"Pirate-Site in the twilight: right wing populist finances internet-filesharing-site", is the lurid title on the front page of Spiegel Online, this morning.
The truth is quite differen, though, as Magnus Eriksson of Piratbyran, who are closely connected to "The Pirate Bay", tells me.

Magnus, the author of the article tried to connect Carl Lundström to the Pirate Party...

...which doesn't make sense. There are two large organisations who work on file sharing in Sweden. Piratbyran, which is us, who also run The Pirate Bay, and the Pirate Party. Although we do know each other, we are totally different organisations.

How far is Carl Lundström connected to "The Pirate Bay"?
Carl Lundström was the CEO and is still the largest shareholder of Rix Telecom, a large provider in Sweden. Frederik from The Pirate Bay also worked there. At that time Rix supplied bandwidth and server space for The Pirate Bay. In the mean time TPB has left Rix and also Frederik left the company. The Pirate Bay received neither servers nor money from Rix. Only bandwidth and server space.

So the whole thing was an initiative of an employee?
Yes, an employer gave his employee the possibility to pursue a private project, in this case The Pirate Bay.

All that sounds very altruistic. Doesn't Lundström pursue his own interests?
It may be that Lundström is a friend of free culture. But fact is, that he has neither influence on Piratbyran nor on The Pirate Bay. And most certainly not on the Pirate Party which has, as I said, nothing to do with the rest.

On TV Tobias Andersson said "Without the support of Carl Lundström, The Pirate Bay couldn't have started"
Well, probably The Pirate Bay couldn't have existed without the starting aid with bandwidth and server space. In the beginning our advertising contracts were rubbish. But if Frederik had worked at some other provider or somebody else but Lundström had been the CEO, we would have had to find a different solution. I could only speculate how this solution would have looked like, but constructing a personal sponsoring by Lundström out of that is nonsense.

Update: Magnus just added that Der Spiegel never directly contacted The Pirate Bay. "The only contact that existed was to Mikael Wiborg,but he has nothing to do with running pirate bay, just helped them provide legal advise. And he was not around at the time this happened."

Die Süddeutsche Zeitung kommt heute mit einem Interview mit Stanford-Professor Lawrence "Creative Commons" Lessig. Über DRM, Pauschalabgaben, Kulturflatrate und Read-Write-Kultur.

Still the situation in Sweden concerning yesterday's raid on ThePirateBay is more than unclear, not very much information is getting out onto the net.
I had the privilege to conduct a small interview with "darknite" from Piratbyrån/The Pirate Bay hopefully lifting the fog a little bit:
What exactly happened yesterday?
We still don't knoww too much, it is all very chaotic. We still haven't had the chance to see the warrant, so we don't exactly know what they were looking for. We know from AntiPiratByrån (the swedish anti-piracy organization) that the warrant was issued towards the whole provider PRQ. Also not only about 160 servers but also networking equipment was taken.
That means that also other websites were affected?
Yes. The Magazine Säkerhet&Sekretess has issued a first list and asks everybody who is affected to notify them, as they are planning a big article on it. Dagens Industri, a rather large magazine in sweden says there were about 200 customers who have become "innocent victims". The fact that so many innocent websites, also the political organisation "Piratbyrån" have been taken down is much more serious for us than the temporary downtime of The Pirate Bay
Some people were also arrested. What are they being charged with?
Three crew members were arrested and questioned, though they were released again yesterday. They are being charged with copyright infringement. This could change, though. We suspect that AntiPiratByrån mislead the police, accusing ThePirateBay actually offering Warez on the servers.
Is there any estimation from the lawyers?
No, not yet. We are negotiating with a very famous swedish lawyer and trying to convince him to defend us in the upcoming case.
Does The Pirate Bay have a backup-plan?
We are currently working hard on a solution and I would be very disappointed in us if we couldn't get TPB up and running again within a week. It is very possible that we move into other countries, possibly Holland, with Russia as a Backup. There are some problems with decentralization, but a solution which would keep TPB up even if one location is taken down would be good.
What were the political reactions so far?
So far only the pirate's party as well as Piratbyrån has issued a statement. This year is election year in sweden, so we expect a lot more discussion to come. The behaviour of the police and AntiPiratByrån will surely also be debated in public

Thank you very much for this interview.