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Pirate Bay knocked offline worldwide following police raid

Police in Sweden have raided The Pirate Bay and seized servers, citing alleged violations of copyright law.

Michelle Starr Science editor
Michelle Starr is CNET's science editor, and she hopes to get you as enthralled with the wonders of the universe as she is. When she's not daydreaming about flying through space, she's daydreaming about bats.
Michelle Starr

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The Pirate Bay

Peer-to-peer file-sharing site The Pirate Bay has been knocked offline worldwide in the wake of a police raid on the company's premises in Stockholm, Sweden -- and the subsequent seizure of servers and other equipment.

"There has been a crackdown on a server room in Greater Stockholm. This is in connection with violations of copyright law," Paul Pintér, the police national coordinator for IP enforcement, said in a statement, according to TorrentFreak.

The raid was also confirmed by prosecutor Fredrik Ingland, who works on file-sharing cases and who, according to Metro Sweden, initiated the raid.

"Several servers and computers were seized, but I don't want to say exactly how many," he told TT News Agency. "I can't say exactly what the crime is yet."

He also did not confirm or deny that one person had been detained.

The raid comes barely a month after the arrest of the final of the website's co-founders on the Thailand-Laos border on November 3, and only a couple of days behind Google Play's takedown of a number of apps related to The Pirate Bay.

Several other sites have also been knocked offline, including The Pirate Bay's forum Suprbay.org, image-hosting website Bayimg.com, and text-hosting website Pastebay.net. Other P2P torrent sites are also down, including EZTV, Zoink, Torrage and the Istole tracker.
The Pirate Bay itself continues to play peekaboo with law enforcement, and is already back online at a Costa Rican top-level domain.