The assumed goal of the new effort is to shut the site down, something the authorities failed to accomplish during the first investigation more than half a decade ago.

Initially, the only source for the new investigation was The Pirate Bay team itself. Today the plans were confirmed by the Swedish hosting company Binero where two of The Pirate Bay’s .se domain names are registered.

“We can confirm that an investigation is underway against the Pirate Bay. We received a letter with questions,” Binero’s marketing manager Erik Arnberg said.

In addition, the hosting company also made it clear that they won’t be complying with the requests unless a proper warrant is served. According to Arnberg this hasn’t happened thus far.

“We will not share any information about our customers until there is a court order, or when a prosecutor can refer to an applicable law. In this case, we have answered the questions with information that’s already available through Whois services.”

The Whois data for the Pirate Bay’s new .se domain lists the name of Fredrik Neij, one of the defendants in the original trial who was sentenced to 10 months in prison.

The exact goals of the new investigation are unclear. The prosecution, led by piracy investigator Frederick Ingblad, confirmed that they “are interested in torrent sites” but refused to comment further. It is expected that the Swedish authorities want to finish what they failed to do in 2006, shut down The Pirate Bay website for good.

However, considering the current state of the site that’s pretty much an impossible task.

In recent years The Pirate Bay has implemented a variety of changes to guarantee that can remains online, whatever happens. It added several backup domains, placed servers all over the world, while removing resource intensive components such as the tracker and .torrent files.

The determination to keep the site online was once again confirmed by the Pirate Bay team last week, who noted:

“We’re staying put where we are. We’re going no-where. But we have a message to hollywood, the investigators and the prosecutors: LOL.”

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

The raid eventually led to the conviction of four people connected to The Pirate Bay, but the site itself remained online.

Today, the Pirate Bay team has informed TorrentFreak that a second raid is being prepared by the Swedish authorities. The site’s operators, who are well-connected in multiple ways, learned that a team of Swedish investigators is gearing up to move against the site in the future.

The suspicions were also made public by The Pirate Bay a few minutes ago.

“The Swedish district attorney Fredrik Ingblad initiated a new investigation into The Pirate Bay back in 2010. Information has been leaked to us every now and then by multiple sources, almost on a regular basis. It’s an interesting read,” the Pirate Bay crew notes.

“We can certainly understand why WikiLeaks wished to be hosted in Sweden, since so much data leaks there. The reason that we get the leaks is usually that the whistleblowers do not agree with what is going on. Something that the governments should have in mind – even your own people do not agree.”

The Pirate Bay team confirmed to TorrentFreak that the announcement is no prank. The authorities have obtained warrants to snoop around in sensitive places and two known anti-piracy prosecutors, Frederick Ingblad and Henrik Rasmusson, are said to be involved.

Employing a little psychological warfare aimed at putting the investigators off-balance, the Pirate Bay team has chosen to make the news public to make the authorities aware that they are not the only ones being watched.

According to The Pirate Bay team they aren’t doing anything illegal, but nonetheless they noticed that the investigation intensified after the site’s recent move to a .SE domain.

“Since our recent move to a .SE domain the investigation has been cranked up a notch. We think that the investigation is interesting considering nothing that TPB does is illegal,” they say.

“Rather we find it interesting that a country like Sweden is being so abused by lobbyists and that this can be kept up. They’re using scare tactics, putting pressure on the wrong people, like providers and users. All out of fear from the big country in the west, and with an admiration for their big fancy wallets.”

Behind the scenes The Pirate Bay team is working hard to ensure that the site will remain online in the event that servers, domain names and Internet routes are cut off. In this regard The Pirate Bay has learned a valuable lesson from its former operators.

Those who are aware of the site’s history know that without a few essential keystrokes in May 2006, The Pirate Bay may not have been here today. When Pirate Bay founder TiAMO heard that something was amiss, he decided to make a full backup of the site before heading off to the datacenter, where he was greeted by dozens of police officers.

TiAMO’s decision to start a backup of the site is probably the most pivotal moment in the site’s history. Because of this backup the Pirate Bay team were able to resurrect the site within three days. If there hadn’t have been a recent backup, things may have turned out quite differently.

It was a close call at the time, and a defining moment in the history of the site. The determination to get the site back online as soon as possible set the defiant tone for the years that followed. Today, the site prides itself in being the most resilient torrent site around.

In recent years The Pirate Bay has implemented a variety of changes to guarantee that the site remains online. It added several backup domains, placed servers all over the world, and removed resource intensive processes.

Earlier this week The Pirate Bay took another important step by removing .torrent files altogether to become a “magnet link” site. As a result, the entire site can now be reduced to a few hundred megabytes, small enough to fit on the tiniest thumb drive.

For the police, this makes a successful Pirate Bay raid almost impossible. While they can take steps to put the site out of business briefly, it’s inevitable that it will re-appear in a matter of hours, or days.

Or to use the words of the Pirate Bay team. “We’re staying put where we are. We’re going no-where. But we have a message to hollywood, the investigators and the prosecutors: LOL.”

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

There are several large topsites hosted in Sweden, some of which host hundreds of terabytes of pirated material. However, according to ‘scene’ etiquette, the files on these are not supposed to leak to other (more public) file-sharing networks but eventually they all do, with most of the big releases managing this in mere minutes.

This puts these servers close to the top of the ‘Piracy Pyramid‘ and one of the priority targets of anti-piracy outfits. Two weeks ago, Pirate Bay co-founder Anakata told the court that these scene members “hate The Pirate Bay” because they prefer to keep their releases within a select group.

Henrik Pontén from Antipiratbyrån – the Swedish anti-piracy office – applauded the police and said that this was one of the largest busts ever, and the largest in Sweden. According to one of our own sources, several well known scene groups were using the servers, which means that they may have been compromised.

For now, the investigation focuses on the person who operated the server in question. “A person suspected of running the server has been identified and it is now up to the police to investigate this. Now, we will continue to look for similar pirate servers,” Pontén told Aftonbladet.

Pontén also claimed that the Sunnydale topsite was the source of all pirated material available on The Pirate Bay, but this was denied by Peter Sunde. “More than 800,000 people have uploaded to The Pirate Bay, so I don’t believe it’s the source of everything. But it is possible that it’s a major source,” he said.

Antipiratbyrån’s involvement in this raid is questionable. In 2005 the police conducted an similar raid at Swedish ISP Bahnhof, only to be presented with evidence that Antipiratbyrån themselves had hired someone to plant copyright material. It turned out that the infiltrator was far from a passive observer. The infiltrator had transferred 68,000 files and went as far as buying hardware for the server to increase its storage capacity.

Antipiratbyrån was later sued for illegal trespassing and harassment because of these entrapment practices which are illegal in Sweden. Now, four years on and they are again involved in a similar raid, but whether they had any help from an insider this time is unknown. The exact role Antipiratbyrån played in this raid remains unclear, but it is likely that they tipped off the police about the location and existence of ‘Sunnydale.’

Pontén said that his organization will continue its “war on piracy.”

Update: Only one of Sunnydale’s servers was seized, the location of the other servers remains unknown.

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