Swedish police raided The Pirate Bay today, shutting down the world’s largest BitTorrent search index, a major blow to users of the peer-to-peer network.

The Pirate Bay

The raid involved 50 police officers in 10 separate locations, a major offensive against a search index that operated in 25 languages and served as a feeder site of sorts for online piracy of movies, music, audio books, televisions broadcasts, games, and software--racking up 1 million visitors a day.

"This is a very important development for Sweden, a country with a fantastically rich music culture yet which has more recently acquired a reputation as a haven for copyright infringement," John Kennedy, CEO of the gobal music industry trade group IFPI, said in a statement. "The Pirate Bay has damaged the legitimate music industry on an international scale and I am very pleased that the Swedish authorities have today taken such decisive action against it."

The Pirate Bay is a commercial enterprise that made money off advertising and had made no secret of its disdain for copyright laws. Although it did not hold, store, or distribute copyrighted material, it served as a tracker of the world's top 100 BitTorrent sites and a P2P search engine of sorts.

Three unidentified people affiliated with Pirate Bay were arrested and detained for questioning, the IFPI said.