The Pirate Bay thumbed its nose at the authorities again this weekend, claiming it now has more peers worldwide than there are people in its home turf of Sweden.

The notorious website, a long-time thorn in the side of film and music execs throughout the globe, claimed on Saturday that it had passed ten million peers and one million torrents to make it "the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker".

According to Slyck, which reported the figures, Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde said: "We're very happy to be part of all of this, and hope our users keep sharing those files."

He also gloated: "We're looking to break 20 million as well."

However, a district court case which is expected to kick off in Sweden later this week, hopes to at least put a dent in Sunde's ambitions by dissuading advertisers from punting their client's wares on the site.

On Thursday (31 January), Swedish public prosecutor Hakan Roswall will finally bring charges against the file-sharing website's organisers, who will be slapped with accusations of accessory and conspiracy to break copyright law, Reuters reports.

Of course, much to the chagrin of music and film industry bigwigs everywhere, The Pirate Bay is likely to argue that it's not doing anything wrong, given that no copyright material is stored on its servers.

But Roswall takes an unsurprisingly dim view against the site. He told Reuters: "It's not merely a search engine. It's an active part of an action that aims at, and also leads to, making copyright protected material available.

"It's a classic example of accessory – to act as intermediary between people who commit crimes, whether it's in the physical or the virtual world."

He accepts, however, that any possible conviction against Pirate Bay individuals including Sunde, Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij would not be enough to effectively tame the BitTorrent tracker beast, given that its infrastructure is scattered at locations throughout the world. ®

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