The Pirate Bay
Encyclopedia
The Pirate Bay is a Swedish
website which hosts magnet links and .torrent files, which allow users to share electronic files, including multimedia, computer games and software via BitTorrent. The Pirate Bay bills itself as "The world's most resilient BitTorrent site" and is currently ranked as the 77th most visited website in the world and 14th in Sweden by Alexa Internet
, has over 5 million registered users and, as of 2011, hosts more than 3.5 million torrent files.
According to the Los Angeles Times
, The Pirate Bay is "one of the world's largest facilitators of illegal downloading" and "the most visible member of a burgeoning international anti-copyright
or pro-piracy movement".
Initially established in November 2003 by the Swedish anti-copyright
organization Piratbyrån
(The Piracy Bureau), The Pirate Bay has been run as a separate organization since October 2004. The Pirate Bay was first run by Gottfrid Svartholm
and Fredrik Neij
, who are known by their nicknames "anakata" and "TiAMO", respectively. They have both been accused by the Motion Picture Association of America
with "assisting in making copyrighted content available". On 31 May 2006, the website's servers in Stockholm
were raided and taken away by Swedish police, leading to three days of downtime
. The Pirate Bay has been involved in a number of lawsuits, both as plaintiff and as defendant. On 17 April 2009, Peter Sunde
, Fredrik Neij
, Gottfrid Svartholm
and Carl Lundström
were found guilty of assistance
to copyright infringement
and sentenced to one year in prison and payment of a fine of 30 million SEK
(app. 4,200,000 USD
; 2,800,000 GBP
; or 3,100,000 EUR
), after a trial
of nine days. The defendants have appealed against the verdict and the judge was accused of bias. On 26 November 2010, a Swedish appeals court returned the verdict, decreasing the original prison terms but increasing the fine to 46 million SEK. On 17 May 2010, due to an injunction against their bandwidth provider, the site was taken offline. Access to the website was later restored with a message making fun of the injunction on their front page. On 23 June 2010 the group Piratbyrån disbanded due to the death of Ibi Kopimi Botani, a prominent member and co-founder of the group.
The Pirate Bay is hosted by PRQ
, a Sweden-based company, owned by creators of TPB Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij. PRQ is said to provide "highly secure, no-questions-asked hosting services to its customers."
Serious Tubes Networks
is currently providing network connectivity to The Pirate Bay.
, small files that contain metadata
necessary to download the data files from other users. The torrents are organized into categories: "Audio", "Video" (including a 3D section), "Applications", "Games", "Other" and "Porn". Normally the "Porn" category is only visible for registered and logged-in users who select the "show pornographic torrents" option in their settings page. However it is currently not necessary with a workaround, allowing unregistered users to search for the content, but not browse through it. Registration requires an email address and is free; registered users may upload their own torrents and comment on torrents.
The website features a browse function that enables users to see what is available in broad categories like Audio, Video, and Games, as well as sub-categories like Audio books, High-res Movies, and Comics. The contents of a category can be sorted by file name, the number of seeds or leechers, the date posted, etc.
According to Piratbyrån
, The Pirate Bay is a long-running project of performance art
. Normally the front page of The Pirate Bay features a drawing of a pirate ship with the logo of the 1980s anti-copyright infringement campaign, Home Taping Is Killing Music
, on its sails.
servers
ran a custom web server
called Hypercube. An old version is open source. On 1 June 2005, The Pirate Bay updated its website in an effort to reduce bandwidth
usage, which was reported to be at 2 HTTP requests per millisecond
on each of the four web server
s, as well as to create a more user friendly interface for the front-end of the website. The website now runs Lighttpd
and PHP
on its dynamic front ends, MySQL
at the database back end, Sphinx
on the two search systems, memcached
for caching SQL queries and PHP-sessions, and Varnish
in front of Lighttpd for caching static content. , The Pirate Bay consisted of 31 dedicated servers including nine dynamic web fronts, a database, two search engines, and eight BitTorrent trackers.
On 7 December 2007, The Pirate Bay finished the move from Hypercube to Opentracker
as its BitTorrent tracking software, also enabling the use of the UDP
tracker protocol for which Hypercube lacked support. This allowed UDP multicast
to be used to synchronize the multiple servers with each other much faster than before. Opentracker is free software.
In June 2008, The Pirate Bay announced that their servers would support SSL encryption (accessible via https://thepiratebay.org) in response to Sweden's new wiretapping law.
On 19 January 2009, The Pirate Bay launched IPv6
support for their tracker system, using an IPv6-only version of Opentracker
.
On 17 November 2009, The Pirate Bay shut off its tracker service permanently, stating that centralized trackers are no longer needed since distributed hash table
s (DHT), peer exchange
(PEX), and magnet links allow peers to find each other and content in a decentralized way.
(US$4,925.83) to The Pirate Bay, which they used to buy new servers. , the website is financed through advertisements on their result pages. According to speculations by Svenska Dagbladet, the advertisements generate about 600,000 SEK (US$84,442.80) per month. In an investigation in 2006, the police concluded that The Pirate Bay brings in 1.2 million SEK (US$168,885.60) per year from advertisements. The prosecution estimated in the 2009 trial from emails and screenshots that the advertisements pay over 10 million SEK (US$1.40738M) a year, but in the indictment used the estimate from the police investigation. The lawyers of the site's administrators counted the 2006 revenue closer to 725,000 SEK (US$102,035.05). The verdict of the trial however quoted the estimate from the preliminary investigation.
In April 2007, a rumor was confirmed on the Swedish talk show Bert that The Pirate Bay had received financial support from right-wing entrepreneur Carl Lundström
. This caused some furor since Lundström, an heir to the Wasabröd
fortune, is known for financing several far-right political parties and movements like Sverigedemokraterna and Bevara Sverige Svenskt
(Keep Sweden Swedish). During the talk show, Piratbyrån
spokesman Tobias Andersson acknowledged that "without Lundström's support, Pirate Bay would not have been able to start" and claimed that most of the money went towards acquiring servers and bandwidth.
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) claims that the website is extremely profitable, and that The Pirate Bay is more engaged in making profit than supporting people's rights. The website has insisted that these allegations are not true, stating, "It's not free to operate a Web Site on this scale," and, "If we were making lots of money I, Svartholm, wouldn't be working late at the office tonight, I'd be sitting on a beach somewhere, working on my tan." In response to claims of annual revenue exceeding US$3 million made by the IFPI, the site's spokesman Peter Sunde argues that the website's high bandwidth, power, and hardware costs eliminate the potential for profit. The Pirate Bay, he says, may ultimately be operating at a loss. In the 2009 trial, the defense estimated the site's yearly expenses to be 800,000 SEK (US$112,590.40). It is possible to make donations to the Pirate Bay and the site also ran a fund intended to buy Sealand
, a platform with debated micro-nation
status.
, PRQ
. The company is owned by two operators of The Pirate Bay. Three people – Gottfrid Svartholm
, Mikael Viborg, and Fredrik Neij
– were held by the police for questioning, but were released later that evening. All servers in the room were seized, including those running the website of Piratbyrån
, an independent organization fighting for file sharing rights, as well as servers unrelated to The Pirate Bay or other file sharing activities, including a Russian opposition news agency. Equipment such as hardware routers, switches, blank CDs, and fax machines were also seized.
The Motion Picture Association of America
(MPAA) wrote in a press release: "Since filing a criminal complaint in Sweden in November 2004, the film industry has worked vigorously with Swedish and U.S. government officials in Sweden to shut this illegal website down." MPAA CEO Dan Glickman
also stated, "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." The MPAA press release set forth its justification for the raid and claimed that there were three arrests; however, the individuals were not actually arrested, only held for questioning. The release also reprinted John G. Malcolm's allegation that The Pirate Bay was making money from the distribution of copyrighted material, a criticism denied by the Pirate Bay.
After the raid, The Pirate Bay displayed a message that confirmed that the Swedish police had executed search warrants for breach of copyright law or assisting such a breach. The closure message initially caused some confusion because on 1 April 2005, April Fool's Day, The Pirate Bay had posted a similar message as a prank, stating that they were unavailable due to a raid by the Swedish Anti-Piracy Bureau and IFPI
. Piratbyrån set up a temporary news blog
to inform the public about the incident. On 2 June 2006, The Pirate Bay was available once again, with their logo depicting a pirate ship firing cannon balls at the Hollywood sign
.
The Pirate Bay has servers in both Belgium and Russia which may be used in the future in case of another raid. According to The Pirate Bay, in the two years following the raid, it grew from one million to 2.7 million registered users and from 2.5 million to 12 million peers. The Pirate Bay now claims more than twenty-five million active users.
Sweden's largest technology museum, the Swedish National Museum of Science and Technology
, acquired one of the confiscated servers in 2009 and placed it in an exhibit for having great symbolic value as a "big problem or a big opportunity".
was put up for "sale", the ACFI and The Pirate Bay tried to buy it. The Sealand government however did not want to be involved with The Pirate Bay, as it was their opinion that file sharing represented "theft of proprietary rights". A new plan was formed to buy an island instead, but this too was never implemented, despite the website having raised US$25,000, €15,000 in donations for this cause.
The P2P
news blog
, Torrent Freak
, reported on 12 October 2007 that the Internet domain ifpi.com, which previously belonged to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry
, an anti-piracy organisation, had been acquired by The Pirate Bay. When asked about how they got hold of the domain, Sunde told TorrentFreak, "It's not a hack, someone just gave us the domain name. We have no idea how they got it, but it's ours and we're keeping it." The website was renamed "The International Federation of Pirates Interests." However, the IFPI filed a complaint with the World Intellectual Property Organisation shortly thereafter, which subsequently ordered The Pirate Bay to return the domain name to the IFPI.
had been made available through a torrent on The Pirate Bay. In Sweden, preliminary investigations become publicly available the moment a lawsuit is filed and can be ordered from the court by any individual. The document included pictures from the autopsy of the two murdered children, which caused their father Nicklas Jangestig to urge the website to have the pictures removed. The Pirate Bay refused to remove the torrent. The number of downloads increased to about 50,000 a few days later. On 11 September 2008, the website's press contact Peter Sunde participated in the debate program Debatt on the public broadcaster SVT
. Sunde had agreed to participate on the condition that the father Nicklas Jangestig would not take part in the debate. Jangestig ultimately did participate in the program by telephone, which made Sunde feel betrayed by SVT. This caused The Pirate Bay to suspend all of its press contacts the following day.
“I don’t think it’s our job to judge if something is ethical or unethical or what other people want to put out on the internet,” said The Pirate Bay’s spokesperson Peter Sunde to TV4.
by an anonymous hacker. Some of the leaked emails discussed hiring hackers
to perform DDOS attacks
on The Pirate Bay's servers and trackers. In response to the leak, The Pirate Bay filed charges in Sweden against MediaDefender clients Twentieth Century Fox Sweden AB, EMI
Sweden AB, Universal Music Group
Sweden AB, Universal Pictures
Nordic AB, Paramount Home Entertainment
(Sweden) AB, Atari
Nordic AB, Activision
Nordic, Ubisoft
Sweden AB, Sony BMG Music Entertainment
(Sweden) AB, and Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
Nordic AB, but the charges were not pursued. MediaDefender's stocks fell sharply after this incident, and several media companies withdrew from the service after the company announced the leak had caused $825,000 in losses. Later, The Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde
accused police investigator Jim Keyzer of a conflict of interest when he declined to investigate MediaDefender. Keyzer later accepted a job for MPAA member studio Warner Brothers. The leaked emails revealed that other MPAA member studios hired MediaDefender to pollute The Pirate Bay's torrent database, contradicting the MPAA's earlier claim that its member studios were not MediaDefender clients.
The Swedish online business newspaper E24 Näringsliv
reported on 15 February 2008 that the UK
based anti-piracy firm Web Sheriff
intended to file lawsuits in the United States and Sweden against The Pirate Bay on behalf of Prince
, the Village People
, Van Morrison
, and the estate of Chet Baker
. Lars Sandberg, Web Sheriff's local counsel in Sweden, told E24 that Web Sheriff had not yet determined whether to sue the individuals or the companies associated with the website. Peter Sunde dismissed the threats as relying on American law inapplicable in Sweden.
In an official letter to the Swedish Minister of Justice, the International Olympic Committee
(IOC) requested assistance from the Swedish government to prevent video clips from the Beijing Olympics from being distributed via The Pirate Bay. The IOC claimed there were more than one million downloads of footage from the Olympics – mostly of the opening ceremony. The Pirate Bay, however, did not take anything down, and temporarily renamed the website to The Beijing Bay.
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The trial
against the men behind the Pirate Bay started in Sweden on 16 February 2009. They are accused of breaking Swedish copyright law. The defendants, however, continued to be confident about the outcome. Half the charges against the Pirate Bay were dropped on the second day of the trial.
The three operators of the site and their one investor Carl Lundström
were convicted in Stockholm district court on 17 April 2009 and sentenced to one year in jail each and a total of 30 million SEK
(3.6 million USD, 2.7 million EUR
, 2.4 million GBP) in fines and damages. The defendants' lawyers have appealed to the Svea Court of Appeal
and have requested a retrial in the district court, alledging bias on behalf of judge Tomas Norström, the same judge who ordered the 2006 raid. The case will likely be appealed to the Supreme Court of Sweden
(and parts of the case may be remitted to the European Court of Justice
), and thus the appeal process could take several years before a verdict is final.
On 13 May 2009 several record companies again sued Neij, Svartholm, Sunde and also The Pirate Bay's main internet service provider
Black Internet. They required enforcement for ending The Pirate Bay's accessory to copyright infringement that had not stopped despite the court order in April, and in the complaint listed several pages of works being shared with the help of the site. The suit was joined by several major film companies on 30 July. The Stockholm district court ruled on 21 August that Black Internet must stop making available the specific works mentioned in the judgment, or face a 500,000 SEK fine. The company was notified of the order on 24 August, and they complied with it on the same day by disconnecting The Pirate Bay. Computer Sweden noted that the judgment did not order The Pirate Bay to be disconnected, but the ISP had no other option for stopping the activity on the site. It is the first time in Sweden for an ISP to be forced to stop providing access for a website. A public support fund fronted by the CEO of the ISP was set up to cover the legal fees of an appeal. Pirate Party leader Rickard Falkvinge
submitted the case for Parliamentary Ombudsman
review, criticising the court's order to make intermediaries responsible for relayed content and to assign active crime prevention tasks to a private party.
The Stockholm District Court ordered on 28 October 2009 a temporary injunction on Neij and Svartholm with a penalty of 500,000 SEK each, forbidding them from participating in the operation of The Pirate Bay's website or trackers.
The Svea Court of Appeal
decided on 21 May 2010 not to change the orders on Black Internet or Neij and Svartholm.
. They copied the user database, which included over 1.5 million users. The Pirate Bay reassured its users that the data was of no value and that passwords and e-mails were encrypted and hashed
. Some blogs stated that a group known as the AUH (Arga Unga Hackare, Swedish for "Angry Young Hackers") were suspected of executing the attack, however the AUH stated on the Computer Sweden newspaper that they were not involved and would take revenge on those responsible for the attack.
On 27 April 2009 the website of The Pirate Bay had fiber
IPv4
connectivity issues. There was widespread speculation this was a forced outage from the Swedish antipiracy group, accelerated somewhat by TPB adding contact details for the Swedish antipiracy group's lawyers to its RIPE
database record. The site and its forums were still available via IPv6
at the time.
On 24 August 2009 one of The Pirate Bay's upstream providers was ordered to discontinue service for the website by a Swedish court in response to a civil action brought by several entertainment companies including Disney, Universal
, Time Warner
, Columbia
, Sony
, NBC
, and Paramount
. According to the Pirate Bay blog, this caused a downtime
of 3 hours, however some users were unable to access the site immediately following the relocation due to unrelated technical difficulties. The site was fully operational again for everyone within 24 hours.
On 6 October 2009, one of the IP transit providers to The Pirate Bay blocked all Pirate Bay traffic causing an outage for most users around the world. On 6 October 2009, the site was back online at an IP address at CyberBunker
, located in the Netherlands. It is not known whether The Pirate Bay is actually located at CyberBunker or whether they are using the CyberBunker service that routes Cyberbunker IP addresses to any datacenter around the world. These routes are not visible from the outside world.
CyberBunker was given a court injunction on 17 May 2010, taking the site offline only briefly; later that day, hosting was restored by Sweden's Piratpartiet (The Pirate Party). Former spokesman for the Pirate Bay, Peter Sunde, commented that it would now be very difficult to stop the site because it would now be seen as political censorship if anyone tries to shut it down.
On 8 July 2010, a group of Argentinean hackers gained access to The Pirate Bay’s administration panel through a security breach via the backend of The Pirate Bay website. They were able to delete torrents and expose users’ IP-addresses, emails and MD5-hashed passwords. The Pirate Bay was taken offline for upgrades. Users visiting the website were met by the following message: "Upgrading some stuff, database is in use for backups, soon back again. Btw, it's nice weather outside I think."
In 2007, BayImg
, an image hosting website similar to TinyPic
went online in June. Pre-publication images posted to BayImg became part of a legal battle when Conde Nast
's network was later allegedly hacked.
In August, The Pirate Bay relaunched the BitTorrent website Suprnova.org
to perform the same functions as The Pirate Bay, with different torrent trackers, but the site languished; the domain was returned to its original owner in August 2010, and it now redirects to Torrentfreak.tv.
Suprbay.org was introduced in August as the official forum for ThePirateBay.org and the various sites connected to it. Users can request reseeding of torrents, or report malware within torrent files or illegal material on ThePirateBay.org. SlopsBox, a disposable e-mail address
anti-spam service, appeared in December, and was reviewed in 2009.
BOiNK was announced in October in response to the raid on Oink's Pink Palace
, a music-oriented BitTorrent website. A month later Sunde canceled BOiNK, citing the many new music websites created since the downfall of OiNK.
In 2008 Baywords was launched as a free blog
ging service that lets users of the site blog
about anything as long as it does not break any Swedish laws. In December, The Pirate Bay resurrected ShareReactor
as a combined eD2k
and BitTorrent site. The same month, the Vio mobile video converter was released, designed to convert video files for playback on mobile devices such as iPhone
, BlackBerry
, Android, many Nokia
and Windows Mobile
devices.
In 2009, Pastebay, a note sharing service similar to Pastebin
, was made available to the public as of 23 March. The Video Bay video streaming/sharing site was announced in June to be "The YouTube Killer", with content viewable in HTML 5-capable browsers. The site was in an "Extreme Beta" phase; a message on the homepage instructed the user "don't expect anything to work at all". , The Video Bay is currently offline.
On 18 April 2011, Pirate Bay temporarily changed its name to "Research Bay" to aid P2P researchers of the Cybernorms group
, was assisting its customers in copyright infringement by allowing the use of The Pirate Bay, and that they were to block access to the site. Although the ISP had decided to challenge the verdict with support from the Danish Telecommunication Industries Association, they complied with it and blocked access to The Pirate Bay. The Pirate Bay reacted by creating an alternate site with instructions on how to work around the block, while the IFPI
welcomed the block and encouraged other ISPs to follow suit. The verdict was affirmed in the Eastern High Court of Denmark on 26 November 2008. Following the court's decision, TDC
, Denmark's largest ISP and owner of most of the cables, decided to block access to The Pirate Bay as a preventive measure. Other Danish ISPs have commented that they would prefer not to intervene in their customers' communication, but have reluctantly put the block in effect in order to avoid fines. Tele2's owner Telenor
in turn appealed the high court verdict to the Supreme Court of Denmark
, which in April 2009 accepted the case for processing.
, one of the major internet service providers in Finland, must cease to provide copyrighted material from The Pirate Bay website by 18 November 2011 with the threat of a 100 000 € fine.
’s member companies.
Tellas/WIND Hellas blocked the site, as a side effect of blocking applied in Italy, since apparently traffic is routed via the sister network Wind Italy
servers. Unlike in Italy, in Greece it is not required by law for ISPs to restrict access to The Pirate Bay.
Tellas/WIND Hellas managed to circumvent the problem as of 19 March 2010 so that access through the ISP is granted to their users, as well as to the rest of Greek internet users. Nevertheless, sometimes Tellas users still can't load the whole page or can't load the page at all.
, Ireland's most popular internet provider, was taken to court by the four large music labels EMI
, Sony
, Universal Music Group
and Warner Music Group
in order to have the ISP monitor its customers and spot illegal file sharing. After eight court days, the parties reached a settlement to introduce a three strikes policy to disconnect customers involved in copyright infringing activity. The Irish Recorded Music Association
continues to negotiate with other ISPs for a similar agreement. On 21 February 2009, Eircom however declared that access to The Pirate Bay would soon be blocked altogether, but retracted that on 24 February 2009, stating that they would not block without a court order. Eircom reversed themselves again on 20 August 2009, announcing that they would block the website starting in September. As of 1 September 2009 Eircom blocked access to The Pirate Bay, though it is still accessible via proxy servers, and still accessible in Ireland to subscribers of other ISP companies.
In a judgment given by Irish High Court Justice Peter Charleton, on April 16, 2010, ruled that the three strikes policy was legal and described the Pirate Bay as a "a site dedicated, on a weird ideological basis, to basically stealing the copyright owned by the plaintiffs in mainly musical works." Following the ruling, the judge was subjected to threats that his life would be "wrecked by computer".
In April 2011 the European Court of Justice ruled that no ISP can be required to filter the Internet, and particularly not to enforce the copyright monopoly.
requested action in Italy. The deputy public prosecutor pursued the complaint in the Bergamo
Court for Preliminary Investigations, which on 1 August 2008 decreed to block access from Italian ISPs to all Pirate Bay addresses. The ruling was based on prevention of copyright violations by the site's users in Italian territory. Once the block had been put in effect, The Pirate Bay responded on 10 August 2008 by posting instructions to work around the block and later by creating a separate site for Italians, but shortly afterwards the ISPs also blocked the alternate site. Some ISPs had implemented the block by redirecting The Pirate Bay traffic to a site owned by the IFPI
. Italian security expert Matteo Flora suggested that by having the page redirected this way, IFPI could access Italian users' cookies and impersonate them on the official The Pirate Bay website. Two Italian IT lawyers Giovanni Battista Gallus and Francesco Micozzi together with forensics expert Matteo Flora appealed to the Bergamo court, which reviewed the case and on 24 September 2008 quashed the original ruling. The decision lifting the block was based on the applicability of the "preventive seizure" section of the Italian Code of Criminal Procedure, which cannot force actions on parties unrelated to the potential offence (ISPs to filter users' traffic). With the April 2009 verdict in Sweden as a precedent, the Bergamo prosecutor appealed the Italian ruling in the Supreme Court of Cassation
to reinstate the block. In September 2009, the Supreme Court annulled the decision to overturn the block, and the case was again reviewed in the Bergamo court.
On 8 February 2010, the web site has been blocked again by the Italian Supreme Court.
ordered the blocking of The Pirate Bay along with several other file-hosting websites via a letter, dated 30 May, to all Malaysian ISPs for violating Section 41 of the Copyright Act 1987, which deals with pirated content
.
hearing against the persons thought responsible for The Pirate Bay. The hearing followed a subpoena from the Dutch record industry trade association BREIN, who had an urgent complaint of intermediary copyright infringement. The defendants did not attend the hearing and hadn't arranged representation, so on 30 July 2009 the court entered an in absentia
default judgment
against them, accepting the complainants demands. It ruled that Neij, Kolmisoppi and Warg are "to stop and keep stopped the infringements on copyright and related rights of Stichting Brein (foundation Brain) in the Netherlands" within 9 August 2009, or face daily penalties of EUR 30,000, up to a maximum total of EUR 3,000,000. They were also ordered to pay the cost of the proceedings. In a separate case handled at the same time, the court ordered the same fines for the expected new owner of The Pirate Bay, Global Gaming Factory X
, were it not to stop the copyright infringements after the site's takeover. According to BREIN director Tim Kuik, it is the first time a foreign website has been ordered to block access from the Netherlands. The BREIN however waived the payment of damages for August and allowed the site to stay online until its expected change of owners at the end of August 2009.
On 2 October 2009, The Pirate Bay's hosting services moved to Ukraine
and their traffic was routed through The Netherlands, but BREIN contacted the ISP NForce and service was stopped. In return, The Pirate Bay moved their hosting location to a nuclear bunker owned by CyberBunker
just outside Kloetinge
in the south of the Netherlands.
rejected demands from the recording artists' copyright organisation TONO
against Norway's largest internet provider, Telenor
, to have The Pirate Bay blocked. In a court ruling on 6 November 2009 the court stated that in today's society it would be unnatural to demand of a private company that it should make judgments on whether a website complied with the law, since making such judgments is considered the responsibility of the authorities.
Facebook
After The Pirate Bay introduced a feature in March 2009 to easily share links to torrents on the popular social networking site Facebook
, Wired
found in May that Facebook had started blocking the links. On further inspection, they discovered that all messages containing links to The Pirate Bay in both public and in private messages, regardless of content, were being blocked. Electronic Frontier Foundation
lawyers commented that Facebook might be working against the US Electronic Communications Privacy Act
by intercepting user messages, but Facebook chief privacy officer Chris Kelly said that they have the right to use blocks on links where there is a "demonstrated disregard for intellectual property rights," following users' agreement on their terms of service. Links to other similar sites have not been blocked.
After the founders of The Pirate Bay lost their 2009 trial, the Belgian Anti-Piracy Foundation (BAF) began pushing two ISPs – Belgacom and Telenet – to block subscriber access to the famous torrent site.
After year-long negotiations between the trio broke down, legal action was the inevitable outcome and in July 2010 their first battle came to a conclusion.
The Antwerp Commercial Court decided that neither ISP would have to block TPB and went on to describe the notion of wholesale site blocking as “disproportionate”.
The ISPs said it wasn’t their position to decide which sites can and can not be accessed by their users. BAF accused them of providing a safe-haven to The Pirate Bay and filed an appeal. The Antwerp Court of Appeal overruled the decision of the Commercial Court and has ordered Belgacom
and Telenet
to initiate DNS blockades of 11 domains connected to The Pirate Bay within 14 days or face fines.
A Pirate Bay spokesperson told that this measure will only have the opposite effect, as there are many ways to circumvent it. “This will just give us more traffic, as always. Thanks for the free advertising.”
The court order has a limitative list of domain names to block, which all include 'www.'. The equivalent URLs without 'www.' are also blocked by ISPs who want to comply with the "spirit of the law" even though the court order doesn't specify that.
NURPA, a nonprofit Belgian advocacy group which promotes and protects digital rights, freedom of expression, privacy and civil liberties, condemn the decision: “The decision of the Antwerp Court of Appeal in the case against Belgacom BAF / Telenet sets a dangerous precedent for blocking of content by Internet service providers in Belgium. It is incompatible with the doctrine of proportionality advocated by the European Court of Human Rights,” says Loconte.
By imposing a site-wide blockade, Loconte says the Court of Appeal has disproportionately censored all content indexed by the site, including legitimately available material.
On Oct 5th, The Pirate Bay registered the domain name depiraatbaai.be, allowing Belgian users to access the site again, even without using alternative dns providers, proving the limits of the court ruling already described by the defendants in their arguments to the court.
(2006), a documentary series about society and filesharing, produced by The League of Noble Peers
and also in the Danish Documentary Good Copy Bad Copy
, which explores the issues surrounding file copyright
. The Pirate Bay has been a topic on the nationally syndicated NPR
radio show On The Media
.
Björn Ulvaeus
, former member of the Swedish pop music group ABBA
, criticised copyright infringing activities of The Pirate Bay supporters as "lazy and mean". In contrast, Brazilian
bestselling author Paulo Coelho
has embraced free sharing online. Coelho supports The Pirate Bay and offered to be a witness in the 2009 trial. He accounts much of his growing sales to his work shared on the Internet and comments that "a person who does not share is not only selfish, but bitter and alone."
and civil
prosecution in Sweden of four individuals charged for promoting the copyright infringement
of others with The Pirate Bay site. The criminal charges were supported by a consortium of intellectual rights
holders led by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry IFPI
, who filed individual civil compensation claims against the owners of The Pirate Bay.
Swedish prosecutor
s filed charges on 31 January 2008 against Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, and Peter Sunde; and Carl Lundström
, a Swedish businessman who through his businesses sold services to the site. The prosecutor claimed the four worked together to administer, host, and develop the site and thereby facilitated other people's breach of copyright law. Some 34 cases of copyright infringements were originally listed, of which 21 were related to music files, 9 to movies, and 4 to games. One case involving music files was later dropped by the copyright holder who made the file available again on The Pirate Bay site. In addition, claims for damages of 117 million kronor
(US$13 million, €12.5 million) were filed. The case was decided jointly by a judge, who was a member of several pro-copyright organisations, and three appointed laymen.
The trial started on 16 February 2009 in the district court
(tingsrätt
) of Stockholm
, Sweden. The hearings ended on 3 March 2009 and the verdict was announced at 11:00 AM on Friday 17 April 2009: Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Carl Lundström were all found guilty and sentenced to serve one year in prison and pay a fine of 30 million Swedish krona (app. €
2.7 million or USD 3.5 million). All of the defendants appealed the verdict.
The appeal trial concluded on 15 October 2010 and the verdict was announced on 26 November. The appeal court shortened sentences of three of the defendants who appeared in court that day. Neij's sentence was reduced to 10 months, Sunde's to eight, and Lundström's to four. However, the fine was increased from 32 to 46 million kronor.
, which won 7.1 % of the Swedish votes and two seats in 2009 European Parliament election
, the NGO Piratbyrån
, and the BitTorrent tracker The Pirate Bay. Of these three, Piratbyrån and The Pirate Bay share a common history but are now separate. Even though the Pirate Party started hosting The Pirate Bay on 18 May 2010, the Pirate Party developed on a completely separate though parallel track and is unrelated to the other two.
60 million (approximately $8.5 million USD
) (30m SEK in cash, 30m SEK in GGF stock).
The Pirate Bay founders stated that the profits from the sale would be placed in an offshore account where it would be used to fund projects pertaining to 'freedom of speech, freedom of information, and the openness of the Internet'. Assurances were made that "no personal data will be transferred in the eventual sale (since no personal data is kept)." Global Gaming Chief Executive Hans Pandeya commented on the site's future by saying "We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site," and announced that users would be charged a monthly fee for access to The Pirate Bay.
Global Gaming Factory's letter of intent expired at the end of September 2009, without the transaction having taken place. This may be due to the company's current financial difficulties. PC World magazine regarded the deal's future as "doomed".
Letters and memos
Video/interviews Interviews (WMV video). With English subtitles.
Sweden
Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....
website which hosts magnet links and .torrent files, which allow users to share electronic files, including multimedia, computer games and software via BitTorrent. The Pirate Bay bills itself as "The world's most resilient BitTorrent site" and is currently ranked as the 77th most visited website in the world and 14th in Sweden by Alexa Internet
Alexa Internet
Alexa Internet, Inc. is a California-based subsidiary company of Amazon.com that is known for its toolbar and Web site. Once installed, the toolbar collects data on browsing behavior which is transmitted to the Web site where it is stored and analyzed and is the basis for the company's Web traffic...
, has over 5 million registered users and, as of 2011, hosts more than 3.5 million torrent files.
According to the Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....
, The Pirate Bay is "one of the world's largest facilitators of illegal downloading" and "the most visible member of a burgeoning international anti-copyright
Anti-copyright
Anti-copyright refers to the complete or partial opposition to prevalent copyright laws. Copyright is known as the owner's right for copies to be only made by the owner or with his/her authorization in form of a license....
or pro-piracy movement".
Initially established in November 2003 by the Swedish anti-copyright
Anti-copyright
Anti-copyright refers to the complete or partial opposition to prevalent copyright laws. Copyright is known as the owner's right for copies to be only made by the owner or with his/her authorization in form of a license....
organization Piratbyrån
Piratbyrån
Piratbyrån was a Swedish organization established to support people opposed to current ideas about intellectual property — by freely sharing information and culture...
(The Piracy Bureau), The Pirate Bay has been run as a separate organization since October 2004. The Pirate Bay was first run by Gottfrid Svartholm
Gottfrid Svartholm
Per Gottfrid Svartholm Warg , alias anakata, is a Swedish computer specialist, known as the co-owner of the web hosting company PRQ and co-founder of the BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay together with Fredrik Neij and Peter Sunde...
and Fredrik Neij
Fredrik Neij
Hans Fredrik Lennart Neij , a.k.a. TiAMO, is a co-founder of The Pirate Bay, a BitTorrent index site and tracker. He also owned the web host PRQ, which previously hosted The Pirate Bay....
, who are known by their nicknames "anakata" and "TiAMO", respectively. They have both been accused by the Motion Picture Association of America
Motion Picture Association of America
The Motion Picture Association of America, Inc. , originally the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America , was founded in 1922 and is designed to advance the business interests of its members...
with "assisting in making copyrighted content available". On 31 May 2006, the website's servers in Stockholm
Stockholm
Stockholm is the capital and the largest city of Sweden and constitutes the most populated urban area in Scandinavia. Stockholm is the most populous city in Sweden, with a population of 851,155 in the municipality , 1.37 million in the urban area , and around 2.1 million in the metropolitan area...
were raided and taken away by Swedish police, leading to three days of downtime
Downtime
The term downtime is used to refer to periods when a system is unavailable.Downtime or outage duration refers to a period of time that a system fails to provide or perform its primary function...
. The Pirate Bay has been involved in a number of lawsuits, both as plaintiff and as defendant. On 17 April 2009, Peter Sunde
Peter Sunde
Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi is an IT expert with Norwegian and Finnish roots. He is best known for being a co-founder and the spokesperson of The Pirate Bay, a BitTorrent tracker site.-Personal life:...
, Fredrik Neij
Fredrik Neij
Hans Fredrik Lennart Neij , a.k.a. TiAMO, is a co-founder of The Pirate Bay, a BitTorrent index site and tracker. He also owned the web host PRQ, which previously hosted The Pirate Bay....
, Gottfrid Svartholm
Gottfrid Svartholm
Per Gottfrid Svartholm Warg , alias anakata, is a Swedish computer specialist, known as the co-owner of the web hosting company PRQ and co-founder of the BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay together with Fredrik Neij and Peter Sunde...
and Carl Lundström
Carl Lundström
Carl Ulf Sture Lundström is a Swedish businessman.Carl Lundström is the son of Ulf Lundström and the grandson of Karl Edvard Lundström, founder of the world's largest crisp bread producer Wasabröd. When his father Ulf Lundström died in 1973, Carl Lundström was one of five heirs to Wasabröd and its...
were found guilty of assistance
Accessory (legal term)
An accessory is a person who assists in the commission of a crime, but who does not actually participate in the commission of the crime as a joint principal...
to copyright infringement
Copyright infringement
Copyright infringement is the unauthorized or prohibited use of works under copyright, infringing the copyright holder's exclusive rights, such as the right to reproduce or perform the copyrighted work, or to make derivative works.- "Piracy" :...
and sentenced to one year in prison and payment of a fine of 30 million SEK
Swedish krona
The krona has been the currency of Sweden since 1873. Both the ISO code "SEK" and currency sign "kr" are in common use; the former precedes or follows the value, the latter usually follows it, but especially in the past, it sometimes preceded the value...
(app. 4,200,000 USD
United States dollar
The United States dollar , also referred to as the American dollar, is the official currency of the United States of America. It is divided into 100 smaller units called cents or pennies....
; 2,800,000 GBP
Pound sterling
The pound sterling , commonly called the pound, is the official currency of the United Kingdom, its Crown Dependencies and the British Overseas Territories of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, British Antarctic Territory and Tristan da Cunha. It is subdivided into 100 pence...
; or 3,100,000 EUR
Euro
The euro is the official currency of the eurozone: 17 of the 27 member states of the European Union. It is also the currency used by the Institutions of the European Union. The eurozone consists of Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg,...
), after a trial
The Pirate Bay trial
The Pirate Bay trial is a joint criminal and civil prosecution in Sweden of four individuals charged for promoting the copyright infringement of others with the torrent tracking website The Pirate Bay...
of nine days. The defendants have appealed against the verdict and the judge was accused of bias. On 26 November 2010, a Swedish appeals court returned the verdict, decreasing the original prison terms but increasing the fine to 46 million SEK. On 17 May 2010, due to an injunction against their bandwidth provider, the site was taken offline. Access to the website was later restored with a message making fun of the injunction on their front page. On 23 June 2010 the group Piratbyrån disbanded due to the death of Ibi Kopimi Botani, a prominent member and co-founder of the group.
Hosting
The Pirate Bay is hosted by PRQ
PRQ
PeRiQuito AB is a Swedish Internet service provider and web hosting company created in 2004.-Ownership:Based in Stockholm, PRQ is owned by Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij, two founders of The Pirate Bay.- Business model :...
, a Sweden-based company, owned by creators of TPB Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij. PRQ is said to provide "highly secure, no-questions-asked hosting services to its customers."
Serious Tubes Networks
Serious Tubes Networks
Serious Tubes Networks is an internet service provider in Stockholm, Sweden, that provides network connectivity for The Pirate Bay, a major BitTorrent search engine....
is currently providing network connectivity to The Pirate Bay.
Website setup
The Pirate Bay allows users to search for and download BitTorrent files (torrents)Torrent file
A torrent file stores metadata used for BitTorrent. It is defined in the BitTorrent specification.Simply, a torrent is data about a target file, though it contains no information about the content of the file. The only data that the torrent holds is information about the location of different...
, small files that contain metadata
Metadata
The term metadata is an ambiguous term which is used for two fundamentally different concepts . Although the expression "data about data" is often used, it does not apply to both in the same way. Structural metadata, the design and specification of data structures, cannot be about data, because at...
necessary to download the data files from other users. The torrents are organized into categories: "Audio", "Video" (including a 3D section), "Applications", "Games", "Other" and "Porn". Normally the "Porn" category is only visible for registered and logged-in users who select the "show pornographic torrents" option in their settings page. However it is currently not necessary with a workaround, allowing unregistered users to search for the content, but not browse through it. Registration requires an email address and is free; registered users may upload their own torrents and comment on torrents.
The website features a browse function that enables users to see what is available in broad categories like Audio, Video, and Games, as well as sub-categories like Audio books, High-res Movies, and Comics. The contents of a category can be sorted by file name, the number of seeds or leechers, the date posted, etc.
According to Piratbyrån
Piratbyrån
Piratbyrån was a Swedish organization established to support people opposed to current ideas about intellectual property — by freely sharing information and culture...
, The Pirate Bay is a long-running project of performance art
Performance art
In art, performance art is a performance presented to an audience, traditionally interdisciplinary. Performance may be either scripted or unscripted, random or carefully orchestrated; spontaneous or otherwise carefully planned with or without audience participation. The performance can be live or...
. Normally the front page of The Pirate Bay features a drawing of a pirate ship with the logo of the 1980s anti-copyright infringement campaign, Home Taping Is Killing Music
Home Taping is Killing Music
"Home Taping Is Killing Music" was the slogan of a 1980s anti-copyright infringement campaign by the British Phonographic Industry , a British music industry trade group. With the rise in cassette recorder popularity, the BPI feared that people being able to record music from the radio onto...
, on its sails.
Technical details
Initially, The Pirate Bay's four LinuxLinux
Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...
servers
Server (computing)
In the context of client-server architecture, a server is a computer program running to serve the requests of other programs, the "clients". Thus, the "server" performs some computational task on behalf of "clients"...
ran a custom web server
Web server
Web server can refer to either the hardware or the software that helps to deliver content that can be accessed through the Internet....
called Hypercube. An old version is open source. On 1 June 2005, The Pirate Bay updated its website in an effort to reduce bandwidth
Bandwidth (computing)
In computer networking and computer science, bandwidth, network bandwidth, data bandwidth, or digital bandwidth is a measure of available or consumed data communication resources expressed in bits/second or multiples of it .Note that in textbooks on wireless communications, modem data transmission,...
usage, which was reported to be at 2 HTTP requests per millisecond
Millisecond
A millisecond is a thousandth of a second.10 milliseconds are called a centisecond....
on each of the four web server
Web server
Web server can refer to either the hardware or the software that helps to deliver content that can be accessed through the Internet....
s, as well as to create a more user friendly interface for the front-end of the website. The website now runs Lighttpd
Lighttpd
lighttpd is an open-source web server more optimized for speed-critical environments than common products while remaining standards-compliant, secure and flexible...
and PHP
PHP
PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document...
on its dynamic front ends, MySQL
MySQL
MySQL officially, but also commonly "My Sequel") is a relational database management system that runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases. It is named after developer Michael Widenius' daughter, My...
at the database back end, Sphinx
Sphinx (search engine)
Sphinx is a free software search engine designed with indexing database content in mind. It currently supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, and ODBC-compliant databases as data sources natively. Other data sources can be indexed via pipe in a custom XML format...
on the two search systems, memcached
Memcached
In computing, memcached is a general-purpose distributed memory caching system that was originally developed by Danga Interactive for LiveJournal, but is now used by many other sites. It is often used to speed up dynamic database-driven websites by caching data and objects in RAM to reduce the...
for caching SQL queries and PHP-sessions, and Varnish
Varnish cache
Varnish is an HTTP accelerator designed for content-heavy dynamic web sites. In contrast to other HTTP accelerators, such as Squid, which began life as a client-side cache, or Apache and nginx, which are primarily origin servers, Varnish was designed from the ground up as an HTTP accelerator...
in front of Lighttpd for caching static content. , The Pirate Bay consisted of 31 dedicated servers including nine dynamic web fronts, a database, two search engines, and eight BitTorrent trackers.
On 7 December 2007, The Pirate Bay finished the move from Hypercube to Opentracker
Opentracker
opentracker is a free BitTorrent peer tracker software that is designed to be fast and to have a low consumption of system resources.- Features :...
as its BitTorrent tracking software, also enabling the use of the UDP
User Datagram Protocol
The User Datagram Protocol is one of the core members of the Internet Protocol Suite, the set of network protocols used for the Internet. With UDP, computer applications can send messages, in this case referred to as datagrams, to other hosts on an Internet Protocol network without requiring...
tracker protocol for which Hypercube lacked support. This allowed UDP multicast
Multicast
In computer networking, multicast is the delivery of a message or information to a group of destination computers simultaneously in a single transmission from the source creating copies automatically in other network elements, such as routers, only when the topology of the network requires...
to be used to synchronize the multiple servers with each other much faster than before. Opentracker is free software.
In June 2008, The Pirate Bay announced that their servers would support SSL encryption (accessible via https://thepiratebay.org) in response to Sweden's new wiretapping law.
On 19 January 2009, The Pirate Bay launched IPv6
IPv6
Internet Protocol version 6 is a version of the Internet Protocol . It is designed to succeed the Internet Protocol version 4...
support for their tracker system, using an IPv6-only version of Opentracker
Opentracker
opentracker is a free BitTorrent peer tracker software that is designed to be fast and to have a low consumption of system resources.- Features :...
.
On 17 November 2009, The Pirate Bay shut off its tracker service permanently, stating that centralized trackers are no longer needed since distributed hash table
Distributed hash table
A distributed hash table is a class of a decentralized distributed system that provides a lookup service similar to a hash table; pairs are stored in a DHT, and any participating node can efficiently retrieve the value associated with a given key...
s (DHT), peer exchange
Peer exchange
Peer exchange or PEX is a communications protocol that augments the BitTorrent file sharing protocol. It allows a group of users that are collaborating to share a given file to do so more swiftly and efficiently....
(PEX), and magnet links allow peers to find each other and content in a decentralized way.
Funding
Petter Nilsson, a candidate on the Swedish political reality show Toppkandidaterna (The Top Candidates), donated 35,000 SEKSwedish krona
The krona has been the currency of Sweden since 1873. Both the ISO code "SEK" and currency sign "kr" are in common use; the former precedes or follows the value, the latter usually follows it, but especially in the past, it sometimes preceded the value...
(US$4,925.83) to The Pirate Bay, which they used to buy new servers. , the website is financed through advertisements on their result pages. According to speculations by Svenska Dagbladet, the advertisements generate about 600,000 SEK (US$84,442.80) per month. In an investigation in 2006, the police concluded that The Pirate Bay brings in 1.2 million SEK (US$168,885.60) per year from advertisements. The prosecution estimated in the 2009 trial from emails and screenshots that the advertisements pay over 10 million SEK (US$1.40738M) a year, but in the indictment used the estimate from the police investigation. The lawyers of the site's administrators counted the 2006 revenue closer to 725,000 SEK (US$102,035.05). The verdict of the trial however quoted the estimate from the preliminary investigation.
In April 2007, a rumor was confirmed on the Swedish talk show Bert that The Pirate Bay had received financial support from right-wing entrepreneur Carl Lundström
Carl Lundström
Carl Ulf Sture Lundström is a Swedish businessman.Carl Lundström is the son of Ulf Lundström and the grandson of Karl Edvard Lundström, founder of the world's largest crisp bread producer Wasabröd. When his father Ulf Lundström died in 1973, Carl Lundström was one of five heirs to Wasabröd and its...
. This caused some furor since Lundström, an heir to the Wasabröd
Wasabröd
The Swedish company Wasabröd is the largest producer in the world of Scandinavian style crisp bread . The Wasabröd company has been in business since 1919, opening its first bakery in the city of Skellefteå...
fortune, is known for financing several far-right political parties and movements like Sverigedemokraterna and Bevara Sverige Svenskt
Bevara Sverige Svenskt
Bevara Sverige Svenskt was a Swedish racist movement based in Stockholm and is a slogan used by various Swedish nationalist parties. The stated objective of the BSS movement, and the aim of the slogan, was to initiate a debate in order to stop immigration by non-Europeans and repatriate non-ethnic...
(Keep Sweden Swedish). During the talk show, Piratbyrån
Piratbyrån
Piratbyrån was a Swedish organization established to support people opposed to current ideas about intellectual property — by freely sharing information and culture...
spokesman Tobias Andersson acknowledged that "without Lundström's support, Pirate Bay would not have been able to start" and claimed that most of the money went towards acquiring servers and bandwidth.
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) claims that the website is extremely profitable, and that The Pirate Bay is more engaged in making profit than supporting people's rights. The website has insisted that these allegations are not true, stating, "It's not free to operate a Web Site on this scale," and, "If we were making lots of money I, Svartholm, wouldn't be working late at the office tonight, I'd be sitting on a beach somewhere, working on my tan." In response to claims of annual revenue exceeding US$3 million made by the IFPI, the site's spokesman Peter Sunde argues that the website's high bandwidth, power, and hardware costs eliminate the potential for profit. The Pirate Bay, he says, may ultimately be operating at a loss. In the 2009 trial, the defense estimated the site's yearly expenses to be 800,000 SEK (US$112,590.40). It is possible to make donations to the Pirate Bay and the site also ran a fund intended to buy Sealand
Principality of Sealand
The Principality of Sealand is an unrecognized entity, located on HM Fort Roughs, a former World War II Maunsell Sea Fort in the North Sea 10 km off the coast of Suffolk, England, United Kingdom ....
, a platform with debated micro-nation
Micronation
Micronations, sometimes also referred to as model countries and new country projects, are entities that claim to be independent nations or states but which are not recognized by world governments or major international organizations...
status.
Raid
On 31 May 2006, a raid against The Pirate Bay and people involved with the website took place as ordered by judge Tomas Norström, later the presiding judge of the 2009 trial, prompted by allegations of copyright violations. Police officers shut down the website and confiscated its servers, as well as all other servers hosted by The Pirate Bay's Internet service providerInternet service provider
An Internet service provider is a company that provides access to the Internet. Access ISPs directly connect customers to the Internet using copper wires, wireless or fiber-optic connections. Hosting ISPs lease server space for smaller businesses and host other people servers...
, PRQ
PRQ
PeRiQuito AB is a Swedish Internet service provider and web hosting company created in 2004.-Ownership:Based in Stockholm, PRQ is owned by Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij, two founders of The Pirate Bay.- Business model :...
. The company is owned by two operators of The Pirate Bay. Three people – Gottfrid Svartholm
Gottfrid Svartholm
Per Gottfrid Svartholm Warg , alias anakata, is a Swedish computer specialist, known as the co-owner of the web hosting company PRQ and co-founder of the BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay together with Fredrik Neij and Peter Sunde...
, Mikael Viborg, and Fredrik Neij
Fredrik Neij
Hans Fredrik Lennart Neij , a.k.a. TiAMO, is a co-founder of The Pirate Bay, a BitTorrent index site and tracker. He also owned the web host PRQ, which previously hosted The Pirate Bay....
– were held by the police for questioning, but were released later that evening. All servers in the room were seized, including those running the website of Piratbyrån
Piratbyrån
Piratbyrån was a Swedish organization established to support people opposed to current ideas about intellectual property — by freely sharing information and culture...
, an independent organization fighting for file sharing rights, as well as servers unrelated to The Pirate Bay or other file sharing activities, including a Russian opposition news agency. Equipment such as hardware routers, switches, blank CDs, and fax machines were also seized.
The Motion Picture Association of America
Motion Picture Association of America
The Motion Picture Association of America, Inc. , originally the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America , was founded in 1922 and is designed to advance the business interests of its members...
(MPAA) wrote in a press release: "Since filing a criminal complaint in Sweden in November 2004, the film industry has worked vigorously with Swedish and U.S. government officials in Sweden to shut this illegal website down." MPAA CEO Dan Glickman
Dan Glickman
Daniel Robert "Dan" Glickman is an American businessman and politician. He served as the United States Secretary of Agriculture from 1995 until 2001, prior to which he represented the Fourth Congressional District of Kansas as a Democrat in Congress for 18 years. He was Chairman and CEO of the...
also stated, "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." The MPAA press release set forth its justification for the raid and claimed that there were three arrests; however, the individuals were not actually arrested, only held for questioning. The release also reprinted John G. Malcolm's allegation that The Pirate Bay was making money from the distribution of copyrighted material, a criticism denied by the Pirate Bay.
After the raid, The Pirate Bay displayed a message that confirmed that the Swedish police had executed search warrants for breach of copyright law or assisting such a breach. The closure message initially caused some confusion because on 1 April 2005, April Fool's Day, The Pirate Bay had posted a similar message as a prank, stating that they were unavailable due to a raid by the Swedish Anti-Piracy Bureau and IFPI
IFPI
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry is the organisation that represents the interests of the recording industry worldwide. It is a not-for-profit members' organisation registered in Switzerland...
. Piratbyrån set up a temporary news blog
Blog
A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...
to inform the public about the incident. On 2 June 2006, The Pirate Bay was available once again, with their logo depicting a pirate ship firing cannon balls at the Hollywood sign
Hollywood Sign
The Hollywood Sign is a landmark and American cultural icon in the Hollywood Hills area of Mount Lee, Santa Monica Mountains, in Los Angeles, California. The sign spells out the name of the area in and white letters. It was created as an advertisement in 1923, but garnered increasing recognition...
.
The Pirate Bay has servers in both Belgium and Russia which may be used in the future in case of another raid. According to The Pirate Bay, in the two years following the raid, it grew from one million to 2.7 million registered users and from 2.5 million to 12 million peers. The Pirate Bay now claims more than twenty-five million active users.
Sweden's largest technology museum, the Swedish National Museum of Science and Technology
Swedish National Museum of Science and Technology
The Swedish National Museum of Science and Technology is a Swedish museum in Stockholm. It is Sweden’s largest museum of technology, and has a national charter to be responsible for preserving the Swedish cultural heritage related to technological and industrial history. Its galleries comprise...
, acquired one of the confiscated servers in 2009 and placed it in an exhibit for having great symbolic value as a "big problem or a big opportunity".
Purchases
In January 2007, when the micronation of SealandPrincipality of Sealand
The Principality of Sealand is an unrecognized entity, located on HM Fort Roughs, a former World War II Maunsell Sea Fort in the North Sea 10 km off the coast of Suffolk, England, United Kingdom ....
was put up for "sale", the ACFI and The Pirate Bay tried to buy it. The Sealand government however did not want to be involved with The Pirate Bay, as it was their opinion that file sharing represented "theft of proprietary rights". A new plan was formed to buy an island instead, but this too was never implemented, despite the website having raised US$25,000, €15,000 in donations for this cause.
The P2P
Peer-to-peer
Peer-to-peer computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads among peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application...
news blog
Blog
A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...
, Torrent Freak
TorrentFreak.com
TorrentFreak is a blog dedicated to reporting the latest news on the BitTorrent protocol and file sharing. TorrentFreak was started in November 2005 by a Dutchman using the pseudonym "Ernesto Van Der Sar"...
, reported on 12 October 2007 that the Internet domain ifpi.com, which previously belonged to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry
IFPI
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry is the organisation that represents the interests of the recording industry worldwide. It is a not-for-profit members' organisation registered in Switzerland...
, an anti-piracy organisation, had been acquired by The Pirate Bay. When asked about how they got hold of the domain, Sunde told TorrentFreak, "It's not a hack, someone just gave us the domain name. We have no idea how they got it, but it's ours and we're keeping it." The website was renamed "The International Federation of Pirates Interests." However, the IFPI filed a complaint with the World Intellectual Property Organisation shortly thereafter, which subsequently ordered The Pirate Bay to return the domain name to the IFPI.
Autopsy photos
In September 2008, the Swedish media reported that the public preliminary investigation protocols concerning a child murder case known as the Arboga caseChristine Schürrer
Christine Schürrer is a German citizen who murdered two Swedish children and seriously injured their mother with 15 blows to the head with a hammer after attacking them in their home in Arboga, Sweden, on March 17, 2008...
had been made available through a torrent on The Pirate Bay. In Sweden, preliminary investigations become publicly available the moment a lawsuit is filed and can be ordered from the court by any individual. The document included pictures from the autopsy of the two murdered children, which caused their father Nicklas Jangestig to urge the website to have the pictures removed. The Pirate Bay refused to remove the torrent. The number of downloads increased to about 50,000 a few days later. On 11 September 2008, the website's press contact Peter Sunde participated in the debate program Debatt on the public broadcaster SVT
Sveriges Television
Sveriges Television AB , Sweden's Television, is a national television broadcaster based in Sweden, funded by a compulsory fee to be paid by all television owners...
. Sunde had agreed to participate on the condition that the father Nicklas Jangestig would not take part in the debate. Jangestig ultimately did participate in the program by telephone, which made Sunde feel betrayed by SVT. This caused The Pirate Bay to suspend all of its press contacts the following day.
“I don’t think it’s our job to judge if something is ethical or unethical or what other people want to put out on the internet,” said The Pirate Bay’s spokesperson Peter Sunde to TV4.
Legal issues
In September 2007, a large number of internal emails were leaked from anti-piracy company MediaDefenderMediadefender
MediaDefender, Inc. is a company that offers services designed to prevent alleged copyright infringement using peer-to-peer distribution. They are controversial because of their use of unusual tactics such as flooding peer-to-peer networks with decoy files that tie up users' computers and...
by an anonymous hacker. Some of the leaked emails discussed hiring hackers
Hacker (computer security)
In computer security and everyday language, a hacker is someone who breaks into computers and computer networks. Hackers may be motivated by a multitude of reasons, including profit, protest, or because of the challenge...
to perform DDOS attacks
Denial-of-service attack
A denial-of-service attack or distributed denial-of-service attack is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users...
on The Pirate Bay's servers and trackers. In response to the leak, The Pirate Bay filed charges in Sweden against MediaDefender clients Twentieth Century Fox Sweden AB, EMI
EMI
The EMI Group, also known as EMI Music or simply EMI, is a multinational music company headquartered in London, United Kingdom. It is the fourth-largest business group and family of record labels in the recording industry and one of the "big four" record companies. EMI Group also has a major...
Sweden AB, Universal Music Group
Universal Music Group
Universal Music Group is an American music group, the largest of the "big four" record companies by its commanding market share and its multitude of global operations...
Sweden AB, Universal Pictures
Universal Pictures
-1920:* White Youth* The Flaming Disc* Am I Dreaming?* The Dragon's Net* The Adorable Savage* Putting It Over* The Line Runners-1921:* The Fire Eater* A Battle of Wits* Dream Girl* The Millionaire...
Nordic AB, Paramount Home Entertainment
Paramount Home Entertainment
Paramount Home Entertainment is the division of Paramount Pictures dealing with home video founded in late 1975.-History:...
(Sweden) AB, Atari
Atari
Atari is a corporate and brand name owned by several entities since its inception in 1972. It is currently owned by Atari Interactive, a wholly owned subsidiary of the French publisher Atari, SA . The original Atari, Inc. was founded in 1972 by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. It was a pioneer in...
Nordic AB, Activision
Activision
Activision is an American publisher, majority owned by French conglomerate Vivendi SA. Its current CEO is Robert Kotick. It was founded on October 1, 1979 and was the world's first independent developer and distributor of video games for gaming consoles...
Nordic, Ubisoft
Ubisoft
Ubisoft Entertainment S.A. is a major French video game publisher and developer, with headquarters in Montreuil, France. The company has a worldwide presence with 25 studios in 17 countries and subsidiaries in 26 countries....
Sweden AB, Sony BMG Music Entertainment
Sony BMG Music Entertainment
Sony BMG Music Entertainment was a recorded music company, which was a 50–50 joint venture between the Sony Corporation of America and Bertelsmann AG...
(Sweden) AB, and Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
Sony Pictures Home Entertainment is the home video distribution arm of Sony Pictures Entertainment, a subsidiary of Sony Corporation. It was established in November 1979 as Columbia Pictures Home Entertainment, releasing 20 titles: The Anderson Tapes, Bell, Book and Candle, Born Free, Breakout,...
Nordic AB, but the charges were not pursued. MediaDefender's stocks fell sharply after this incident, and several media companies withdrew from the service after the company announced the leak had caused $825,000 in losses. Later, The Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde
Peter Sunde
Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi is an IT expert with Norwegian and Finnish roots. He is best known for being a co-founder and the spokesperson of The Pirate Bay, a BitTorrent tracker site.-Personal life:...
accused police investigator Jim Keyzer of a conflict of interest when he declined to investigate MediaDefender. Keyzer later accepted a job for MPAA member studio Warner Brothers. The leaked emails revealed that other MPAA member studios hired MediaDefender to pollute The Pirate Bay's torrent database, contradicting the MPAA's earlier claim that its member studios were not MediaDefender clients.
The Swedish online business newspaper E24 Näringsliv
E24 Näringsliv
E24 Näringsliv is a Swedish online business newspaper based in Stockholm, Sweden. It was previously named Näringsliv24 , but changed to E24 in 2006. It started as N24 on 4 October 2005, and is owned by Svenska Dagbladet and Aftonbladet...
reported on 15 February 2008 that the UK
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
based anti-piracy firm Web Sheriff
Web Sheriff
Web Sheriff is an anti-piracy company based in the United Kingdom that provides intellectual property, copyright and privacy rights protection services for a range of clients that include record labels, musical artists, media organizations, and celebrities. The company monitors various websites...
intended to file lawsuits in the United States and Sweden against The Pirate Bay on behalf of Prince
Prince (musician)
Prince Rogers Nelson , often known simply as Prince, is an American singer, songwriter, musician, and actor. Prince has produced ten platinum albums and thirty Top 40 singles during his career. Prince founded his own recording studio and label; writing, self-producing and playing most, or all, of...
, the Village People
Village People
Village People is a concept disco group that formed in the United States in 1977, well known for their on-stage costumes depicting American cultural stereotypes, as well as their catchy tunes and suggestive lyrics....
, Van Morrison
Van Morrison
Van Morrison, OBE is a Northern Irish singer-songwriter and musician. His live performances at their best are regarded as transcendental and inspired; while some of his recordings, such as the studio albums Astral Weeks and Moondance, and the live album It's Too Late to Stop Now, are widely...
, and the estate of Chet Baker
Chet Baker
Chesney Henry "Chet" Baker, Jr. was an American jazz trumpeter, flugelhornist and singer.Though his music earned him a large following , Baker's popularity was due in part to his "matinee idol-beauty" and "well-publicized drug habit."He died in 1988 in Amsterdam, the...
. Lars Sandberg, Web Sheriff's local counsel in Sweden, told E24 that Web Sheriff had not yet determined whether to sue the individuals or the companies associated with the website. Peter Sunde dismissed the threats as relying on American law inapplicable in Sweden.
In an official letter to the Swedish Minister of Justice, the International Olympic Committee
International Olympic Committee
The International Olympic Committee is an international corporation based in Lausanne, Switzerland, created by Pierre de Coubertin on 23 June 1894 with Demetrios Vikelas as its first president...
(IOC) requested assistance from the Swedish government to prevent video clips from the Beijing Olympics from being distributed via The Pirate Bay. The IOC claimed there were more than one million downloads of footage from the Olympics – mostly of the opening ceremony. The Pirate Bay, however, did not take anything down, and temporarily renamed the website to The Beijing Bay.
The Pirate Bay trial
The Pirate Bay trial is a joint criminal and civil prosecution in Sweden of four individuals charged for promoting the copyright infringement of others with the torrent tracking website The Pirate Bay...
against the men behind the Pirate Bay started in Sweden on 16 February 2009. They are accused of breaking Swedish copyright law. The defendants, however, continued to be confident about the outcome. Half the charges against the Pirate Bay were dropped on the second day of the trial.
The three operators of the site and their one investor Carl Lundström
Carl Lundström
Carl Ulf Sture Lundström is a Swedish businessman.Carl Lundström is the son of Ulf Lundström and the grandson of Karl Edvard Lundström, founder of the world's largest crisp bread producer Wasabröd. When his father Ulf Lundström died in 1973, Carl Lundström was one of five heirs to Wasabröd and its...
were convicted in Stockholm district court on 17 April 2009 and sentenced to one year in jail each and a total of 30 million SEK
Swedish krona
The krona has been the currency of Sweden since 1873. Both the ISO code "SEK" and currency sign "kr" are in common use; the former precedes or follows the value, the latter usually follows it, but especially in the past, it sometimes preceded the value...
(3.6 million USD, 2.7 million EUR
Euro
The euro is the official currency of the eurozone: 17 of the 27 member states of the European Union. It is also the currency used by the Institutions of the European Union. The eurozone consists of Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg,...
, 2.4 million GBP) in fines and damages. The defendants' lawyers have appealed to the Svea Court of Appeal
Svea Court of Appeal
The Svea Court of Appeal , located in Stockholm, is one of six appellate courts in the Swedish legal system. It was founded in 1614 and was the highest court in Sweden until 1789, when the Supreme Court of Sweden was established....
and have requested a retrial in the district court, alledging bias on behalf of judge Tomas Norström, the same judge who ordered the 2006 raid. The case will likely be appealed to the Supreme Court of Sweden
Supreme Court of Sweden
The Supreme Court of Sweden is the supreme court and the third and final instance in all civil and criminal cases in Sweden. Before a case can be decided by the Supreme Court, leave to appeal must be obtained, and with few exceptions, leave to appeal can be granted only when the case is of...
(and parts of the case may be remitted to the European Court of Justice
European Court of Justice
The Court can sit in plenary session, as a Grand Chamber of 13 judges, or in chambers of three or five judges. Plenary sitting are now very rare, and the court mostly sits in chambers of three or five judges...
), and thus the appeal process could take several years before a verdict is final.
On 13 May 2009 several record companies again sued Neij, Svartholm, Sunde and also The Pirate Bay's main internet service provider
Internet service provider
An Internet service provider is a company that provides access to the Internet. Access ISPs directly connect customers to the Internet using copper wires, wireless or fiber-optic connections. Hosting ISPs lease server space for smaller businesses and host other people servers...
Black Internet. They required enforcement for ending The Pirate Bay's accessory to copyright infringement that had not stopped despite the court order in April, and in the complaint listed several pages of works being shared with the help of the site. The suit was joined by several major film companies on 30 July. The Stockholm district court ruled on 21 August that Black Internet must stop making available the specific works mentioned in the judgment, or face a 500,000 SEK fine. The company was notified of the order on 24 August, and they complied with it on the same day by disconnecting The Pirate Bay. Computer Sweden noted that the judgment did not order The Pirate Bay to be disconnected, but the ISP had no other option for stopping the activity on the site. It is the first time in Sweden for an ISP to be forced to stop providing access for a website. A public support fund fronted by the CEO of the ISP was set up to cover the legal fees of an appeal. Pirate Party leader Rickard Falkvinge
Rickard Falkvinge
Rickard ”Rick” Falkvinge , born Dick Augustsson on 21 January 1972 in Gothenburg, is a Swedish IT entrepreneur known as the founder and first party leader of the Swedish Pirate Party. He is currently a political evangelist with the party, spreading the ideas across the world...
submitted the case for Parliamentary Ombudsman
Parliamentary Ombudsman
The Parliamentary Ombudsman is the principal ombudsman authority in Finland, in Sweden and Iceland, charged with the supervision of the public authorities...
review, criticising the court's order to make intermediaries responsible for relayed content and to assign active crime prevention tasks to a private party.
The Stockholm District Court ordered on 28 October 2009 a temporary injunction on Neij and Svartholm with a penalty of 500,000 SEK each, forbidding them from participating in the operation of The Pirate Bay's website or trackers.
The Svea Court of Appeal
Svea Court of Appeal
The Svea Court of Appeal , located in Stockholm, is one of six appellate courts in the Swedish legal system. It was founded in 1614 and was the highest court in Sweden until 1789, when the Supreme Court of Sweden was established....
decided on 21 May 2010 not to change the orders on Black Internet or Neij and Svartholm.
Service issues
In May 2007, The Pirate Bay was attacked by a group of hackersHacker (computer security)
In computer security and everyday language, a hacker is someone who breaks into computers and computer networks. Hackers may be motivated by a multitude of reasons, including profit, protest, or because of the challenge...
. They copied the user database, which included over 1.5 million users. The Pirate Bay reassured its users that the data was of no value and that passwords and e-mails were encrypted and hashed
Hash function
A hash function is any algorithm or subroutine that maps large data sets to smaller data sets, called keys. For example, a single integer can serve as an index to an array...
. Some blogs stated that a group known as the AUH (Arga Unga Hackare, Swedish for "Angry Young Hackers") were suspected of executing the attack, however the AUH stated on the Computer Sweden newspaper that they were not involved and would take revenge on those responsible for the attack.
On 27 April 2009 the website of The Pirate Bay had fiber
Fiber-optic communication
Fiber-optic communication is a method of transmitting information from one place to another by sending pulses of light through an optical fiber. The light forms an electromagnetic carrier wave that is modulated to carry information...
IPv4
IPv4
Internet Protocol version 4 is the fourth revision in the development of the Internet Protocol and the first version of the protocol to be widely deployed. Together with IPv6, it is at the core of standards-based internetworking methods of the Internet...
connectivity issues. There was widespread speculation this was a forced outage from the Swedish antipiracy group, accelerated somewhat by TPB adding contact details for the Swedish antipiracy group's lawyers to its RIPE
RIPE NCC
The Réseaux IP Européens Network Coordination Centre is the Regional Internet Registry for Europe, the Middle East and parts of Central Asia...
database record. The site and its forums were still available via IPv6
IPv6
Internet Protocol version 6 is a version of the Internet Protocol . It is designed to succeed the Internet Protocol version 4...
at the time.
On 24 August 2009 one of The Pirate Bay's upstream providers was ordered to discontinue service for the website by a Swedish court in response to a civil action brought by several entertainment companies including Disney, Universal
Universal Studios Home Entertainment
Universal Studios Home Entertainment is the home video division of Universal Pictures...
, Time Warner
Time Warner
Time Warner is one of the world's largest media companies, headquartered in the Time Warner Center in New York City. Formerly two separate companies, Warner Communications, Inc...
, Columbia
Columbia Pictures
Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. is an American film production and distribution company. Columbia Pictures now forms part of the Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group, owned by Sony Pictures Entertainment, a subsidiary of the Japanese conglomerate Sony. It is one of the leading film companies...
, Sony
Sony
, commonly referred to as Sony, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan and the world's fifth largest media conglomerate measured by revenues....
, NBC
NBC
The National Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network and former radio network headquartered in the GE Building in New York City's Rockefeller Center with additional major offices near Los Angeles and in Chicago...
, and Paramount
Paramount Pictures
Paramount Pictures Corporation is an American film production and distribution company, located at 5555 Melrose Avenue in Hollywood. Founded in 1912 and currently owned by media conglomerate Viacom, it is America's oldest existing film studio; it is also the last major film studio still...
. According to the Pirate Bay blog, this caused a downtime
Downtime
The term downtime is used to refer to periods when a system is unavailable.Downtime or outage duration refers to a period of time that a system fails to provide or perform its primary function...
of 3 hours, however some users were unable to access the site immediately following the relocation due to unrelated technical difficulties. The site was fully operational again for everyone within 24 hours.
On 6 October 2009, one of the IP transit providers to The Pirate Bay blocked all Pirate Bay traffic causing an outage for most users around the world. On 6 October 2009, the site was back online at an IP address at CyberBunker
CyberBunker
CyberBunker is a former military nuclear warfare bunker that is currently utilized as a data-center .During the Cold War, NATO maintained top secret hardened facilities all over western Europe. In 1955 a large command bunker was constructed just outside the small town of Kloetinge in the south of...
, located in the Netherlands. It is not known whether The Pirate Bay is actually located at CyberBunker or whether they are using the CyberBunker service that routes Cyberbunker IP addresses to any datacenter around the world. These routes are not visible from the outside world.
CyberBunker was given a court injunction on 17 May 2010, taking the site offline only briefly; later that day, hosting was restored by Sweden's Piratpartiet (The Pirate Party). Former spokesman for the Pirate Bay, Peter Sunde, commented that it would now be very difficult to stop the site because it would now be seen as political censorship if anyone tries to shut it down.
On 8 July 2010, a group of Argentinean hackers gained access to The Pirate Bay’s administration panel through a security breach via the backend of The Pirate Bay website. They were able to delete torrents and expose users’ IP-addresses, emails and MD5-hashed passwords. The Pirate Bay was taken offline for upgrades. Users visiting the website were met by the following message: "Upgrading some stuff, database is in use for backups, soon back again. Btw, it's nice weather outside I think."
Projects
The team behind The Pirate Bay has worked on several websites of varying degrees of permanence.In 2007, BayImg
BayImg
BayImg is an image hosting website founded in 2007 by The Pirate Bay. BayImg aims to provide a registration-free service that does not have any copyright license enforced on its images....
, an image hosting website similar to TinyPic
TinyPic
TinyPic is a photo and video sharing service, owned and operated by Photobucket.com , that allows users to upload, link and share, images and videos on the Internet. The idea is similar to URL shortening in which each uploaded image is given a relatively short internet address...
went online in June. Pre-publication images posted to BayImg became part of a legal battle when Conde Nast
Condé Nast Publications
Condé Nast, a division of Advance Publications, is a magazine publisher. In the U.S., it produces 18 consumer magazines, including Architectural Digest, Bon Appétit, GQ, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Vogue, as well as four business-to-business publications, 27 websites, and more than 50 apps...
's network was later allegedly hacked.
In August, The Pirate Bay relaunched the BitTorrent website Suprnova.org
Suprnova.org
Suprnova.org was a Slovenia-based website which distributed torrents for various music and video files, computer programs and games. Started in late 2002 by Andrej Preston and for a while considered the most popular BitTorrent search engine, Suprnova.org closed in late 2004 after legal threats...
to perform the same functions as The Pirate Bay, with different torrent trackers, but the site languished; the domain was returned to its original owner in August 2010, and it now redirects to Torrentfreak.tv.
Suprbay.org was introduced in August as the official forum for ThePirateBay.org and the various sites connected to it. Users can request reseeding of torrents, or report malware within torrent files or illegal material on ThePirateBay.org. SlopsBox, a disposable e-mail address
Disposable e-mail address
Disposable email addressing refers to an alternative way of sharing and managing email addressing. DEA aims to set up a new, unique email address for every contact or entity, making a point-to-point connection between the sender and the recipient...
anti-spam service, appeared in December, and was reviewed in 2009.
BOiNK was announced in October in response to the raid on Oink's Pink Palace
Oink's Pink Palace
Oink's Pink Palace was a prominent BitTorrent tracker which operated from 2004 to 2007. Following a two-year investigation by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry , and the British Phonographic Industry , the site was shut down on 23 October 2007, by British and Dutch police...
, a music-oriented BitTorrent website. A month later Sunde canceled BOiNK, citing the many new music websites created since the downfall of OiNK.
In 2008 Baywords was launched as a free blog
Blog
A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...
ging service that lets users of the site blog
Blog
A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...
about anything as long as it does not break any Swedish laws. In December, The Pirate Bay resurrected ShareReactor
ShareReactor
ShareReactor is an index site for files on the eDonkey network and Torrent files. ShareReactor does not host any files; instead, the links it contains are accessible through an eDonkey network and BitTorrent client. The site was taken down by Swiss Police on March 10, 2004 due to the suspicion of...
as a combined eD2k
EDonkey network
The eDonkey network is a decentralized, mostly server-based, peer-to-peer file sharing network best suited to share big files among users, and to provide long term availability of files...
and BitTorrent site. The same month, the Vio mobile video converter was released, designed to convert video files for playback on mobile devices such as iPhone
IPhone
The iPhone is a line of Internet and multimedia-enabled smartphones marketed by Apple Inc. The first iPhone was unveiled by Steve Jobs, then CEO of Apple, on January 9, 2007, and released on June 29, 2007...
, BlackBerry
BlackBerry
BlackBerry is a line of mobile email and smartphone devices developed and designed by Canadian company Research In Motion since 1999.BlackBerry devices are smartphones, designed to function as personal digital assistants, portable media players, internet browsers, gaming devices, and much more...
, Android, many Nokia
Nokia
Nokia Corporation is a Finnish multinational communications corporation that is headquartered in Keilaniemi, Espoo, a city neighbouring Finland's capital Helsinki...
and Windows Mobile
Windows Mobile
Windows Mobile is a mobile operating system developed by Microsoft that was used in smartphones and Pocket PCs, but by 2011 was rarely supplied on new phones. The last version is "Windows Mobile 6.5.5"; it is superseded by Windows Phone, which does not run Windows Mobile software.Windows Mobile is...
devices.
In 2009, Pastebay, a note sharing service similar to Pastebin
Pastebin
A pastebin is a type of web application that allows its users to upload snippets of text, usually samples of source code, for public viewing. It is very popular in IRC channels where pasting large amounts of text is considered bad etiquette. A new trend is that users use Pastebin to post Twitter...
, was made available to the public as of 23 March. The Video Bay video streaming/sharing site was announced in June to be "The YouTube Killer", with content viewable in HTML 5-capable browsers. The site was in an "Extreme Beta" phase; a message on the homepage instructed the user "don't expect anything to work at all". , The Video Bay is currently offline.
On 18 April 2011, Pirate Bay temporarily changed its name to "Research Bay" to aid P2P researchers of the Cybernorms group
Cybernorms group
Cybernorms began officially on March 1, 2009 as research project and the department of sociology of law, and was started by Dr Måns Svensson, Stefan Larsson, and Professor Håkan Hydén and is administrated the Sociology of Law department at the University of Lund. The group researches how...
Denmark
On 5 February 2008, the district court of Frederiksberg, Copenhagen ruled that one of Denmark's largest ISPs, DMT2-Tele2Tele2
Tele2 AB is a major European telecommunications operator, with about 34 million customers in 11 countries. It serves as a fixed-line telephone operator, cable television provider, mobile phone operator and Internet service provider.- Overview :...
, was assisting its customers in copyright infringement by allowing the use of The Pirate Bay, and that they were to block access to the site. Although the ISP had decided to challenge the verdict with support from the Danish Telecommunication Industries Association, they complied with it and blocked access to The Pirate Bay. The Pirate Bay reacted by creating an alternate site with instructions on how to work around the block, while the IFPI
IFPI
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry is the organisation that represents the interests of the recording industry worldwide. It is a not-for-profit members' organisation registered in Switzerland...
welcomed the block and encouraged other ISPs to follow suit. The verdict was affirmed in the Eastern High Court of Denmark on 26 November 2008. Following the court's decision, TDC
TDC A/S
TDC A/S is the former telecom monopoly in Denmark. It is now privatized. Thus, it is the biggest company in all aspects of telecommunications in Denmark with landline, mobile, Internet, VHF maritime borderline-radio etc.By the end of 2004, the TDC Group had more than 13.4 mil. customers in Europe:...
, Denmark's largest ISP and owner of most of the cables, decided to block access to The Pirate Bay as a preventive measure. Other Danish ISPs have commented that they would prefer not to intervene in their customers' communication, but have reluctantly put the block in effect in order to avoid fines. Tele2's owner Telenor
Telenor
Telenor Group is the incumbent telecommunications company in Norway, with headquarters located at Fornebu, close to Oslo. Today, Telenor Group is mostly an international wireless carrier with operations in Scandinavia, Eastern Europe and Asia, working predominantly under the Telenor brand...
in turn appealed the high court verdict to the Supreme Court of Denmark
Supreme Court of Denmark
The Supreme Court of Denmark is the supreme court and the third and final instance in all civil and criminal cases in Denmark. It is based at Christiansborg Palace in Copenhagen which also houses the Danish Parliament.-History:...
, which in April 2009 accepted the case for processing.
Finland
On 26 October 2011, the district court of Helsinki ruled that Elisa OyjElisa Oyj
Elisa Oyj is a Finnish telecommunications company founded in 1882 that was known until July 2000 as HPY. Elisa Oyj employs about 3000 people and in 2007 had revenue of about €1.57 billion...
, one of the major internet service providers in Finland, must cease to provide copyrighted material from The Pirate Bay website by 18 November 2011 with the threat of a 100 000 € fine.
Germany
On 13 May 2010, the Hamburg District Court ordered an injunction against CB3Rob Ltd & Co KG (Cyberbunker) and its operator, Mr. Sven Olaf Kamphuis, restraining them from connecting The Pirate Bay site to the Internet. The injunction application was brought by the Motion Picture AssociationMotion Picture Association
The Motion Picture Association is the international counterpart of the Motion Picture Association of America.-History:The MPA starting out as the Motion Picture Association of America was started in 1922, as a trade organization for American Film industry...
’s member companies.
Greece
In Greece, from 15 February 2010 until late March 2010, Land Internet Service ProviderInternet service provider
An Internet service provider is a company that provides access to the Internet. Access ISPs directly connect customers to the Internet using copper wires, wireless or fiber-optic connections. Hosting ISPs lease server space for smaller businesses and host other people servers...
Tellas/WIND Hellas blocked the site, as a side effect of blocking applied in Italy, since apparently traffic is routed via the sister network Wind Italy
WIND (Italy)
Wind Telecomunicazioni SpA is an Italian telecom operator which offers integrated mobile, fixed and IPTV and Internet services and has also a sister network in Greece: WIND Hellas...
servers. Unlike in Italy, in Greece it is not required by law for ISPs to restrict access to The Pirate Bay.
Tellas/WIND Hellas managed to circumvent the problem as of 19 March 2010 so that access through the ISP is granted to their users, as well as to the rest of Greek internet users. Nevertheless, sometimes Tellas users still can't load the whole page or can't load the page at all.
Ireland
In January 2009, Irish ISP EircomEircom
Eircom Group LTD is a telecommunications company in the Republic of Ireland, and a former state-owned incumbent. It is currently the largest telecommunications operator in the Republic of Ireland and operates primarily on the island of Ireland, with a point of presence in Great Britain.As Bord...
, Ireland's most popular internet provider, was taken to court by the four large music labels EMI
EMI
The EMI Group, also known as EMI Music or simply EMI, is a multinational music company headquartered in London, United Kingdom. It is the fourth-largest business group and family of record labels in the recording industry and one of the "big four" record companies. EMI Group also has a major...
, Sony
Sony
, commonly referred to as Sony, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan and the world's fifth largest media conglomerate measured by revenues....
, Universal Music Group
Universal Music Group
Universal Music Group is an American music group, the largest of the "big four" record companies by its commanding market share and its multitude of global operations...
and Warner Music Group
Warner Music Group
Warner Music Group is the third largest business group and family of record labels in the recording industry, making it one of the big four record companies...
in order to have the ISP monitor its customers and spot illegal file sharing. After eight court days, the parties reached a settlement to introduce a three strikes policy to disconnect customers involved in copyright infringing activity. The Irish Recorded Music Association
Irish Recorded Music Association
Irish Recorded Music Association is the Irish record industry association. IRMA is a non-profit association set up to manage and control the music industry in the Republic of Ireland.-Goals and activities:...
continues to negotiate with other ISPs for a similar agreement. On 21 February 2009, Eircom however declared that access to The Pirate Bay would soon be blocked altogether, but retracted that on 24 February 2009, stating that they would not block without a court order. Eircom reversed themselves again on 20 August 2009, announcing that they would block the website starting in September. As of 1 September 2009 Eircom blocked access to The Pirate Bay, though it is still accessible via proxy servers, and still accessible in Ireland to subscribers of other ISP companies.
In a judgment given by Irish High Court Justice Peter Charleton, on April 16, 2010, ruled that the three strikes policy was legal and described the Pirate Bay as a "a site dedicated, on a weird ideological basis, to basically stealing the copyright owned by the plaintiffs in mainly musical works." Following the ruling, the judge was subjected to threats that his life would be "wrecked by computer".
In April 2011 the European Court of Justice ruled that no ISP can be required to filter the Internet, and particularly not to enforce the copyright monopoly.
Italy
In mid 2008, following the criminal charges raised in Sweden, the Italian Federation against Musical Piracy in MilanMilan
Milan is the second-largest city in Italy and the capital city of the region of Lombardy and of the province of Milan. The city proper has a population of about 1.3 million, while its urban area, roughly coinciding with its administrative province and the bordering Province of Monza and Brianza ,...
requested action in Italy. The deputy public prosecutor pursued the complaint in the Bergamo
Bergamo
Bergamo is a town and comune in Lombardy, Italy, about 40 km northeast of Milan. The comune is home to over 120,000 inhabitants. It is served by the Orio al Serio Airport, which also serves the Province of Bergamo, and to a lesser extent the metropolitan area of Milan...
Court for Preliminary Investigations, which on 1 August 2008 decreed to block access from Italian ISPs to all Pirate Bay addresses. The ruling was based on prevention of copyright violations by the site's users in Italian territory. Once the block had been put in effect, The Pirate Bay responded on 10 August 2008 by posting instructions to work around the block and later by creating a separate site for Italians, but shortly afterwards the ISPs also blocked the alternate site. Some ISPs had implemented the block by redirecting The Pirate Bay traffic to a site owned by the IFPI
IFPI
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry is the organisation that represents the interests of the recording industry worldwide. It is a not-for-profit members' organisation registered in Switzerland...
. Italian security expert Matteo Flora suggested that by having the page redirected this way, IFPI could access Italian users' cookies and impersonate them on the official The Pirate Bay website. Two Italian IT lawyers Giovanni Battista Gallus and Francesco Micozzi together with forensics expert Matteo Flora appealed to the Bergamo court, which reviewed the case and on 24 September 2008 quashed the original ruling. The decision lifting the block was based on the applicability of the "preventive seizure" section of the Italian Code of Criminal Procedure, which cannot force actions on parties unrelated to the potential offence (ISPs to filter users' traffic). With the April 2009 verdict in Sweden as a precedent, the Bergamo prosecutor appealed the Italian ruling in the Supreme Court of Cassation
Court of Cassation (Italy)
The Supreme Court of Cassation is the major court of last resort in Italy. It has its seat in the Rome Hall of Justice.The Court of Cassation exists also to “ensure the observation and the correct interpretation of law” by ensuring the same application of law in the inferior and appeal courts...
to reinstate the block. In September 2009, the Supreme Court annulled the decision to overturn the block, and the case was again reviewed in the Bergamo court.
On 8 February 2010, the web site has been blocked again by the Italian Supreme Court.
Malaysia
In June 2011, the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia CommissionMalaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission
The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission or Suruhanjaya Komunikasi dan Multimedia Malaysia is the regulator for the converging communications and multimedia industry in Malaysia...
ordered the blocking of The Pirate Bay along with several other file-hosting websites via a letter, dated 30 May, to all Malaysian ISPs for violating Section 41 of the Copyright Act 1987, which deals with pirated content
Copyright infringement of audio-visual works
Copyright infringement of audio-visual works, often referred to as piracy or warez, occurs when unauthorized copies are made of music, movies and similar works. Incidence of copyright infringement has grown dramatically since the late 1970s, as technology has facilitated the unauthorized...
.
Netherlands
On 21 July 2009, the Amsterdam district court held a preliminary injunctionPreliminary injunction
A preliminary injunction, in equity, is an injunction entered by a court prior to a final determination of the merits of a legal case, in order to restrain a party from going forward with a course of conduct or compelling a party to continue with a course of conduct until the case has been decided...
hearing against the persons thought responsible for The Pirate Bay. The hearing followed a subpoena from the Dutch record industry trade association BREIN, who had an urgent complaint of intermediary copyright infringement. The defendants did not attend the hearing and hadn't arranged representation, so on 30 July 2009 the court entered an in absentia
In absentia
In absentia is Latin for "in the absence". In legal use, it usually means a trial at which the defendant is not physically present. The phrase is not ordinarily a mere observation, but suggests recognition of violation to a defendant's right to be present in court proceedings in a criminal trial.In...
default judgment
Default judgment
Default judgment is a binding judgment in favor of either party based on some failure to take action by the other party. Most often, it is a judgment in favor of a plaintiff when the defendant has not responded to a summons or has failed to appear before a court of law...
against them, accepting the complainants demands. It ruled that Neij, Kolmisoppi and Warg are "to stop and keep stopped the infringements on copyright and related rights of Stichting Brein (foundation Brain) in the Netherlands" within 9 August 2009, or face daily penalties of EUR 30,000, up to a maximum total of EUR 3,000,000. They were also ordered to pay the cost of the proceedings. In a separate case handled at the same time, the court ordered the same fines for the expected new owner of The Pirate Bay, Global Gaming Factory X
Global Gaming Factory X
Global Gaming Factory X AB is an advertising and software company based in Sweden that relies on Internet cafes and gaming venues as its medium...
, were it not to stop the copyright infringements after the site's takeover. According to BREIN director Tim Kuik, it is the first time a foreign website has been ordered to block access from the Netherlands. The BREIN however waived the payment of damages for August and allowed the site to stay online until its expected change of owners at the end of August 2009.
On 2 October 2009, The Pirate Bay's hosting services moved to Ukraine
Ukraine
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...
and their traffic was routed through The Netherlands, but BREIN contacted the ISP NForce and service was stopped. In return, The Pirate Bay moved their hosting location to a nuclear bunker owned by CyberBunker
CyberBunker
CyberBunker is a former military nuclear warfare bunker that is currently utilized as a data-center .During the Cold War, NATO maintained top secret hardened facilities all over western Europe. In 1955 a large command bunker was constructed just outside the small town of Kloetinge in the south of...
just outside Kloetinge
Kloetinge
Kloetinge is a village in the Dutch province of Zeeland. It is located in the municipality of Goes, on the eastern side of the city.Kloetinge was a separate municipality until 1970, when it was merged with Goes....
in the south of the Netherlands.
Norway
Asker and Bærum District CourtAsker and Bærum District Court
Asker and Bærum District Court is the district court serving Asker and Bærum in Norway. Cases may be appealed to Borgarting Court of Appeal. The court is located in Sandvika in Bærum. It has 13 professional judges, of which one is the chief judge, and 2 deputy judges. The administration has 20...
rejected demands from the recording artists' copyright organisation TONO
TONO
TONO is a Norwegian corporation that administers copyrights for music in Norway.It is owned and governed by its members; composers, music publishers and text-writers...
against Norway's largest internet provider, Telenor
Telenor
Telenor Group is the incumbent telecommunications company in Norway, with headquarters located at Fornebu, close to Oslo. Today, Telenor Group is mostly an international wireless carrier with operations in Scandinavia, Eastern Europe and Asia, working predominantly under the Telenor brand...
, to have The Pirate Bay blocked. In a court ruling on 6 November 2009 the court stated that in today's society it would be unnatural to demand of a private company that it should make judgments on whether a website complied with the law, since making such judgments is considered the responsibility of the authorities.
People's Republic of China
The site was blocked for a short time in November 2008 in the PRC with other BitTorrent sites, and as of fall 2011 remains inaccessible from mainland China while not being blocked in Hong Kong or Macau.Sweden
In May 2010, The Pirate Bay's Swedish internet service provider lost an appeal against an order to stop providing service to the site. Although the service provider had already complied with an earlier order in August 2009 and The Pirate Bay was thereafter hosted elsewhere, in June 2010 the ISP chose also to block their customers from accessing The Pirate Bay in its new location. One of the judges in the case later commented that the court's order didn't require the ISP to control their customers' access to the site, but the ISP wanted to avoid any risk.United Kingdom
In the UK, The Pirate Bay is blocked by default by BT Mobile Broadband and other mobile broadband providers, as part of a system that blocks access to sites considered to be "over 18" status, implying the block is because it has pornographic torrents, not because of copyright infringement. Customers can remove the block by contacting their ISP.Facebook
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...
, Wired
Wired (magazine)
Wired is a full-color monthly American magazine and on-line periodical, published since January 1993, that reports on how new and developing technology affects culture, the economy, and politics...
found in May that Facebook had started blocking the links. On further inspection, they discovered that all messages containing links to The Pirate Bay in both public and in private messages, regardless of content, were being blocked. Electronic Frontier Foundation
Electronic Frontier Foundation
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is an international non-profit digital rights advocacy and legal organization based in the United States...
lawyers commented that Facebook might be working against the US Electronic Communications Privacy Act
Electronic Communications Privacy Act
The Electronic Communications Privacy Act is a United States law.- Overview :The “electronic communication” means any transfer of signs, signals, writing, images, sounds, data, or intelligence of any nature transmitted in whole or in part by a wire, radio, electromagnetic, photoelectronic or...
by intercepting user messages, but Facebook chief privacy officer Chris Kelly said that they have the right to use blocks on links where there is a "demonstrated disregard for intellectual property rights," following users' agreement on their terms of service. Links to other similar sites have not been blocked.
Belgium
A court has overturned a 2010 ruling which said that blocking The Pirate Bay at the ISP level was “disproportionate”. The Antwerp Court of Appeal sided with the Belgian Anti-Piracy Federation in their quest to force two ISPs to block subscriber access to TPB. Belgacom and Telenet must implement a DNS blockade of the site within 14 days or face fines.After the founders of The Pirate Bay lost their 2009 trial, the Belgian Anti-Piracy Foundation (BAF) began pushing two ISPs – Belgacom and Telenet – to block subscriber access to the famous torrent site.
After year-long negotiations between the trio broke down, legal action was the inevitable outcome and in July 2010 their first battle came to a conclusion.
The Antwerp Commercial Court decided that neither ISP would have to block TPB and went on to describe the notion of wholesale site blocking as “disproportionate”.
The ISPs said it wasn’t their position to decide which sites can and can not be accessed by their users. BAF accused them of providing a safe-haven to The Pirate Bay and filed an appeal. The Antwerp Court of Appeal overruled the decision of the Commercial Court and has ordered Belgacom
Belgacom
The Belgacom Group is the largest telecommunications company in Belgium, headquartered in Brussels. Belgacom Group is primarily state owned, with the Belgian state holding 53.3% + 1 share...
and Telenet
Telenet
Telenet was a commercial packet switched network which went into service in 1974. It was the first packet-switched network service that was available to the general public. Various commercial and government interests paid monthly fees for dedicated lines connecting their computers and local...
to initiate DNS blockades of 11 domains connected to The Pirate Bay within 14 days or face fines.
A Pirate Bay spokesperson told that this measure will only have the opposite effect, as there are many ways to circumvent it. “This will just give us more traffic, as always. Thanks for the free advertising.”
The court order has a limitative list of domain names to block, which all include 'www.'. The equivalent URLs without 'www.' are also blocked by ISPs who want to comply with the "spirit of the law" even though the court order doesn't specify that.
NURPA, a nonprofit Belgian advocacy group which promotes and protects digital rights, freedom of expression, privacy and civil liberties, condemn the decision: “The decision of the Antwerp Court of Appeal in the case against Belgacom BAF / Telenet sets a dangerous precedent for blocking of content by Internet service providers in Belgium. It is incompatible with the doctrine of proportionality advocated by the European Court of Human Rights,” says Loconte.
By imposing a site-wide blockade, Loconte says the Court of Appeal has disproportionately censored all content indexed by the site, including legitimately available material.
On Oct 5th, The Pirate Bay registered the domain name depiraatbaai.be, allowing Belgian users to access the site again, even without using alternative dns providers, proving the limits of the court ruling already described by the defendants in their arguments to the court.
In media
The Pirate Bay is featured in Steal This FilmSteal This Film
Steal This Film is a film series documenting the movement against intellectual property produced by The League of Noble Peers and released via the BitTorrent peer-to-peer protocol....
(2006), a documentary series about society and filesharing, produced by The League of Noble Peers
The League of Noble Peers
The League of Noble Peers is an organization credited with producing the Steal This Film documentary series. When releasing Steal This Film the group introduced itself as "a group of friends" that, in 2006, "decided to make a film about filesharing that we would recognise." The Steal This Film...
and also in the Danish Documentary Good Copy Bad Copy
Good Copy Bad Copy
Good Copy Bad Copy, A documentary about the current state of copyright and culture, is a documentary about copyright and culture in the context of Internet, peer-to-peer file sharing and other technological advances, directed by Andreas Johnsen, Ralf Christensen, and Henrik Moltke.It features...
, which explores the issues surrounding file copyright
Copyright
Copyright is a legal concept, enacted by most governments, giving the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time...
. The Pirate Bay has been a topic on the nationally syndicated NPR
NPR
NPR, formerly National Public Radio, is a privately and publicly funded non-profit membership media organization that serves as a national syndicator to a network of 900 public radio stations in the United States. NPR was created in 1970, following congressional passage of the Public Broadcasting...
radio show On The Media
On the Media
On the Media is an hour-long weekly radio program, hosted by Bob Garfield and Brooke Gladstone, covering journalism, technology, and First Amendment issues. It is produced by WNYC in New York City...
.
Björn Ulvaeus
Björn Ulvaeus
Björn Kristian Ulvaeus is a Swedish songwriter, composer, musician, writer, producer, a former member of the Swedish musical group ABBA , and co-composer of the musicals Chess, Kristina från Duvemåla, and Mamma Mia!...
, former member of the Swedish pop music group ABBA
ABBA
ABBA was a Swedish pop group formed in Stockholm in 1970 which consisted of Anni-Frid Lyngstad, Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson and Agnetha Fältskog...
, criticised copyright infringing activities of The Pirate Bay supporters as "lazy and mean". In contrast, Brazilian
Brazil
Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...
bestselling author Paulo Coelho
Paulo Coelho
Paulo Coelho is a Brazilian lyricist and novelist.-Biography:Paulo Coelho was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He attended a Jesuit school. As a teenager, Coelho wanted to become a writer. Upon telling his mother this, she responded with "My dear, your father is an engineer. He's a logical,...
has embraced free sharing online. Coelho supports The Pirate Bay and offered to be a witness in the 2009 trial. He accounts much of his growing sales to his work shared on the Internet and comments that "a person who does not share is not only selfish, but bitter and alone."
Trial
The Pirate Bay trial was a joint criminalCriminal law
Criminal law, is the body of law that relates to crime. It might be defined as the body of rules that defines conduct that is not allowed because it is held to threaten, harm or endanger the safety and welfare of people, and that sets out the punishment to be imposed on people who do not obey...
and civil
Civil law (legal system)
Civil law is a legal system inspired by Roman law and whose primary feature is that laws are codified into collections, as compared to common law systems that gives great precedential weight to common law on the principle that it is unfair to treat similar facts differently on different...
prosecution in Sweden of four individuals charged for promoting the copyright infringement
Copyright infringement
Copyright infringement is the unauthorized or prohibited use of works under copyright, infringing the copyright holder's exclusive rights, such as the right to reproduce or perform the copyrighted work, or to make derivative works.- "Piracy" :...
of others with The Pirate Bay site. The criminal charges were supported by a consortium of intellectual rights
Intellectual rights
Intellectual rights is a term sometimes used to refer to the legal protection afforded to owners of intellectual capital...
holders led by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry IFPI
IFPI
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry is the organisation that represents the interests of the recording industry worldwide. It is a not-for-profit members' organisation registered in Switzerland...
, who filed individual civil compensation claims against the owners of The Pirate Bay.
Swedish prosecutor
Prosecutor
The prosecutor is the chief legal representative of the prosecution in countries with either the common law adversarial system, or the civil law inquisitorial system...
s filed charges on 31 January 2008 against Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, and Peter Sunde; and Carl Lundström
Carl Lundström
Carl Ulf Sture Lundström is a Swedish businessman.Carl Lundström is the son of Ulf Lundström and the grandson of Karl Edvard Lundström, founder of the world's largest crisp bread producer Wasabröd. When his father Ulf Lundström died in 1973, Carl Lundström was one of five heirs to Wasabröd and its...
, a Swedish businessman who through his businesses sold services to the site. The prosecutor claimed the four worked together to administer, host, and develop the site and thereby facilitated other people's breach of copyright law. Some 34 cases of copyright infringements were originally listed, of which 21 were related to music files, 9 to movies, and 4 to games. One case involving music files was later dropped by the copyright holder who made the file available again on The Pirate Bay site. In addition, claims for damages of 117 million kronor
Swedish krona
The krona has been the currency of Sweden since 1873. Both the ISO code "SEK" and currency sign "kr" are in common use; the former precedes or follows the value, the latter usually follows it, but especially in the past, it sometimes preceded the value...
(US$13 million, €12.5 million) were filed. The case was decided jointly by a judge, who was a member of several pro-copyright organisations, and three appointed laymen.
The trial started on 16 February 2009 in the district court
Tingsrätt
Tingsrätt , käräjäoikeus or tingrett is a term used for district courts in Sweden, Finland and Norway...
(tingsrätt
Tingsrätt
Tingsrätt , käräjäoikeus or tingrett is a term used for district courts in Sweden, Finland and Norway...
) of Stockholm
Stockholm
Stockholm is the capital and the largest city of Sweden and constitutes the most populated urban area in Scandinavia. Stockholm is the most populous city in Sweden, with a population of 851,155 in the municipality , 1.37 million in the urban area , and around 2.1 million in the metropolitan area...
, Sweden. The hearings ended on 3 March 2009 and the verdict was announced at 11:00 AM on Friday 17 April 2009: Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Carl Lundström were all found guilty and sentenced to serve one year in prison and pay a fine of 30 million Swedish krona (app. €
Euro
The euro is the official currency of the eurozone: 17 of the 27 member states of the European Union. It is also the currency used by the Institutions of the European Union. The eurozone consists of Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg,...
2.7 million or USD 3.5 million). All of the defendants appealed the verdict.
The appeal trial concluded on 15 October 2010 and the verdict was announced on 26 November. The appeal court shortened sentences of three of the defendants who appeared in court that day. Neij's sentence was reduced to 10 months, Sunde's to eight, and Lundström's to four. However, the fine was increased from 32 to 46 million kronor.
Relations to other Swedish pirate organizations
There are three major pirate organizations in Sweden: the political Pirate PartyPirate Party
The Pirate Party is a political party in Sweden founded in 2006. Its sudden popularity has given rise to parties with the same name and similar goals in Europe and worldwide, forming the international Pirate Party movement....
, which won 7.1 % of the Swedish votes and two seats in 2009 European Parliament election
European Parliament election, 2009
Elections to the European Parliament were held in the 27 member states of the European Union between 4 and 7 June 2009. A total of 736 Members of the European Parliament were elected to represent some 500 million Europeans, making these the biggest trans-national elections in history...
, the NGO Piratbyrån
Piratbyrån
Piratbyrån was a Swedish organization established to support people opposed to current ideas about intellectual property — by freely sharing information and culture...
, and the BitTorrent tracker The Pirate Bay. Of these three, Piratbyrån and The Pirate Bay share a common history but are now separate. Even though the Pirate Party started hosting The Pirate Bay on 18 May 2010, the Pirate Party developed on a completely separate though parallel track and is unrelated to the other two.
Failed acquisition
On 30 June 2009 Swedish advertising company Global Gaming Factory X AB announced their intention to buy the site for SEKSwedish krona
The krona has been the currency of Sweden since 1873. Both the ISO code "SEK" and currency sign "kr" are in common use; the former precedes or follows the value, the latter usually follows it, but especially in the past, it sometimes preceded the value...
60 million (approximately $8.5 million USD
United States dollar
The United States dollar , also referred to as the American dollar, is the official currency of the United States of America. It is divided into 100 smaller units called cents or pennies....
) (30m SEK in cash, 30m SEK in GGF stock).
The Pirate Bay founders stated that the profits from the sale would be placed in an offshore account where it would be used to fund projects pertaining to 'freedom of speech, freedom of information, and the openness of the Internet'. Assurances were made that "no personal data will be transferred in the eventual sale (since no personal data is kept)." Global Gaming Chief Executive Hans Pandeya commented on the site's future by saying "We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site," and announced that users would be charged a monthly fee for access to The Pirate Bay.
Global Gaming Factory's letter of intent expired at the end of September 2009, without the transaction having taken place. This may be due to the company's current financial difficulties. PC World magazine regarded the deal's future as "doomed".
See also
- Comparison of BitTorrent sitesComparison of BitTorrent sitesThere are many different BitTorrent websites, each providing information about files distributed via the BitTorrent protocol. They typically contain multiple torrent files and an index of those files. In a typical scenario, a user would enter such a site and browse or search for the content they...
- IPREDatorIPREDatorIpredator is a virtual private networking service offered by The Pirate Bay with the stated goal of providing internet privacy. It is a response to the introduction of IPRED in Sweden, which will allow copyright holders and law enforcement officials to request personal information about copyright...
- KazaaKazaaKazaa Media Desktop started as a peer-to-peer file sharing application using the FastTrack protocol licensed by Joltid Ltd. and operated as Kazaa by Sharman Networks...
- NewzbinNewzBinNewzbin is a British Usenet indexing website, intended to facilitate access to content on Usenet. The site has caused controversy over its stance on copyrighted material...
- TPB-AFKTPB-AFKTPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard, is an upcoming documentary film, directed by Simon Klose, based on the lives of the three founders of The Pirate Bay BitTorrent tracker - Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, and Gottfrid Svartholm...
External links
- thepiratebay.org home page
Letters and memos
Video/interviews Interviews (WMV video). With English subtitles.