Pirate Bay’s rivals profit after police shutdown file sharing site

Supporters of the file sharing service Pirate Bay have flocked to substitute sites after the popular domain was taken offline following a police raid.

The Pirate Bay disappeared offline this week following a raid by Swedish police in the country’s capital, Stockholm.

As of 4pm AEST on Wednesday, the site had been down for almost 18 hours.

Authorities confirmed the raid was carried out by police as part of an operation to protect intellectual property.

In a statement, police national coordinator for IP enforcement Paul Pintér said there had been a “crackdown on a server room in Greater Stockholm”.

“This is in connection with violations of copyright law,” he stated.

The raid follows the arrest of Pirate Bay’s co-founder Hans Fredrik Lennart Neij last month.

Neij, known to hackers as TiAMO, had been on the run from authorities for five years after being convicted of illegally sharing copyright-protected files by a Swedish court.

Another Pirate Bay co-founder, Gottfrid Warg, was arrested in Cambodia in 2012 and sent back to Sweden to serve his sentence for the same conviction, as well as face a separate hacking trial in Denmark.

The site’s supporters have pledged their loyalty online, stating that proxy sites were working and programmers were working to bring others online.

“Long live the Pirate Bay,” one commenter posted.

Others were less positive.

“Rest in peace… It was a hell of a ride,” one comment read.