BitTorrent tracker site The Pirate Bay was reported as having been taken down by Swedish authorities. The aptly-named site has become one of the more popular sites for people to find BitTorrent download links.

On the official homepage was this message:

“In the morning of 2006-05-31 the Swedish National Criminal Police showed a search warrant to Rix|Port80 personnell. The warrant was valid for all datacentres of Rix|Port80 and was directed at The Pirate Bay. The allegation was breach of copy-right law, alternatively assisting breach of copy-right law.”

Because of the way BitTorrent works, The Pirate Bay only hosted links (the .torrent files) to its data, so it is claiming that it has done nothing wrong, because no copyrighted information is hosted on its servers.

It seems the authorities beg to differ, and they took down the site. Apparently, the site was put back online again using machines hosting in the Netherlands, but at the time of writing the site is completely inaccessible.

I have no doubt that even if The Pirate Bay meets its demise soon, yet another site will emerge for people to get BitTorrent downloads. The fight continues.

Of course, there are legal uses for BitTorrent, it is the hosting of copyrighted material that is being disputed here.