The American film and music industry rejoiced over the raid by the Swedish police on The Pirate Bay. But reports that the US government was behind the action against the Sweden-based file sharing site have now resulted in the Swedish government being reported to the country's Constitutional Committee. According to the news, 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. In April a Swedish delegation consisting of representatives of the National Police Department, the Police Board and the Ministry of Justice travelled to Washington to discuss The Pirate Bay.

Swedish police and prosecutors were then given the go-ahead to act. According to one prosecutor the legal situation was still unclear, but the state secretary Dan Eliasson gave the order for the operation to begin, according to the news. He said, 'I can guarantee that nobody from the Ministry of Justice gets involved in operational work in individual cases. Neither politicians nor civil servants.' The Swedish delegation and the US authorities simply discussed copyright issues and how to deal with file sharing in general terms and did not focus on The Pirate Bay specifically. 'We have not had any demands about The Pirate Bay from the American authorities at a government level. On the other hand, there are often discussions at a civil servant level about the problem of file sharing and copyright breaches', he said. Eliasson also confirmed that the MPAA has lobbied the Swedish government many times. The Centre Party's justice spokesman Linander has asked the parliamentary Constitutional Committee to investigate justice minister Bodström and others in office. Linander says that American pressure led Swedish politicians to get involved in the police's operations. Last Thursday Bodström said that he found it hard to believe that anyone would try to direct the Swedish police or prosecutors to make arrests.

During Wednesday's raid on The Pirate Bay police confiscated around two hundred servers. Then on Thursday night, apparently in response, an attack from hackers overloaded the Swedish police's web site leaving offline for almost a day. On Sunday morning the police site had crashed again. The government's web site was functioning again at around 8am on Sunday morning, but it was still unclear whether it was completely back to normal. A group calling themselves 'World Wide Hackers' claimed responsibility for the attacks in a telephone call to the newspaper on Saturday night. Experts say that the attack on the government's site followed the same pattern as that on the police. But officials are still not saying what forced the most important web site for the Swedish authorities out of action.

Throughout the day the government's IT department is to work on preventing further attacks from crashing the site. The file sharing battle even reached the streets of Stockholm on Saturday, as hundreds of demonstrators with pirate flags gathered in Mynttorget, in the city's Gamla Stan. The protestors demanded that The Pirate Bay's servers be given back and the investigation against the site's operators closed. At the demonstration, which was organised by Piratbyrån, The Pirate Party and the youth wings of the Greens the Left Party and the Liberals, many spoke out against the Swedish authorities' recent raids. The leader of the Liberals' youth association, Fredrik Malm, pointed out that despite the massive police raid on The Pirate Bay, the site was already operating again. The cost of the action had been wasted, he said. File sharing site The Pirate Bay, which was closed down following Wednesday's raid by the Swedish police, opened again on Saturday morning under a different name: The Police Bay. The site's performance was still patchy at lunchtime on Saturday, despite being run from new servers in Holland after all the Swedish equipment was confiscated.