Pirate Bay raid hits other sites

When police raided the company hosting file sharing site The Pirate Bay, they also closed down a number of sites that have nothing to do with music or film sharing, it has emerged.

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The Pirate Bay's servers were kept at the PRQ hosting company in Stockholm. But when police raided the company on Wednesday, they allegedly took all servers on the premises without checking who they belonged to.

According to a message on PRQ's own homepage, "all servers and network eqipment was seized in an act of blatant abuse of power by public prosecutor Håkan Roswall."

The company also said it planned to sue the Swedish state to get the equipment returned and "for the multi-million dollar losses sustained by us and our customers."

One of the customers to be hit was Birdie, a gaming association which had some of its games hosted at PRQ.

"We can't really understand why it was necessary to take all the servers," said Birdie's Peter Olsson to The Local.

"We've talked to the police but it's impossible to get information out of them".

Olsson said that he believed PRQ had borrowed more servers to try to help its customers.

IT news website IDG named 9 sites that had been taken offline in addition to The Pirate Bay.

Police spokesman Ulf Göranzon refused to say whether the other servers had been taken on purpose, and if so, why. Prosecutor Håkan Roswall also said he could not answer questions about the precise circumstances of the raid.

When The Local called PRQ, a spokesman said he could not talk "as we are in a bit of a hurry - the new equipment has just arrived."

Does this mean the websites will be up and running soon?

"Yes, they should be".

The Pirate Bay is suspected of breach of copyright law, alternatively assisting breach of copyright law.

The Motion Picture Association of America said that the raid "served as a reminder to pirates all over the world that there are no safe harbours for Internet copyright thieves."