October 1st was a day of some considerable panic in the file-sharing world. Many dozens of file-sharing sites, including The Pirate Bay, went offline at the same time. The problems were caused by a police raid on Swedish webhost PRQ. The authorities, it was later revealed, were targeting two sites.

One was Appbucket.net, a site that was previously subjected to legal action in August when the FBI seized its domain in a crackdown against Android app piracy. The other was Tankafetast, once Sweden's second largest torrent site. The site had called it quits in February after being put under pressure by Antipiratbyran lawyer Henrik Ponten and Hollywood lawyer Monique Wadsted, but it returned shortly after.

This resurrection obviously didn't go unnoticed, hence the PRQ raid three weeks ago today. But despite the setback Tankafetast is now back online, energized, and more belligerent than ever before. On their frontpage is the following notice:


The message, which appears to refer to an earlier statement from Antipiratbyran, says that lawyer Henrik Ponten was wrong to presume that the site had disappeared for good. TorrentFreak spoke with Ponten who declined to comment on the site's return due to there being an ongoing police investigation.

Taunts aside, Tankafetast's operators appear to be trying to raise the profile of the site. They have launched a clothing range, consisting mainly of t-shirts carrying a range of pro-filesharing slogans such as Keep Calm and Download and Support Your Local Uploader, plus a few with defiant messages on Tankafetast's return.

In addition, on Saturday the site's operators announced that in celebration of the site's return they would be hiring three cinemas in Malmo, Gothenburg and Stockholm and giving away tickets to fans of the site. The first viewing has been announced as taking place this Thursday for the premiere of the new Bond movie, Skyfall.

What is interesting to observe here is that when it comes to file-sharing the Swedes are very defiant indeed, even in the face of adversaries such as the government and police. Whether the site will be able to back up its defiance with long-term uptime remains to be seen, but even that seems to be more likely than their aim this week of giving away at least a hundred of their cinema tickets to girls.