The ISP, created in 2004 by Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij of The Pirate Bay, usually hits the news due to their business strategy. PRQ’s philosophy says that if a website is legal in Sweden, they will not only host it, but defend it to the end. That has made it a haven for controversial sites that are less welcome elsewhere.

Time and again PRQ’s affiliation with The Pirate Bay and other file-sharing domains has seen the company raided, most recently during early October when authorities hunted down the operators of Tankafetast and Appbucket and took down dozens of sites in the process.

PRQ is known for respecting the privacy of its customers, even going as far as accepting cash in envelopes from website operators requiring the highest levels of protection. However, a decision just taken by PayPal might mean that this archaic method of payment becomes more popular in the months to come.

After targeting dozens of file-sharing, file-hosting and Usenet services in recent months, PayPal has just banned PRQ from its service and seized all its funds, not once but twice.

“First they froze our primary account without any prior notice – we can’t even receive funds to it,” PRQ told TorrentFreak in a statement.

“After we contacted their ‘support’ they stated that the support could not help us, BUT the person who was responsible for our account should contact us within a couple of days.”

As of today, PRQ are still awaiting that call, despite having a trading relationship with PayPal for the last three years.

PRQ told us that since PayPal is a big source of payments for the ISP they need to be able to process funds while their account is frozen. So the company asked PayPal for a solution.

“PayPal stated that we just had to open a new account to receive funds to until the primary account problem was resolved, and once it was resolved they would merge the two accounts,” PRQ explained.

That all sounded simple enough, but “PayPal dispute” and “straightforward” aren’t usually terms seen in the same sentence together, and this occasion was no different.

“So we started a second account, and that got frozen too so that we could not withdraw the funds, although we still can receive funds to the account,” says PRQ.

Not content with freezing two accounts, last week PayPal sent an email stating that they will be keeping all funds in PRQ’s primary account for up to 180 days to act as a reserve in case of any chargebacks. PRQ informs us that historically there have been almost none of those.

“That was it for us, that made us decide to discontinue PayPal forever. It’s sad that PayPal decided to f*ck us after three years of service,” PRQ concludes.

In the meantime PRQ is accepting Bitcoins and bank wire transfer while their Visa/Mastercard merchant account is being set up.

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

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.

PRQ, a company with a reputation for allowing almost anyone to anonymously use its facilities, was severely disrupted as police hunted for the file-sharing related servers behind a handful of IP addresses.

Dozens of sites went down, but it took until last Wednesday for the actual targets of the operation to be revealed. The primary target was Tankafetast, once Sweden’s #2 torrent site.

The second was Appbucket, a site that was the subject of legal action in August when the FBI seized its domain in a crackdown against Android app piracy. SVT now has confirmation that the raid on that domain was carried out in concert with a “foreign police force”.

By the middle of the week most PRQ-linked sites had returned and were back in business, meaning that Internet user interest in the raids had already started to wane. However, it appears that the Swedish government’s interest in shutting down torrent sites has not.

Last Thursday, action was taken against another site known as SweDream. Police carried out a raid in Skåne in southern Sweden, seizing several computers. The site is suspected of being involved in the unauthorized distribution of movies.

“We think [the raids are] completely wrong, file sharing is something that is good for society,” says Swedish Pirate Party leader Anna Troberg.

“That it is illegal is one thing, but if a law is bad you should change the law,” she says.

But while a change in the law may help longer term, it isn’t going to help the situation developing in Sweden today. The first signs that something might be coming appeared in February when the Sweden’s Supreme Court said it would not be hearing an appeal of the Pirate Bay trial.

“The rule of law has spoken and this is a defining moment in the lengthy discussion of copyright on the Internet,” said Henrik Pontén, lawyer at Antipiratbyrån at the time.

“The Supreme Court has made clear to all involved in copyright violations, including those that provide them with Internet connections, must now assume their responsibilities.”

What followed was a public warning from Antipiratbyrån and local Hollywood lawyer Monique Wadsted to around 150 file-sharing sites with Swedish connections – shut down or else.

Later in February police in Gothenburg carried out a raid against an individual they said was involved with both The Pirate Bay and another local site, Shareitall.

Police also flexed their muscles with a raid on SwePiracy, although in the last couple of days the site appears to have coincidentally reappeared.

Since February Sweden has been fairly quiet though, until last week of course when things really heated up. Speaking with TorrentFreak this morning, Antipiratbyrån’s Henrik Pontén confirmed that in the last seven days at least five “key” Swedish sites have been completely shut down.

They are Tankafetast, SweDream, ShareItAll, SharingZone and SteelBits.

So, do the developments of the past week indicate the start of a new file-sharing crackdown?

“Yes, you can expect more actions against illegal sites,” Pontén concludes.

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

February this year the main verdict against Fredrik Neij and his co-defendants in the Pirate Bay trial was made final. However, Neij has not given up completely.

Together with former site spokesman Peter Sunde he filed appeals with the European Court of Human Rights in June.

While Neij awaits the Court’s decision he is residing in Asia with his family, where he and his wife are expecting their third child.

But a few months ago Neij suffered another setback when the Embassy of Sweden in Bangkok revoked his passport, a decision the Pirate Bay co-founder decided to appeal in August.

The 34-year-old argued that the nature of his crime is not serious enough to warrant his passport being taken away and that by doing so the Swedish authorities will subject his family to unreasonable consequences.

Among other things, Neij and his Thai wife want to be able to travel to Thailand for the birth for medical reasons.

Fortunately for the family, the appeal was successful. Fredrik informs TorrentFreak that he has won the case and is free to travel again. According to him, the authorities were not able to give a proper reason for the revocation, or at least they refused to.

“I can only assume they didn’t have any reason, maybe they were just someone doing someone a favor,” he told TorrentFreak.

The good news for Neij comes in a week where one of his former companies, hosting company PRQ, was making headlines in the international press after a raid by the Swedish police.

Neij started the hosting company in 2004 with fellow Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm, but left the company around 2007. In a short clip from the upcoming documentary TPB AFK he explains that providing a hosting facility for controversial but legal sites was one of the main reasons to start PRQ.

Neij will now await the decision of the European Court of Human Rights, in a country of his own choosing.

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

The immediate effect was that all sites hosted on the 80.88./19 net went down, including the torrent sites torrenthound.com, linkomanija.net and tankafetast.nu, release blog RLSLOG.net, and sports streaming sites atdhenet.tv, hahasport.com, sportlemon.tv and stopstream.tv. In all, dozens were affected.

The individual sites listed above are now back online, with one notable exception – Tankafetast.

As reported earlier this year, Tankafetast was once Sweden’s second largest torrent site but in February decided to call it quits. The closure was prompted by a Supreme Court decision that it would not be granting leave to appeal in the long-running Pirate Bay case and subsequent warnings of a file-sharing site crackdown from Hollywood lawyer Monique Wadsted and Antipiratbyrån lawyer Henrik Pontén.

Despite the announcement Tankafetast had remained online until this week, but as confirmed by PRQ owner Mikael Viborg this morning, the police took the site’s server on Monday.

“They took three servers, and I know two of the sites that were targets of the raid. The first is Tankafetast.com or Tankafett.com, they are different names for the same site,” he said.

“The other is a site called Appbucket.com. It has not been on since April when they stopped paying their bills, so no other customer has taken over the server,” Viborg added.

Although Viborg is quoted as referencing Appbucket.com, that site has zero traffic and is owned by Photobucket, Inc., a seemingly unlikely target for a police operation.

However, switch to Appbucket.net and things get a whole lot more interesting. That site was the subject of legal action in August when the FBI seized its domain in a crackdown against Android app piracy. It was also hosted by PRQ.

The site currently diverts to the familiar ‘seized’ server notice, but its WHOIS entry reveals that it is still registered to PRQ itself, care of none other than Pirate Bay co-founder and former PRQ owner Gottfrid Svartholm. TorrentFreak is currently awaiting further information from Mikael Viborg.

Overall, the raids this week generated a lot of interest from web users, particularly as they coincided with The Pirate Bay being offline. The site has now returned, but its interesting to see how many other torrent sites received a boost as a result of its downtime.

As can be seen from the member graph below, another direct beneficiary of the raids is the Swedish Pirate Party. After having its server seized this week, Tankafetast redirected its domain to the Party’s Facebook page.

“This resulted in a very welcome onslaught of new members,” explains Pirate Party leader Anna Troberg.

“Last time I checked, we had about a thousand new members and 12,000 new likes on Facebook in a day.”

Authorities are currently refusing to discuss the raids but anti-piracy group Antipiratbyrån confirms that on Monday “50 illegal sites” went offline as a result of the action at PRQ.

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

All sites hosted on the 80.88./19 net are currently unavailable, including but not limited to the torrent sites torrenthound.com, linkomanija.net and tankafetast.nu, release blog RLSLOG.net, and the sports streaming sites atdhenet.tv, hahasport.com, sportlemon.tv and stopstream.tv.

Many private BitTorrent sites that use PRQ’s services are also affected.

The PRQ raid coincided with downtime at The Pirate Bay but TorrentFreak is informed that this is unrelated. The Pirate Bay says it’s not using PRQ’s services and attributes the downtime to a power failure.

PRQ owner Mikael Viborg told Nyheter24 that the police were looking for particular hardware.

“Yes, they’re looking for four servers,” he said. “It is the first time since 2010 they have done this.”

The raid wasn’t plain sailing. The police first arrived on Monday hunting for hardware behind certain IP addresses. However, due to a technical error PRQ’s systems were down and the hardware could only be identified when the systems were restored today.

At this point in time Viborg cannot say which sites or services police are targeting, but he believes the investigation is related to intellectual property violations.

“No, I have not been told,” he said earlier. “Police are sitting in the office now but I have to wait until tomorrow. Then I can find out what is happening.”

Helena Ekstrand at the Prosecutor General’s Office said she was aware that a raid took place today but has no further information at this point.

This is not the first time that PRQ has been raided. In 2006 Swedish police confiscated 180 servers in The Pirate Bay raid, servers that mostly belonged to customers that were not connected to the BitTorrent site.

At this point it is unclear when the sites hosted or routed via PRQ will come back online.

Update: The PRQ website and several streaming sites are back. The majority of the other file-sharing sites remain offline for now. It’s still unknown what the target of the raid is.

Update: RLSLOG is back online and told TorrentFreak that they are not hosted at PRQ. They do use a routing service that uses PRQ’s services, but RLSLOG says the downtime was caused by an unrelated issue.

Update: TorrentHound informed us that they will return soon.

Update: The PRQ website has gone offline again.

Update: linkomanija.net and the sports streaming sites atdhenet.tv, hahasport.com, sportlemon.tv and stopstream.tv are back.

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

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

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

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

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