Swedish prosecutors are expected to charge the operators of Swedish file sharing service The Pirate Bay with “conspiracy to breach copyrights,” later this month according to the Wall Street Journal. The paper has a lengthy article looking at the site which indexes online videos, music and even books and has long since become the scourge of the entertainment industry.

But shutting down the service--which has some 157,000 movies, songs and other files on its site and attracts 1.5 million visitors a day, according to the MPAA’s estimate--has proved difficult. Sweden is apparently a digital pirate’s paradise and its prosecutors are only making a move after years of complaints from Hollywood and from the US government.

In a country where fast speed internet access is standard, copyright laws are weak, enforcement is slack, and there’s a “general antipathy” to the entertainment industry. Seven politicians from the conservative party have called for decriminalizing file-sharing, and as the WSJ notes, a pro-piracy political party has more members than the Greens. Plus, the more Hollywood and governments try to rein the Pirate Bay in, the more popular the site gets. The founders are seen as “plucky upstarts who dared to take on Hollywood.”

The trial is expected to question the legality of BitTorrent, the computer program that speeds the transfer of large files such as movies over the web by breaking them down into smaller pieces. Moreover, The Pirate Bay doesn’t actually store the files on their own computers—rather they are scattered on other computers around the world, prompting the founders to claim they aren’t actually breaking any copyright laws. Even if the sites operators are found guilty, it’s unclear if the Pirate Bay can even be shut down—since the files are held on computers outside the country, and out of Sweden’s jurisdiction.