Video from the police raid on the Pirate Bay

Vanity Fair has written about Bit torrents, and the Pirate Bay:

If the online file-sharing universe is the Wild West, Sweden is Deadwood—a place where the rule of law leaves barely a footprint. Thanks to a combination of national copyright laws, laissez-faire social attitudes, and inexpensive and superior bandwidth, gentle little Sweden—which refers to itself as Europe’s “duck pond”—has become a file-sharing fortress in which more than 10 percent of its nine million citizens trade digital material, much of it provided by the country’s Pirate Bay site.

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Early on the morning of May 31, 2006, Swedish police launched the kind of cleanup operation the M.P.A.A. had long been craving. Law-enforcement officials raided eight locations related to Pirate Bay, with more than 50 police officers involved in arresting the site’s operators and seizing their computer equipment. As one Swedish Internet entrepreneur puts it, “When was the last time the Swedish police had 50 people doing anything?”…

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Pirate Bay HQ is a shabby, low-ceilinged concrete bunker that bears little resemblance to anyone’s idea of a high-tech Death Star that is threatening to annihilate Hollywood. A handful of cheap desks are strewn with standard dude detritus: empty beer bottles, scattered paperwork, take-out-food cartons, and so on.

Pirates of the Multiplex: On The Web: vanityfair.com.