The investigation following a datacenter raid involving The Pirate Bay nearly five years ago has been closed. The prosecution says it managed to obtain sufficient evidence against a suspect, but it failed to get a mandatory response to the final serving. With the statute of limitations expiring, the entire criminal investigation is now over.
On December 9, 2014, the file-sharing world was in turmoil.
Swedish police raided the Nacka station, a nuclear-proof datacenter in Stockholm, and confiscated dozens of servers.
The raid caused downtime at many popular torrent sites including The Pirate Bay. While a TPB insider later denied that its servers were taken, it remained offline for nearly two months.
After the raid, it became clear that The Pirate Bay was indeed the main reason for the enforcement effort. Similar to the earlier raid in 2005, a criminal investigation was launched to hold the operators responsible and keep the site offline.
However, where the first enforcement action resulted in several criminal convictions, the most recent investigation had limited success.
Last week we reported that the police ended the investigation into Pirate Bay co-founder Fredrik Neij, who was seen as a prime suspect. Today, we can report that the entire criminal investigation is now closed.
While the prosecution gathered a substantial amount of evidence, the case can’t continue, simply because time ran out.
“The investigation was closed because the statute of limitations expired,” Anna Ginner, Prosecutor at the National Intellectual Property Crime Unit tells us.
There was enough evidence to pursue a case against a suspect, which we believe is Fredrik Neij. However, the prosecution was unable to reach this person for “final serving,” a process where defendants can review the evidence, which is mandatory in Sweden.
“The investigation was finished. However, we did not manage to contact the suspect to give him the possibility to review the investigation on final serving,” Ginner notes.
Although there are no criminal convictions, the police and prosecution did book some results, Ginner says.
The investigation led to a legal battle over the thepiratebay.se domain name, which was registered to Neij. This case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which forfeited the domain to the Swedish state last year.
The prosecution may have hoped for more but the lack of a conviction doesn’t come as a complete surprise. In 2017, the then leading prosecutor Henrik Rasmusson already warned that time was running out and that oral evidence was weakening.
Due to secrecy provisions, the prosecution can’t comment on whether The Pirate Bay remains a topic of interest, but it’s clear that the investigation following the 2014 raid is now closed.
Last week Neij told us that he is pleased that the case was dropped.
“Now that the investigation is closed, I’m looking forward to being compensated for them unnecessarily holding all my computer equipment for four years and ten months,” he said.
