The Pirate Bay

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The Pirate Bay
URL http://thepiratebay.org/
Type of site Torrent index
Registration Free
Owner PRQ.se
Created by Gottfrid Svartholm
Launched 2004

The Pirate Bay (often abbreviated TPB) is an Internet site that bills itself as "the world's largest BitTorrent tracker," and also serves as an index for .torrent files that it tracks. Due to BitTorrent's ability to handle extremely large files, it is popular for sharing large music sets, movies and software as well as Linux distribution discs. ThePirateBay.org is ranked 426th in the Alexa ranking list of the world's most-visited internet sites.[1]

The Pirate Bay was started by the Swedish anti-copyright organization Piratbyrån ('The Pirate Bureau') in early 2004, but since October 2004 it has been a separate organization. The site is currently run by Gottfrid "Anakata" Svartholm and Fredrik "TiAMO" Neij.

The website, now located in Stockholm, Sweden, is hosted on Linux servers running a custom httpd developed by Svartholm.[2] On June 1, 2005, The Pirate Bay updated its website in an effort to reduce bandwidth usage, which was reported to be at 2,000 HTTP requests per second on each of the four web servers, as well as to create a more user friendly interface for the frontend of the website. On May 31, 2006, the site's servers were raided by Swedish police, taking it offline until June 3, when it came online with new hosting in the Netherlands. Backup servers are planned to be put up both in Belgium and Russia. On June 14, 2006 the Swedish newspaper SvD reported that The Pirate Bay was back in Sweden due to "pressure from the Department of Justice [in the Netherlands]."[3] Upon reopening on June 3, 2006, its number of visitors has doubled, the increased popularity attributed to greater exposure through the recent media coverage. This has in turn increased the advertising revenues to the founders Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij. The advertisements now generate about 75,000 USD per month according to speculations by Swedish newspaper SvD.[4]

Contents

[edit] Political connections

"In Sweden, the site is more than just an electronic speak-easy; it's the flagship of a national file-sharing movement that's generating an intense national debate, and has even spawned a pro-filesharing political party Pirate Party."[5]

According to The Pirate Bay's blog, Petter Nilsson donated 35,000 SEK (approximately 4,656 US dollars) to help support the torrent tracker.[6] Nilsson was a candidate on the Swedish reality show Toppkandidaterna (The Top Candidates), on which young contestants were given the opportunity to experience politics firsthand. The contestants competed at convincing others of the value of their ideas. The winner of the contest then spent their prize money in the pursuit of these ideals. Nilsson won the contest and donated 25% of his winnings to The Pirate Bay, which they used to buy new servers.

[edit] Logos

From Time to Time TPB changes its Frontpagelogo to reflect special situations. A few of these logos can be viewed below, some older ones are shown on their site themself [7]

The original logo.

June 3, 2006 the logo was depicting the Pirate Bay victory over Hollywood.

A new Phoenix-themed Pirate Bay logo was added on June 15, 2006.

The new Pirate Bay logo, added on July 26, 2006, came with an announcement of TPB supporting the 'Armed Coalition Forces of the Internets' against Ladonia.

A new Movie-themed Pirate Bay logo was added on August 30, 2006 in support of the freelance documentation named Steal This Film about intellectual property.

TPB "announced" the 2006 Riksdag election results condensed in one picture of Mr. Bodström.

Logo added on November 22. Clicking on the Pirate Ship links you to a page titled:Lamont - Rather Do It

[edit] Legal threats and actions

The Pirate Bay is known in the online file sharing community as one of the more prominent websites which also distributes torrents that point to unlicensed copies of copyrighted material. In some countries, offering such torrents could be considered an illegal inducement of copyright infringement,[8] but in other countries this is not the case.[9] In Sweden it is not yet settled by any court whether torrent trackers are legal or not. In July 2005, new anti-piracy legislation was enacted in Sweden which made the distribution of software for the purposes of copyright violation illegal.[10]. The Pirate Bay is blocked by Türk Telekom, largest ISP in Turkey, as per court order.[citation needed]

The Pirate Bay is well known for the "legal" page it hosts[11], featuring mockery of copyright infringement notices and cease and desist letters that The Pirate Bay claims to have received from various organizations.

A hardcopy of a reply from The Pirate Bay to Web Sheriff, in response to faxed legal threats, was sold on eBay June 8, 2005, for US $255.[12]

[edit] May 2006 police raid

People in Stockholm protesting the raid, June 3, 2006.
Enlarge
People in Stockholm protesting the raid, June 3, 2006.
The new ThePirateBay.org logo instituted the morning of June 3, 2006, and taken down shortly after. The image depicts the famous Pirate Bay pirate ship firing cannonballs at a Hollywood sign, depicting triumph over Hollywood and the MPAA. The pirate ship in the Pirate Bay logo also bears the Home Taping is Killing Music logo.
Enlarge
The new ThePirateBay.org logo instituted the morning of June 3, 2006, and taken down shortly after. The image depicts the famous Pirate Bay pirate ship firing cannonballs at a Hollywood sign, depicting triumph over Hollywood and the MPAA. The pirate ship in the Pirate Bay logo also bears the Home Taping is Killing Music logo.
"Site Down" message on 31 May 2006.
Enlarge
"Site Down" message on 31 May 2006.
"Site Down Hoax" message on 1 June 2005.
Enlarge
"Site Down Hoax" message on 1 June 2005.

At around 11 a.m. UTC[13] on May 31, 2006, a major raid against The Pirate Bay and people involved with the site took place, prompted by allegations of copyright violations. Some 65 police officers participated in the raid, shutting down the site and confiscating its servers, as well as all other servers hosted by The Pirate Bay's ISP, PRQ Inet. PRQ is owned by the current managers of the Pirate Bay.

Three people, Gottfrid Svartholm, Mikael Viborg, and Fredrik Neij, were held by the police for questioning, but were released later in the evening. Mikael Viborg, the legal adviser to The Pirate Bay, was arrested at his apartment, brought in for questioning, forced to submit a DNA sample and had his electronic equipment seized.[14] All servers in the server 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 filesharing activities like a russian opposition news agency [15] In addition, other equipment were also seized, such as hardware routers, switches, blank CDs and faxes regarding air conditioning.

The Swedish public broadcast network, Sveriges Television, cited unnamed sources claiming that the raid was prompted by political pressure from the United States, which the Swedish government firmly denies. Specifically, the claim is that the Swedish government was threatened with WTO trade sanctions unless action was taken against The Pirate Bay.[16] There have been claims of ministerstyre (lit. "minister rule") in connection with this allegation.[citation needed] Ministerstyre — when a politician pressures another government agency to take action — is a crime in Sweden.

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 site 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."[17] The MPAA 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 included a statement from John G. Malcolm which alleged that The Pirate Bay was making money from the distribution of copyrighted material.

As of June 2006, the website was financed through advertisements on their result pages and through "The Pirate Shop," an online merchandise shop, and several means of donation for server costs. According to The Pirate Bay, the funds are "exclusively spent on the tracker."[citation needed]

After the raid, ThePirateBay.org displayed a "SITE DOWN" message confirming that Swedish police had executed search warrants for breach of copyright law or assisting such a breach. The BitTorrent community quickly spread the announcement across online news sites, blogs, and discussion forums. The closure message initially caused some confusion because on June 1, 2005 The Pirate Bay had posted a similar message, stating that they were permanently down due to a supposed raid by the Swedish Anti-Piracy Bureau and IFPI, as a prank. The Pirate Bay recently posted pictures of the alleged empty servers raided by the police. Piratbyrån set up a temporary news blog to inform the public about the incident.[18]

On June 1, 2006 it was reported on ThePirateBay.org that the site would be up and fully functional within a day or two. As promised, ThePirateBay.org was back up and fully operational by the end of the next day, their famous logo now depicting the pirate ship firing cannon balls at a Hollywood sign. The header displayed the name The Police Bay and ThePoliceBay.org still redirects to ThePirateBay.org. The next logo featured the pirate ship as a stylized phoenix, in reference to the servers rising up again after the raid.

The reincarnated website was, as stated by "Peter" in the Chaosradio International interview with Tim Pritlove [19], running on servers located in the Netherlands. As of June 3, the search function was not available. It was possible to browse for .torrent files manually and download them, but attempts at downloading .torrent files for most copyrighted materials gave 404 Not Found errors. On June 5, 2006, TPB went down, citing database server problems. It was back up the next day, but with limited availability. The Pirate Bay attributed these issues to increased traffic resulting from the recent publicity, and promised that the site would soon be running smoothly again. TPB thereafter fixed a number of minor software bugs and brought new servers online to handle the increased traffic load.[20] By June 9, the site was once again fully functional.

During the afternoon of June 1, again on June 3, and again in the morning of June 4, the website of the Swedish police[21] went down due to high load. It was speculated that this was a retaliatory denial of service attack in response to the TPB raid. According to a Swedish article in the IT news site IDG, the downtime resulted from many requests for a specific url - which had been widely circulated via IRC chatrooms and internet forums.[22] According to the article, the purpose was to "show what you think of the police's behaviour." On June 3, at about 11.40 PM CET, the website of the Government of Sweden was hit by another Denial of service attack.[23]

Demonstrations against the police action took place on June 3 in Gothenburg and Stockholm, organized by Piratbyrån and the Pirate Party in collaboration with the Liberal Youth League, Green Youth and Young Left parties. There were no reports of violence and all required permits were obtained. Approximately 500-600 people showed up at the Stockholm protest and about 300 at the Gothenburg protest.

[edit] Criticisms

Investigations by some journalists suggest that the site is making money on a level that far exceeds its operating costs. This leads some to opine that the Pirate Bay is more engaged in making profit than supporting people's rights.[24] [25] [26]

[edit] Letters and memos

  • Letter from John G. Malcolm, Executive Vice President of the MPA, to the former State Secretary, Dan Eliasson: [5]
  • Response from Dan Eliasson: [6]
  • The Swedish Governments "orders" to the authorities (in Swedish): [7] (It is notable that it is illegal for the Swedish government or ministry to intervene in a specific case).
  • Håkan Roswalls (prosecutor) memo (in Swedish): [8] (pdf)

[edit] References

  1. ^ Traffic statistics from Alexa internet ranking. Alexa - Traffic details of The Pirate Bay. Last accessed July 28, 2006.
  2. ^ Gottfrid "Anakata" Svartholm is the primary author of Hypercube, a highly optimized, single-threaded httpd which incorporates tracking software as a built-in module. The author claims almost linear - O(1) - performance scaling.
  3. ^ Svenska Dagbladet:The Pirate Bay tillbaka i Sverige (Swedish)
  4. ^ Svenska Dagbladet: Pirate Bay drar in miljonbelopp (Swedish)
  5. ^ The Pirate Bay: Here to Stay?, Wired News, March 13, 2006. Last accessed July 13, 2006.
  6. ^ The Pirate Bay blog entry
  7. ^ http://thepiratebay.org/doodles
  8. ^ See, for example, the 2005 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd..
  9. ^ In Spain, a court (Juzgado de Instrucción número 8 de Alicante) ruled on March 29, 2006 that torrent web sites of this kind are lawful.
  10. ^ LinuxReviews.org article
  11. ^ http://thepiratebay.org/legal.php
  12. ^ Image of TPB's reply to Web Sheriff
  13. ^ This is based on the IRC message "[11:03:49] * neptune has quit IRC (Ping timeout: 192 seconds)" - neptune was the IRC bot of The Pirate Bay. (Timestamp is UTC plus network lag and possible computer clock offset) - #ThePirateBay on EFNet[citation needed]
  14. ^ Blog by Mikael Viborg, 1 June 2006
  15. ^ Per the June 1, 2006 message posted on the home page of ThePirateBay.org: "The police officers were allowed access to the racks where the TPB servers and other servers are hosted. All servers in the racks were clearly marked as to which sites run on each. The police took down all servers in the racks, including the non-commercial site Piratbyrån."
  16. ^ "USA-hot bakom fildelningsrazzia", article in Swedish from Dagens Nyheter
  17. ^ Motion Picture Association of America (2006-05-31). Swedish authorities sink Pirate Bay. Press release.
  18. ^ [1] (Swedish language). Unofficial English translations are available at [2] and [3]
  19. ^ mp3 audiofile of the interview
  20. ^ Pirate Bay Bloodied But Unbowed, Wired News, last accessed June 9, 2006.
  21. ^ http://www.polisen.se/
  22. ^ [4]
  23. ^ Online newspaper article on dn.se (Swedish)
  24. ^ Lehti: Pirate Bayn rahavirrassa sveitsiläinen välisatama, digitoday, July 10, 2006. Last accessed September 13, 2006. (Finnish) Unofficial English translation here.
  25. ^ TPB Raking in Millions, Rixstep. Last accessed September 13, 2006.
  26. ^ Has Pirate Bay Sold Out the BitTorrent Community?, Zeropaid, July 11, 2006. Last accessed July 21, 2006.

[edit] See also

 Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

[edit] External links

[edit] Related to the raid May 2006

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