Some of the most sought after publications are those hunted by students since the paper-based textbooks they are forced to buy in order to conduct their education are notoriously (some would say artificially) costly.

Inevitably, though, where there’s a cost to be cut, pirates have a cutlass, and in March 2008 a new website called Student Bay appeared, aimed at making students’ lives less expensive.

“In Sweden, education is claimed to be free of charge. Despite this students are forced every term to spend thousands of kronor on books necessary for their education,” the site owners said in their launch press release.

“Student Bay does not publish the course books as a whole, rather we divide them up in chapters, so that one can download them for personal use,” they continued.

While having reservations about the site’s legal status, the Swedish National Union of Students said they thought Student Bay had every chance of becoming successful, adding that the fact that the site exists should be a signal to publishers that they need to do more in the digital domain.

The Swedish Association of Educational Publishers, FSL, were less enthusiastic and said that the development of a market place should not be driven by criminal activity.

Since the site had things in common with another very famous file-sharing site – not least its name and logo – it wasn’t long before Student Bay attracted the wrong sort of attention. Within days of the site appearing online people began making connections to The Pirate Bay’s Gottfrid Svartholm (aka Anakata). He publicly denied having anything to do with running of the site.

During December 2008 the Swedish Association for Educational Writers (SLFF) finally reported Student Bay to the police but despite his denial, prosecutors confirmed that Svartholm remained a target in the investigation along with another individual.

“The funny part is that [SLFF] also decided to press charges against Anakata because they claim he is part of this site,” Pirate Bay said in a statement. “We don’t really know why. Our suspicion is that this is because Anakata used to run the ISP which hosts The Student Bay.” Student Bay had indeed been hosted at PRQ, a so-called “bullet-proof” host previously owned by Svartholm.

But while Pirate Bay is free for anyone to use, Student Bay was not. Users not uploading material to the site were required to subscribe via a $3.00 premium SMS to access content, much of which was stored on file-hosting sites such as RapidShare. Pirate Bay openly disapproved of the approach and said that they hoped Student Bay would remove the requirement as it was against Pirate Bay “ideals”.

It isn’t clear if Student Bay fulfilled the request to go completely free but under pressure the site closed in May 2009.

Yesterday, nearly 3 years after the initial complaint, prosecutor Frederick Ingblad confirmed that a 23-year-old man has been prosecuted for founding and running Student Bay. He is charged with violating and assisting in breaches of copyright law between August 2008 and May 2009, and charged with “regularly receiving and assimilating payments” from site users, which appear to total around $8,000.

Gottfrid Svartholm is mentioned nowhere in the complaint and earlier requests from The Pirate Bay for a formal apology for the wrongful accusations appear to have gone unanswered. Meanwhile, attempts at breaking the textbook monopoly continue.

Source: Student Bay Admin Prosecuted in Sweden

Police in up to 14 European countries are said to be involved in an operation, said to be in the planning for two years, targeting the Warez Scene, the network of individuals and servers at the top of the so-called ‘Piracy Pyramid’.

Details are scarce at the moment, but it is believed that at the behest of Belgian authorities, raids have gone ahead in The Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Germany, Great Britain, Czech Republic, Hungary and Sweden.

Not unusually, Sweden appears to have borne the brunt of the activity with a total of seven locations raided including Stockholm, Malmö, Umeå, Eskilstuna and Solna.

Armed with IP addresses, this morning police officers turned up at the Solna premises of PRQ, the company that in part hosts WikiLeaks.There is no suggestion that the controversial whistle-blowing site is connected to the operation.

“At 9:00 this morning, five policemen were here,” explained PRQ’s Mikael Viberg. “They were interested in who were using two IP addresses from 2009 and onwards. We have no records of our clients but we’re handing over the e-mail addresses for those behind the IPs. However, it’s rare that our clients have mail addresses that are traceable.”

This is a breaking news story and will be updated.

Update: Swedish Prosecutor Frederick Ingblad told Swedish news outlet Expressen.se, “I can confirm that [this operation] is not about Wikileaks.”

Update 2: Thus far, four people are said to be being questioned on suspicion of breaching copyright law. Servers and computers have been seized in Sweden.

Update 3:Police raided the Umeå University.

Source: Police in File-Sharing Raids Across Europe, WikiLeaks Host Targeted

Since then there have been thousands of follow up stories which continue today, as people pick through the information on offer and try to work out what it means for authorities around the world and especially the U.S. Government.

While some are trying to play down the implications for the ongoing war in Afghanistan, Wikileaks chief Julian Assange has been more forceful and has suggested that some of the documents show evidence of war crimes carried out by the U.S. military.

When added to the outrage caused by the recent ‘Collateral Murder‘ video, Wikileaks is developing quite a problem for itself. Yesterday Assange revealed that he had learned that there had been discussions to charge him “as a co-conspirator to espionage.”

Although it appears those discussions were later dropped, Assange still believes that he could be forcefully detained by the U.S. as a witness in the prosecution of intelligence analyst and video-leaker, Bradley Manning. But while concerns persist over Assange’s personal position, some are already considering the implications for the Wikileaks site itself.

“It would not surprise me at all if Sweden is shortly subjected to American pressure to shut down Wikileaks,” says Anna Troberg of the Swedish Pirate Party. “They have acted similarly in terms of The Pirate Bay, and given that Wikileaks’ activities strikes at the very heart of American power, it’s probably just a matter of time before they act.”

“Now is the moment of truth for our Swedish politicians. Will they have enough backbone to stand up on Wikileaks and democracy, or will they give way to the U.S. and go after PRQ and Wikileaks?”

PRQ is the Sweden-based company run by Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij of Pirate Bay fame that currently provides hosting to Wikileaks. Although absolutely no stranger to coming under pressure over the sites they host, should PRQ become vulnerable, Wikileaks now have a backup offer on the table.

Never an entity to shy away from the free flow of information, no matter where it lies or whoever might claim ownership of it, the Swedish Pirate Party recently announced that it would become bandwidth supplier to The Pirate Bay. It now says that if the going gets too rough for Wikileaks and PRQ, they will offer the whistleblower site both servers and hosting too.

“The Pirate Party will under no circumstances give in to pressure,” says Troberg. “We now help democracy activists in Iran, including communication via anonymous servers. We provide bandwidth to our greatest political opinion leaders, The Pirate Bay. If Wikileaks is attacked again, we will immediately offer them both server space and bandwidth.”

“The Pirate Party believes in democracy and we are not afraid to stand up for it.”

Source: Pirate Party Offers Servers and Hosting To Wikileaks

PRQ’s Anakata told TorrentFreak that not everything went down because of the electrical fault, but that he had to kill the power to the entire facility in order to fix things. He added that none of the servers are permanently damaged.

The fire didn’t take out The Pirate Bay itself, much to the disappointment of some, including Swedish prosecutors. It has, however, disabled several other torrent sites and some of Pirate Bay’s services, including bayIMG, their court weblog and the Pirate Bay forums at SuprBay.

In 2007 several torrent sites moved to Sweden, and to PRQ in particular. Sweden is considered to be a safe haven for BitTorrent sites, and PRQ is popular because it is owned by TiAMO and Anakata, two of the founders of The Pirate Bay. Ironically, however, The Pirate Bay is not hosted in Sweden or at PRQ, which is probably a wise decision, you can’t have all your eggs in one basket.

Amongst the sites taken down were Waffles, Suprnova, Swebits and the popular TV-torrent site EZTV. Waffles posted the following notice on their site

FIRE AT PRQ DATACENTER
Please bear with us waffles! We’re scrambling to get you your syrup.

- The servers were not harmed.
- Even in such case, no data has been lost as we have daily offsite backups.

- Luckily, we have a brand new server already…
We are assessing whether to ship it to the new Swedish datacenter where arrangements have been made or to take the hospitality of our good friends in Canada (unrelated to what.cd’s move)

An admin at the private music tracker Waffles -one of the sites that is experiencing downtime at the moment- wasn’t happy with the downtime and told TorrentFreak: “… ridiculous. 2nd time this month we’ve had more than 6 hours downtime,” adding “I need to ship our new (much more powerful server) for waffles to a different datacenter in Sweden, before the Post Office closes.” Another admin said: “We noticed the downtime 7 hours ago, and only found out via someone else outside of PRQ about the fire”

Regardless, there will be some smiles in Hollywood and at the Swedish anti-piracy organization Antipiratbyrån, as well as many frowns from users all around the world. More information will be added when we get it.

UPDATE 16/2/2008 20:50 GMT: Power has been restored and half the servers are now back up

UPDATE 17/2/2008 02:03 GMT: Some sites including Waffles are back, EZTV and others are still down

Source: PRQ Fire Takes Down Several Torrent Sites