The Pirate Bay, possibly the most popular website for downloading pirated content, is now offline after a raid by authorities in Sweden.

After the Rights Alliance, a group against Internet crime, filed a complaint, Swedish police went to seize servers in Stockholm that supported the website, leading to the first instance in several years that The Pirate Bay has been taken offline, instead of just being blocked by filters.

Peter Sunde, a co-founder of The Pirate Bay that is not connected with the website anymore, unexpectedly supported the website's takedown, and has even called for the permanent closure of The Pirate Bay.

Stockholm County Police's Paul Pinter said that investigations lasting years led the authorities to where the servers for The Pirate Bay were located.

In addition to the seized servers, several individuals have now been brought in for questioning by the police.

The raid occurred in Nacka, which has a mountainous terrain that acts as a natural coolant for servers.

However, several reports reveal that The Pirate Bay has been brought back online using a web address that locates it in Costa Rica. The website looks like it is only a mirror of The Pirate Bay though, as the website's search function is not working.

The Pirate Bay has been in operations for more than a decade, becoming the banner child of copyright infringement as it hosts torrents for music, movies and software.

Despite the website's founders and operators already being convicted, authorities have found it difficult to shut down the website completely.

Several countries have ordered to block the website, but users have bypassed the filters by using proxies. The Pirate Bay also changed domains, rendering the earlier implemented filters useless.

While the raid in Sweden knocked The Pirate Bay offline, it would likely be back soon.

Security expert Alan Woodward said that the website has recently been distributing its infrastructure to give it resistance to such raids.

"I would imagine they will reappear in some form," Woodward cautioned.

Sunde, however, thinks that The Pirate Bay will be closed down permanently not by the authorities, but rather by the indifference in the community.

Sunde wrote in a blog post that a similar raid against The Pirate Bay occurred more than eight years ago. During that time, protests broke out to defend the website.

"Today few seem to care. And I'm one of them," Sunde wrote, stating that the main reason is that he does not like what the website has grown to become.

Sunde criticized how much advertising was on The Pirate Bay, along with the absence of "soul" within the community.

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