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The demonstration was organised by several other websites in an attempt to persuade Sweden's government not to prosecute the owners of The Pirate Bay (TPB).

'The demands of the demonstration were that the Swedish government, instead of criminalizing more than one million of their citizens should seek a compromise in the issue,' says the Pirate Watch blog.

Earlier, hackers launched a denial of service attack on the Swedish police website, forcing it offline for a while.

The raids on more than 10 locations were carried out at the behest of Hollywood's major studios in the guise of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and succeeded in closing the website down. TPB's owners said that the site would return within a day or two.

Police turned up at premises of TPB's hosting service last week, with a court order to remove TPB servers, alleging breaches and assisting breaches of copyright law. TPB claims they also removed computers not covered by the order.

'The

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police officers were allowed access to the racks where the TPB servers and other servers are hosted,' TPB said. 'All servers in the racks were clearly marked as to which sites run on each. The police took down all servers in the racks, including the non-commercial site Piratbyrån, the mission of which is to defend the rights of TPB via public debate.'

The MPAA accused TPB of making more than 157,000 files available including recent film releases The Da Vinci Code and Poseidon (although it managed to get the film's name wrong in its press release).

'The actions today taken in Sweden serve as a reminder to pirates all over the world that there are no safe harbors for Internet copyright thieves,' said Dan Glickman, chairman and CEO of MPAA. 'Intellectual property theft is a problem for film industries all over the world and we are glad that the local government in Sweden has helped stop The Pirate Bay from continuing to enable rampant copyright theft on the Internet.'

It said that copyright holders have sent countless cease-and-desist letters to TPB, requesting that its operators remove 'pirated' content, 'and have been met with mockery and scorn'. But as the BBC notes, the legality of the site has not been tested in a Swedish court.

File sharing advocacy site p2pnet said that this is another example of how the MPAA 'routinely uses tax-payer funded international law enforcement agencies to do its corporate dirty work'.