Three days later, the site was back up and running and more popular than ever thanks to a swell of mainstream media coverage.

That led to Swedish police raiding the outfit in 2006, confiscating enough servers and computer equipment to fill three trucks and making two arrests. The US threatened that unless something was done to take the site offline, it'd impose trade sanctions against Sweden by way of The World Trade Organization.

Given Sweden's lax laws regarding copyrighted materials, Hollywood had to enlist the United States government for help cracking down on the site. Naturally, it went after the biggest target to exact its revenge: the Sweden-based site known as The Pirate Bay. The movie industry claimed that in 2006 alone, piracy cost it some $6.1 billion. You didn't have to log in to some arcane message board or know someone to get an invite - the anonymous file-sharing site was open to everybody and made piracy as simple as a Google search. Up until a police raid took it offline last week, it was the most popular place to grab Sunday's episode of The Newsroom or Gone Girlmonths before the Blu-ray hits stores. For the past decade, if you wanted to download copyrighted material and didn't want to pay for it, it's likely you turned to The Pirate Bay.

Pirate bays website