Bruno Kramm, the Berlin chairman of the Pirate Party, has said that The Pirate Bay will fight police crackdown on the file-sharing website by multiplying servers. In an interview with Russia Today , he vowed that each time police shut The Pirate Bay down through punitive raids, it would re-open by multiplying servers.
Affirming the resolve of The Pirate Bay to keep afloat, days after the website was taken down in a raid by Swedish police in Stockholm, Kramm said in the interview with Russia Today , “It was already shut down in 2005, and the result was the creation of a party called Pirate Party coming with all the ideas of sharing of information, of knowledge and culture on the internet; and freedom on the internet. So they came up with this: basically, each time you shut the Pirate Bay down, we will multiply.”
Kramm argued that given the fact of the nature of the internet as a “huge copying machine,” it was wrong for copyright owners to insist that The Pirate Bay’s activity, which involves providing links to torrents for file sharing, was necessarily copyright infringement.
“Each time you shut the Pirate Bay down, we will multiply.”
He argued that instead of insisting on maintaining the status quo, corporations could adapt to the fact that the internet has “changed the view on public property,” by allowing copyright laws to be re-formulated.
He gave the example of the music industry which adapted to new developments through streaming. He noted that streaming music has emerged as a fast growing market.
“We can see that this [streaming music] is working, and that copying on the internet doesn’t’ kill the market.”
He said The Pirate Bay was determined to fight the Swedish authorities who are cracking down on the website for the first time. He said the crack-down would fail because taking down one server won’t bring the site down due to the ability to multiply servers.
“It is not so easy in Sweden and Scandinavia to take down an infrastructure, especially when it’s carrying on like a party. It’s a long fight. If you just take one server away, it will have many copies somewhere else. It will not help at all.”
The Pirate Bay, an online file-sharing platform with over 20 million users, gained notoriety and the attention of authorities due to concerns expressed by copyright owners that the site facilitates piracy and illegal access to copyrighted material.
Torrent Freak reported on Tuesday, December 9, that Swedish police carried out a raid in which they seized servers and computers, forcing The Pirate Bay to go offline. A number of other torrent-related sites , such as EZTV, Zoink, Torrage and the Istole tracker, also went offline, the Inquisitr reported.
Although, at first, police did not give details about the location of the raid and what prompted it, the chief of IP enforcement, Paul Pinter, said in a statement, “There has been a crackdown on a server room in Greater Stockholm. This is in connection with violations of copyright law.”
Police later said the raid occurred at a facility “built into a mountain” in Nacka, Stockholm.
The incident did not come as a surprise to close watchers of the file-sharing website’s ongoing confrontation with international authorities. This is not the first time police have shut The Pirate Bay down. Only last month, police arrested co-founder Fredrik Neij at Thailand’s border with Laos, while a French court ordered the site shut down in France.
The site had been plagued with frequent downtime before the raid which finally took it offline.
Corporations, such as Warner Brothers, consider the site’s file-sharing operations, which involve linking to torrents for TV shows and movies, as copyright infringement. They also argue that it deprives primary distributors of legitimate profits.
There were reports earlier in the year that The Pirate Bay had established a network of virtual servers so that it can continue running in the event of a raid. But Tuesday’s incident reveals that the measures have not succeeded entirely.
While a number of the site’s proxies have stayed up, Torrent Freak denied reports that the site has resurrected in a new domain . The site’s proxies cannot operate alone, they rely on The Pirate Bay for torrent content.
