The Pirate Bay Raid - Aftermath

Aftermath

After the raid, The Pirate Bay displayed a "SITE DOWN" message confirming that Swedish police had executed search warrants for breach of copyright law or assisting such a breach. The BitTorrent community quickly spread the announcement across online news sites, blogs, and discussion forums. The closure message initially caused some confusion because on 1 April 2005 The Pirate Bay had posted a similar message, stating that they were permanently down due to a supposed raid by the Swedish Anti-Piracy Bureau and IFPI, as a prank. Piratbyrån set up a temporary news blog to inform the public about the incident.

On 1 June 2006, it was reported on The Pirate Bay website that it would be up and fully functional within a day or two. As promised, The Pirate Bay was back up and operational by the end of the next day, their logo now depicting the pirate ship firing cannon balls at the Hollywood sign. The header displayed the name "The Police Bay". The next logo featured the pirate ship as a stylized phoenix, in reference to the servers rising up again after the raid.

The reincarnated website was, as stated by "Peter" in the Chaosradio International interview with Tim Pritlove, running on servers located in the Netherlands. As of 3 June, the search function was not available. It was possible to browse for .torrent files manually and download them, but attempts at downloading .torrent files for most copyrighted materials gave 404 Not Found errors. On 5 June 2006, The Pirate Bay went down, citing database server problems. It was back up the next day, but with limited availability. The Pirate Bay attributed these issues to increased traffic resulting from the recent publicity, and promised that the website would soon be running smoothly again. TPB thereafter fixed a number of minor software bugs and brought new servers online to handle the increased traffic load. By 9 June, the website was once again fully functional. On 14 June 2006, the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet reported that The Pirate Bay was back in Sweden due to "pressure from the Department of Justice ."

During the afternoon of 1 June, again on 3 June, and again in the morning of 4 June, the website of the Swedish police went down due to high load. It was speculated that this was a retaliatory denial-of-service attack in response to the TPB raid. According to a Swedish article in the IT news website IDG, the downtime resulted from many requests for a specific url—which had been widely circulated via IRC chatrooms and internet forums. According to the article, the purpose was to "show what you think of the police's behaviour."

Demonstrations against the police action took place on 3 June 2006 in Gothenburg and Stockholm, organized by Piratbyrån and the Pirate Party in collaboration with the Liberal Youth, Young Greens and Young Left parties. There were no reports of violence. Approximately 500–600 people showed up at the Stockholm protest and about 300 at the Gothenburg protest.

The Pirate Bay is considered part of an international anti-copyright movement. The documentary Steal This Film was produced and distributed (via BitTorrent) in the months following the raid. In the words of its speakers, it aimed to present the other side of the debate, until that time dominated by the media industry. The film was made available free, as donationware.

Since the raid, Pirate Bay stated their disaster recovery plan of "a few days" worked correctly, but that they are now moving to redundant servers both in Belgium and Russia, and an aim of a few hours restoration time, should the servers be disrupted again. Following the raid the number of Pirate Bay users grew from 1 million to 2.7 million. The number of peers grew almost 5 times, from 2.5 million to 12 million. It has been reported that the Pirate Bay claims more than 5 million active users. Internet traffic ranker Alexa.com ranks Pirate Bay as the 113th most popular website in the world.