The problems were caused by a police raid on Swedish webhost PRQ. The authorities, it was later revealed, were targeting two sites.

One was Appbucket.net, a site that was previously subjected to legal action in August when the FBI seized its domain in a crackdown against Android app piracy.

The other was Tankafetast, once Sweden’s second largest torrent site. The site had called it quits in February after being put under pressure by Antipiratbyrån lawyer Henrik Pontén and Hollywood lawyer Monique Wadsted, but it returned shortly after.

This resurrection obviously didn’t go unnoticed, hence the PRQ raid three weeks ago today. But despite the setback Tankafetast is now back online, energized, and more belligerent than ever before. On their frontpage is the following notice:

The message, which appears to refer to an earlier statement from Antipiratbyrån, says that lawyer Henrik Pontén was wrong to presume that the site had disappeared for good.

TorrentFreak spoke with Pontén who declined to comment on the site’s return due to there being an ongoing police investigation.

Taunts aside, Tankafetast’s operators appear to be trying to raise the profile of the site. They have launched a clothing range, consisting mainly of t-shirts carrying a range of pro-filesharing slogans such as Keep Calm and Download and Support Your Local Uploader, plus a few with defiant messages on Tankafetast’s return.

In addition, on Saturday the site’s operators announced that in celebration of the site’s return they would be hiring three cinemas in Malmö, Gothenburg and Stockholm and giving away tickets to fans of the site. The first viewing has been announced as taking place this Thursday for the premiere of the new Bond movie, Skyfall.

What is interesting to observe here is that when it comes to file-sharing the Swedes are very defiant indeed, even in the face of adversaries such as the government and police. Whether the site will be able to back up its defiance with long-term uptime remains to be seen, but even that seems to be more likely than their aim this week of giving away at least hundred of their cinema tickets to girls.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Quickly, prominent copyright enforcers for the entertainment industries – Hollywood lawyer Monique Wadsted and Antipiratbyrån lawyer Henrik Pontén – announced that the decision would signal a new crackdown on file-sharing sites in Sweden.

Although there was no immediate news of site closures, now there is a significant development. Tankafetast, Sweden’s second largest torrent site behind The Pirate Bay, has announced that it has ceased its operations with immediate effect.

“After many ifs and buts, we have decided to close down TankaFetast,” the site’s operators said in a statement.

“Maybe we can one day see an end to the fascist tendencies that comfortable businessmen in the film industry and corrupt politicians have turned to something common in recent years.”

While Tankafetast may not be hugely popular overseas, its importance in Sweden was reflected by its inclusion in Google’s 2010 Zeitgeist report. At the time the site claimed 39 million page views per month.

“As long as we allow the reality of facing fossils bribe away our rights, they will do it. We will never agree that copying is theft, and will always consider the distribution of culture as something positive,” the site’s operators conclude.

At the start of the month the entertainment industry lawyers said that more than 150 file-sharing sites with Swedish connections would be pressured to close. According to Henrik Pontén of Antipiratbyrån, Tankafetast’s closure is a result of their action.

“We can confirm that we have acted against Tankafetast and many other similar sites,” he told TorrentFreak this morning. The bitterness in the site’s shutdown statement certainly appears to confirm that.

However, the Swedish Pirate Party are claiming that Tankafetast’s loss is their gain. The site encouraged outgoing users to join up to Piratpartiet to assist with the fight against over zealous copyright enforcement, a push which resulted in 250 new members for the Party overnight.

“Tankafetast gave the party the best parting gift you can imagine,” says Party leader Anna Troberg. “By helping the party to get more activists we have strengthened the Party’s capacity to work for a reform of copyright which is in line with the times and can not be used to tighten the thumbscrews on ordinary culture lovers.”

Significant copyright enforcement actions in Sweden have resulted in membership boosts for the Pirate Party not only locally but worldwide. Following the first Pirate Bay trial in 2009, the Party added record-breaking numbers of new members but administrative issues meant they couldn’t maintain all of them longer term.

“We learned a lot from the huge influx of members after the first Pirate Bay trial. Then we weren’t able to take care of all new members,” says Troberg. “We will this time.”

To the south-west of Sweden in the Netherlands, local anti-piracy outfit BREIN is reporting that during 2011 they managed to shut down 383 BitTorrent sites, 83 streaming sites, 71 cyberlocker link sites and 52 Usenet indexers.

The news would of course be even more dramatic if we could back up these claims with some site names and other details, but BREIN are traditionally tight-lipped on providing extra information to accompany their annual reports.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

For the majority of westerners, December is a consumer-orientated orgy of greed, over-eating and over-spending, all accompanied by countless hours of overtime at work in order to pay for these annual excesses.

But presuming funding is in place, and that you can tolerate the violent free-for-all that has become the much loved hallmark of Christmas shopping, there’s still the problem of what to buy your loved ones. Luckily, help is at hand.

This year, forget expensive perfume and designer clothing, and throw high-end electronics and fine champagne to one side. Online gifts are the new cool, so what could be a more warm and romantic gesture in 2010 than handing your significant other the root passwords to a fully functioning, high-flying torrent site?

While you’d need many millions to buy The Pirate Bay, Sweden’s biggest torrent site, it is currently possible to acquire the next best thing. An auction currently taking place on Flippa could enable one lucky individual to obtain Sweden’s second biggest torrent site.

While it has a reserve price of $44,000, the indexing site Tankafetast can be bought immediately for just $100,000. For this amount the lucky Christmas present recipient could enjoy 4.5 million visitors and a claimed 39 million page views per month.

The site is on the up too, shown here at #9 in Google Sweden’s list of searches that increased the most in popularity during 2010.

“The site is not a tracker, but an index of torrents that are on different trackers,” the site’s current owner explains. “So, the site hosts no torrents or any copyrighted content, in other words.”

The owner says that while he’s had some good times on the site, he’s off to pastures new. Apparently the site is making around $1,700 per month gross and has contracts in place with ‘discreet advertisers’ which can be passed on to the new owner.

If the site went for its reserve of $44,000 it’s clear that it would take quite a while for the new owner to get his money back based on the current position. For most people even $44k is a lot of money and would represent a pretty extravagant Christmas gift – you could even get a Nissan 370z Nismo Edition sports car for that, with enough change for a romantic holiday in the sun.

But of course, cars have running costs, so the bills don’t end with the initial outlay. The same, however, is also true of torrent sites. Tankafetast costs at least £350 per month in bandwidth and this figure does not include any of the unpredictable legal fees that can be incurred at torrent sites indexing Hollywood movies, even if they are all subtitled in Swedish.

Nevertheless, if you’re interested in acquiring the site you’ll need to hurry since there are only 18 days left to make an offer. Interest is currently riding high with zero bids.

Just like buying a dog or cat as a ‘surprise’ present, this Christmas when you have absolutely no idea that the recipient is prepared to commit to their new friend for the next few years, buying someone a torrent site might also be ill-advised.

Actually, no. Buying someone a torrent site for Christmas is not just ill-advised but the worst idea ever. Forget I even mentioned it. Stick to gift cards. Or socks.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.