According to Swedish Television’s news programme, Rapport, the action was the result of contact between the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the White House.
The US State Department then turned to Stockholm, with a demand for Sweden to do something about The Pirate Bay.
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The Centre Party’s justice spokesman, Johan Linander, has now asked the parliamentary Constitutional Committee to investigate justice minister Thomas Bodström and others in office.
A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the government’s website launched by hackers and demos waged by the public have generated a lot of publicity and commentary. Most surprising is the emergence of a political party that looks to stand a very good chance of capturing the 4% of popular vote needed to earn seats in the Parliament this September.
George South reports that the Pirate Party is “closely linked to the Piratbyrån” (The Bureau of Piracy) and is “heavily influenced by thinkers such as Lawrence Lessig.”
When the Pirate Bay’s servers were seized by local police on 31 May, along with those of Piratbyrån, an advocacy group for copyright reform, the resultant media blaze took almost everybody by surprise. “The situation is really hot here now,” says Rasmus Fleischer, a spokesperson for Piratbyrån. “We’re actually delighted at the raids, as they have brought our issues to the front pages of newspapers, to the top of the TV news.”
Fleischer’s organisation founded the Pirate Bay, although the two are no longer formally affiliated. The additional seizure of Piratbyrån’s server, along with those of over a hundred unrelated organisations, was widely seen as heavy-handed, since the police admitted that they were not connected to any illegal activity. It is still not clear that the Pirate Bay itself was breaking the law, even under the EU Copyright Directive, since it did not host any of the copyright-infringing files on its servers, only files which direct users to them.