Banned piracy site reopens
2006-06-03 11:30
Stockholm - The Pirate Bay, one of the world's most popular websites for the illegal downloading of movies through filesharing, reopened on Saturday, three days after Swedish authorities shut the site down.
"We just got the servers up and running. They're not totally stable yet but we expect the site to be working as normal within an hour," one of those behind the site, Fredrik Neij, told AFP.
The site was temporarily available at an IP address, 85.17.40.36, but Neij said its Internet address, www.thepiratebay.org, would be "working again soon".
Police on Wednesday arrested and later released three people, one of them Neij, in several raids involving more than 50 police officers. Some 200 servers were also seized.
Neij, who insisted on Saturday that his actions were not illegal, said the reopened site was using servers in The Netherlands.
The Pirate Bay provides instructions on how to share music and film files using links offered on the site, which attracts 1.5 million users throughout the world everyday, 29% of them in Sweden, Neij said.
The Scandinavian country last year passed a law banning the sharing of copyrighted material on the Internet without payment of royalties, in a bid to crack down on free downloading of music, films and computer games.
Filesharing carries a maximum sentence of two years in prison.
A Swedish film and music copyright lobby organisation, the Anti-Piracy Agency, had reported The Pirate Bay to police.
- SAPA