The world's most notorious BitTorrent tracking site, The Pirate Bay, won't be going to Davy Jones' Locker, even if its four operators are convicted of facilitating copyright infringement, one of the defendants said in an interview Friday with Wired.com's Threat Level. Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi, one of the four Swedes charged in Sweden on Thursday, said in a telephone interview that the site has set up a clandestine, double-blind operation with its servers spread throughout the world -- and out of reach of the Swedish authorities. "The Pirate Bay is not in Sweden," the 29-year-old Kolmisoppi said. Where are the servers? "It's a distributed system. We don't know where the servers are. We gave them to people we trust and they don't know it's The Pirate Bay," Kolmisoppi said. "They then rent locations and space for them somewhere else. It could be three countries. It could be six countries. We don't want to know because then you'll have a problem shutting them down."

The Pirate Bay allows users to search for and access indexed torrents, which contain the information needed to download data containing copyright-infringing content like movies, music, software and other material from users of the service. The Bay, he said, operates like the search engine Google, which also points the way to copyrighted works on the internet. "We're just a general-purpose search engine and torrent-tracking system. You can put whatever you want on the Pirate Bay," Kolmisoppi said. "We don't participate in how the people communicate with each other. We only participate in bringing the possibility to communicate and share files."