keep on sharing. Keep on uploading, downloading, swapping bits of information. Let today be the pirates independence day! Today we celebrate the victories we've had and the victories that will come. Today we celebrate that we're united in our efforts. Keep on seeding!
Swedish only, uppföljning
Angående förra blogginlägget - Vi tror fortfarande våra källor har fått informationen dom fått. Vi vill också påpeka att vi vill att detta ska utredas så vi vet om det är sant eller ej. Vi vill att folk ska avvakta och ta det med största försiktighet. Under senaste två dagarna har vi själva pressat på våra källor för att själva outa sig - vi kommer inte göra det då det strider emot vår moral.
Vi vill påpeka att vi själva inte påstått att nån är "mutad" utan att vi hela tiden påstått att det måste utredas om så är fallet. 31åringen själv förnekar det och vi skulle tycka det vore jättebra om han kunde påvisa att det inte är så. Inget vore bättre.
Angående prejudikat - det ni måste tänka på är att om man inte går vidare så får man inte heller fastställt att man inte får göra husrannsakan vid fallet. Detta fallet var viktigt för oss för att få slut på dessa dumheter. Om en man inte orkar längre, så förstår vi det. Vi vet hur det är i dessa situationer och har all empati. Men vi vill att detta ska se på lika villkor för alla och utan involvering av mutor såklart.
Swedish only
När man driver en sajt som TPB så får man ofta tips från olika personer om vad som händer kring frågorna man är intresserad av. Igår fick vi två oberoende tips från väldigt säkra källor (insiders som det heter) om att den 31-åriga mannen som blev dömd till villkorlig dom för fildelning, har fått sina böter och rättegångskostnader betalda av upphovsrättslobbyn - för att på så vis kunna ha ett prejudikat. Med andra ord - upphovsrättslobbyn har nu ungefär köpt en lagpåföljd i Sverige.
Vi tycker detta är skandalöst och ingen av gammalmedia har rapporterat om detta. Vi uppmanar er till att inte donera pengar till 31åringen och att be gammalmedia om att ta tag i saken och få fram denna informationen! Även om det gäller en gammal teknik som folk knappt använder längre så är det katastrofalt att det ska vara så lätt att få rätt att göra husrannsakan hos människor.
Vi brukar sällan lyssna på tips, men en av personerna är högt uppsatt inom en av upphovsrättsorganisationerna och vi litar därför ytterst mycket på hans ord. Därför har vi idag valt att posta detta blogginlägget på enbart Svenska, för att det är så viktigt för Sverige att detta utreds! Det ska inte få gå till på det här viset.
Websheriff, oh this sheriff
So, our old friend Websheriff has just dropped a press release that he's going to sue us for 100 million dollars. I can see his Dr. Evil grin when he said that number to the press.
They're going to sue us for Prince, The Village People, Bob Marley, UB40 and Michael Jackson. The common thing for all of these artists are of course that noone listens to them anymore. And hey Michael - do you want us to pay you in small kids maybe?
Websheriff says he wants to sue us in Sweden and in the US. Most of us civilized people understand that people cannot be sued outside their own domicile - aka we can not be sued outside of Sweden. So good luck with that. It proves that the sheriff is just after making some headlines!
Oh on a side note Mr Sheriff - you're saying to the press that you have not sent PI's after us? And that we're paranoid to think that we have had PI's after us? Well, read the police investigation - there's statements from a PI company in there. But of course you're not interested in reading over 4000 pages, it's too hard.
The good thing about this is that we just broke TorrentSpy's law suit. Maybe time to call Guiness, we like to break world records and we just broke one I think! Hooray for TPB!
Insane in the membrane
Sorry for the late blog update - but we just didn't care too much about what just happened. But this is it:
The MPA has decided we owe them 93 million SEK. In total together with Ifpi and APB they think we owe a total of 115 million SEK (~12 million EUR).
We - on the other hand - know we don't owe them a single öre. In fact, they owe us a shitload of money.
All the time we've spent on being called criminals and hunted down by private investigators and getting our stuff stolen by them - it's
gonna be expensive for them.
We won't go as far as them - and force the police to steal stuff. But we're a bit tired of them saying to the media that we're criminals. It's slander. So when we found out now that they've employed the head investigatory police officer from the ongoing case against us, already in August last year, we couldn't just lie down. We reported the police officer yesterday. For a lot of different reasons, at least three criminal complaints was filed. But you know what? It's illegal to bribe the police as well. So more people have been reported to the police. So who's the fucking criminals really? Hey hollywood assholes - Be afraid. Very afraid. The law is coming to serve justice.
When the court case is over, we will demand compensation for the years of time and personal money spent on this media circus. And the MPA, Ifpi and the others will have to pay up. The Pirate Bay never goes down and we never take any crap, ffs!
If you wanna support the cause - check out the new t-shirt shop. All the profits go to the Pro-piracy movement.
18 comment(s) | Posted Y-day 01:01 by tpb
