The popular file-sharing service Pirate Bay was taken down today following a raid in Sweden by police who seized servers and computers. 
 
 The Pirate Bay portal went down Tuesday morning after Swedish police raided a server room in Stockholm over alleged copyright violations. In addition to its file-sharing section, Pirate Bay's forum Suprbay.org was also down. 
 
 “There were a number of police officers and digital forensics experts there. This took place during the morning and continued until this afternoon. Several servers and computers were seized, but I cannot say exactly how many,” Swedish prosecutor Fredrik Ingblad told Radio Sweden. 
 
 Pirate Bay may not be the only target. According to TorrentFreak, other sites related to file sharing such as EZTV, Zoink, and Torrage went down today as well, though it's not yet known if they were also raided. 
 
 Founded in 2003, Pirate Bay has been in the legal crosshairs for years, but has managed to stay afloat despite efforts by governments, anti-piracy groups and the music and film industries to close it down. Today's raid comes after a number of recent events have occurred around the service, putting it in the spotlight once again. 
 
 The Timeline of Pirate Bay's Recent Troubles 
 
 In October, Pirate Bay's co-founder, the Swedish national Gottfrid Svartholm, was found guilty in Denmark and sentenced to 3.5 years in prison. Although the conviction this time was unrelated to file-sharing, it follows a previous 2009 conviction on copyright violations related to the file-sharing service. Svartholm had been convicted on the copyright charges along with his Pirate Bay co-founders, Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde, and Swedish telecommunitations owner Carl Lundstrom. While all three had been apprehended, Neij went on the lam, however. 
 
 But just last month, Neij was arrested at the Thailand-Laos border on the 2009 conviction. 
 
 And last week a French court ordered ISPs in that country to block access to Pirate Bay, as well as any of its mirror sites, from within French territory. 
 
 Then days ago Google removed and banned a number of third-party Pirate Bay file-sharing apps from the Google Play store. The apps help users circumvent blocks instated by ISPs to prevent users from accessing Pirate Bay. 
 
 Today's raid comes after some of the movie files stolen from Sony Pictures Entertainment in its recent hack became available for download through links at Pirate Bay. It's unknown if the raid and takedown were instigated by the distribution of those Sony files. 
 
 >Today's raid comes after some of the movie files stolen from Sony Pictures Entertainment in its recent hack became available for download through links at Pirate Bay. 
 
 Despite the previous convictions, Pirate Bay has managed to forge ahead without its founders, catering to millions of daily users. Although today's raid is not the first—Pirate Bay was also raided in 2006—in 2012 its operators bragged that they had moved their operations to the cloud to make the service virtually impervious to police raids. By hosting their operation from multiple cloud hosting providers located in a number of countries, a single police raid would not be able to disrupt their operation. Or so they thought. 
 
 It's unclear how long authorities can keep Pirate Bay down this time before it pops up again. ||||| News just reached me that The Pirate Bay has been raided, again. That happened over 8 years ago last time. That time, a lot of people went out to protest and rally in the streets. Today few seem to care. And I’m one of them. 
 
 Why, you might ask? Well. For multiple reasons. But most of all, I’ve not been a fan of what TPB has become. 
 
 TPB has become an institution that people just expected to be there. Noone willing to take the technology further. The site was ugly, full of bugs, old code and old design. It never changed except for one thing – the ads. More and more ads was filling the site, and somehow when it felt unimaginable to make these ads more distasteful they somehow ended up even worse. 
 
 The original deal with TPB was to close it down on it’s tenth birthday. Instead, on that birthday, there was a party in it’s “honour” in Stockholm. It was sponsored by some sexist company that sent young girls, dressed in almost no clothes, to hand out freebies to potential customers. There was a ticket price to get in, automatically excluding people with no money. The party had a set line-up with artists, scenes and so on, instead of just asking the people coming to bring the content. Everything went against the ideals that I worked for during my time as part of TPB. 
 
 
 
 The past years there was no soul left in TPB. The original team handed it over to, well, less soul-ish people to say the least. From the outside I felt that noone had any interest in helping the community if it didn’t eventually pay out in cash. The attention for new artists (the promo bay) felt more like something TPB had to do in order to keep it’s street cred. The street cred I personally tried to destroy when being part of TPB, multiple times, in order to make sure that people stopped idolizing TPB the way they did. Mostly it didn’t work though. 
 
 As a big fan of the KLF I once learned that it’s great to burn great things up. At least then you can quit while you’re on top. I think I left TPB just a little bit after that top, and not when it’s as shitty as it was when it was closed today. It feels good that it might have closed down forever, just a real shame the way it did that. A planned retirement would have given the community time and a way to kick off something new, something better, something faster, something more reliable and with no chance of corrupting itself. Something that had a soul and could retain it. 
 
 But from the immense void that will now fill up the fiber cables all over the world, I’m pretty sure the next thing will pan out. And hopefully it has no ads for porn or viagra. There’s already other services for that. ||||| Swedish file-sharing website The Pirate Bay was taken down after Swedish police seized servers and computers from a server room in Stockholm. 
 
 "We had a crackdown on a server room in Greater Stockholm because of a copyright infringement, and yes it was Pirate Bay," Paul Pinter, national coordinator, intellectual property crime at Stockholm County Police told Reuters. 
 
 Other file-sharing sites such as EZTV, Zoink, and Torrage were also offline, as was Pirate Bay's forum Suprbay.org. 
 
 It was unsure if Pirate Bay was taken down for hosting some of the movies leaked due to the recent cyber attack on Sony Corp's Sony Pictures Entertainment, tech website Wired reported. 
 
 Pirate Bay resurfaced for a while late Tuesday, after changing its domain name to .cr (Costa Rica), according to Russian news site Rt.com. 
 
 (Reporting by Anya George Tharakan in Bengaluru; Editing by Joyjeet Das) ||||| The Pirate Bay and several other torrent websites temporarily disappeared from the internet on Tuesday. Reports say the sites were downed in a raid by Swedish police, which seized servers, computers, and equipment of previously elusive web pirates. 
 
 The Pirate Bay site appeared back online late on Tuesday, changing its web domain to .cr (Costa Rica). Prior to that, however, it was reportedly unavailable for hours. 
 
 “There has been a crackdown on a server room in Greater Stockholm. This is in connection with violations of copyright law,” police national coordinator for IP enforcement, Paul Pintér, said in a statement, as quoted by TorrentFreak. 
 
 Worst day of my life. #RIPPirateBay — Yash Khatri (@Yash_17) 10 декабря 2014 
 
 Other details are being kept under wraps, including the location of the operation and exact targets. 
 
 The operation took place in the morning and lasted into the afternoon, expert file-sharing case prosecutor Fredrik Ingblad told Radio Sweden (SR). 
 
 “There were a number of police officers and digital forensics experts there. This took place during the morning and continued until this afternoon. Several servers and computers were seized, but I cannot say exactly how many,” Ingblad said. 
 
 Today is a sad day... A moment of silence for the death of the Pirate Bay... #PirateBay#PirateBayDown — Sephirex (@Sephirex) 9 декабря 2014 
 
 There are reports of at least one man being detained in connection to the case, according to TorrentFreak. 
 
 Swedish Metro reported that Ingblad initiated the police effort. 
 
 Other sites reportedly downed by the raid include EZTV, Zoink, Torrage, and the Istole tracker. 
 
 The Pirate Bay’s forums were also offline, including Suprbay.org, Bayimg.com, and Pastebay.net. 
 
 Taking down The Pirate Bay will only lead to more trackers. Have police and governments learned nothing about the culture of the Internet? — Amy Miranda (@AmyMiranda) 10 декабря 2014 
 
 In November, police arrested the third and final co-founder of The Pirate Bay, Hans Fredrik Lennart Neij, who spent four years on the run from authorities. 
 
 The 36-year-old Swede, known in hacking communities as 'TiAMO,' was on his way to Thailand with his Laotian wife when he was detained at a border checkpoint in Nong Khai under a warrant issued by Interpol. 
 
 READ MORE: Last of Pirate Bay founders arrested on Laos-Thailand border 
 
 Earlier in September, The Pirate Bay announced new cloud technology which made its servers “raid proof,” adding that the 21 “virtual machines” (VMs) were scattered around the globe with cloud-hosting providers. 
 
 The cloud technology reportedly made the site more portable and made the torrent harder to take down. 
 
 READ MORE: Pirate Bay fools the system with cloud technology ||||| Image copyright The Pirate Bay Image caption The site recently marked its 10th anniversary but its future is now uncertain 
 
 The Pirate Bay, arguably the most well-known website for accessing pirated content, has been taken offline following a raid in Sweden. 
 
 Swedish police seized servers in Stockholm after a complaint was filed by a group targeting internet crime. 
 
 It is the first time in several years the site has been taken offline rather than simply blocked by filters. 
 
 Unexpectedly, the site's co-founder Peter Sunde - who is no longer involved - called for its permanent closure. 
 
 Swedish police have confirmed the raid, which took place after the complaint from the Rights Alliance. 
 
 Paul Pinter from Stockholm County Police, told the BBC that an investigation that had lasted "for years" led them to the location of the servers containing material related to the The Pirate Bay. 
 
 As well as servers being removed from the data centre for examination, he said several people were now being interviewed by police. 
 
 However, he would not confirm or deny if anybody had been arrested. 
 
 Image copyright Getty Images Image caption The Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde has said he does not care that the site has gone down 
 
 The police operation took place in an area in Nacka, south-east of Stockholm. The area's mountainous terrain is used as a natural cooling system for computer servers. 
 
 "We can confirm that the police has completed a raid in the facility which where we rent space for our data centre," hosting firm Portlane, which has servers located in Nacka, told the BBC. 
 
 "This raid was not for our company or any of our employees," a spokesperson said. It added: "It was partly directed at one of our customers." 
 
 According to Torrent Freak, a website that reports on news about piracy and copyright law, a number of smaller torrent websites, or sites related to the activity, had also gone down. 
 
 Various reports on Wednesday suggested that the site had returned with a Costa Rican web address. 
 
 However, this site appeared to be a "mirror" - meaning copy - of the real site, and search functionality did not work. 
 
 Cloud strategy 
 
 The Pirate Bay has operated for over 10 years, and in that time has become a focus for the creative industry's war on copyright infringement. It is one of the internet's most-visited websites, and the movie, music and software industries blame it for losses running into billions of pounds. 
 
 Despite The Pirate Bay's operators being convicted of copyright violations, authorities have struggled to stop the site from operating. 
 
 In the UK, internet service providers (ISPs) were ordered by the High Court to block access to the site in 2012. Other countries rolled out similar measures. 
 
 The effectiveness of such blocks has been disputed. Sites will evade them by changing domains, or users will utilise proxies to circumvent them. 
 
 The Swedish raid steps up the effort to stop people reaching The Pirate Bay by knocking the site itself offline, although for how long is unclear. 
 
 Prof Alan Woodward, a security expert who has been working with European authorities to shut down illegal sites, said: "There have been raids before from which Pirate Bay has recovered. 
 
 "Recently they have taken steps moving their infrastructure to be more distributed as a way of being more resistant to raids, so I would imagine they will reappear in some form." 
 
 In 2012, The Pirate Bay announced it was to move its site to the cloud - internet-based storage, which can be shared across a variety of locations - so that raids would apparently be ineffective. 
 
 Indifference 
 
 At the time, the site said: "The site that you're at will still be here, for as long as we want it to. Only in a higher form of being. A reality to us. A ghost to those who wish to harm us." 
 
 That confidence in the site's agility appeared misguided as it remained unreachable well into Wednesday. 
 
 But according to Peter Sunde, it will be indifference that closes the site, rather than police action. 
 
 "News just reached me that The Pirate Bay has been raided, again," he wrote in a blog post. 
 
 "That happened over eight years ago last time. That time, a lot of people went out to protest and rally in the streets. Today few seem to care. And I'm one of them. 
 
 "Why, you might ask? Well. For multiple reasons. But most of all, I've not been a fan of what TPB has become." 
 
 He bemoaned the level of advertising found on the site and criticised what he called a lack of "soul" in the community. 
 
 Follow Dave Lee on Twitter @DaveLeeBBC
– The Pirate Bay is down for the count after a raid on one of the file-sharing company's server rooms in Sweden yesterday, Reuters reports. "We had a crackdown on a server room in Greater Stockholm because of a copyright infringement, and yes it was Pirate Bay," an intellectual property crime coordinator for local police says. According to sources for TorrentFreak, computers, servers, and other equipment were seized. It's the first time in years the site has actually been taken offline instead of just blocked, the BBC notes. Other file-sharing sites such as EZTV, Zoink, and Torrage were also offline, Reuters notes. An interesting theory that's been floated for the seemingly sudden raid, said by TorrentFreak to have taken place at a "data center in Nacka which is built into a 'mountain'": downloads of movies stolen during the recent Sony leak, though Wired notes no one's sure yet if that was the impetus. Peter Sunde, a TPB founder busted in Sweden this summer after two years on the lam, is jumping ship, writing yesterday in a blog post that "I've not been a fan of what TPB has become," and that the site "was ugly, full of bugs, old code and old design" and teeming with "distasteful" ads. The Pirate Bay briefly popped up again last night using a .cr domain (for Costa Rica), but it's currently offline again, RT.com reports. (TPB was invited by North Korea to route its service through that country.)