Pirate Bay Police Raid, This weirded me out. Seems so strange. Options

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As described by Wikipedia:

At around 11 a.m. CET [6] on May 31, 2006, a major raid against The Pirate Bay and people involved with the site took place, prompted by allegations of copyright violations.

The raid, in which some 50 police officers participated, shut down the site and its servers were confiscated, as well as all other servers hosted at The Pirate Bay's Internet service provider, PRQ Inet.

Three people, aged 22, 24, and 28, were held by the police for questioning, but were released later in the evening.

Special attention has been brought to the fact that even though only the servers running The Pirate Bay were eligible for possible copyright violations, all servers in the server room were seized, even those running Piratbyrån, an independent organization fighting for file-sharing rights, as well as servers that are unrelated to The Pirate Bay or other filesharing activities.[7]

Whether the police were simply expected to trust the labels the server administrators had placed as to which server ran which site, or if their thorough sweep of evidence was precautionary or even legal remains unknown at this time.

It is not clear why the raid was carried out at this particular time. The Swedish public broadcast network Sveriges Television cited unnamed sources claiming that the raid was prompted by political pressure from the United States which the Swedish government firmly denies.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) wrote in a press release[8]: "Since filing a criminal complaint in Sweden in November 2004, the film industry has worked vigorously with Swedish and U.S. government officials in Sweden to shut this illegal site down". Dan Glickman, CEO of MPAA, also stated that "Intellectual property theft is a problem for film industries all over the world and we are glad that the local government in Sweden has helped stop The Pirate Bay from continuing to enable rampant copyright theft on the Internet". The MPAA release goes on to say there were three arrests while in actuality they were only held for questioning.

The closure message initially caused some minor confusion, because on June 1, 2005 The Pirate Bay had posted a remarkably similar message stating that they were permanently down since they had been raided by the Swedish Anti-Piracy Bureau and IFPI, which was later admitted as a prank. The BitTorrent community, once assured of the story's truth, quickly spread the announcement across online news sites, blogs, and discussion forums.
Picture from one of PRQ's "emptied" data centers. PRQ is the hosting company that hosts the Piratebay.org website.
Enlarge
Picture from one of PRQ's "emptied" data centers. PRQ is the hosting company that hosts the Piratebay.org website.
Wikinews has news related to:
The Pirate Bay and Piratbyrån raided
Wikinews has news related to:
Hackers hit Swedish police's website
Wikinews has news related to:
The Pirate Bay back online

The Pirate Bay was, at first, brought back online on a temporary server, and displayed a "SITE DOWN" message, in which they confirm that the police were in possession of valid search warrants alleging either breach of copyright law or assisting such a breach. The Pirate Bay recently posted pictures of the alleged empty servers raided by the police. Piratbyrån have set up a temporary news blog to inform the public about the incident.[9] Unofficial English translations are available.[10][11]

On June 1st, 2006 it was reported on ThePirateBay.org that the site would be up and fully functional within a day or two. By the end of the day, June 2nd, 2006, ThePirateBay.org was back up and fully operational with their famous logo depicting the pirate ship firing cannon balls at a Hollywood sign, and the header displaying the name Police Bay. Previous speculation that the Pirate Bay had rented servers in the Netherlands has proven true as the reinstated website is now indeed running on servers located in the Netherlands.

During the night of June 1, the website of the Swedish police[12] went down due to high load. Speculations started immediately that this was a denial of service attack in retaliation of the raid against The Pirate Bay. This has not been confirmed, but according to a Swedish article in the IT news site IDG, the downtime is a result of many people connecting to a specific webpage which address is spread on IRC and various internet forums.[13] According to the article, the purpose of this action is to "show what you think of the police's behaviour". The Pirate Bay website was down for some time but was up at 12:55pm PST, June 3rd. Although the search funtion has not yet opened, users are still able to browse torrents manually.