The Pirate Bay

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The Pirate Bay
URL http://thepiratebay.org/
Type of site Torrent index
Registration Free
Owner Gottfrid "Anakata" Svartholm and Fredrik "TiAMO" Neij
Created by Gottfrid Svartholm
Launched 2004

The Pirate Bay (often abbreviated TPB or just Pirate bay) 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. ThePirateBay.org is ranked 288th in the Alexa ranking list of the world's most-visited sites on the Internet.[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. As strong opponents of copyright, they coined the term kopimist, from the root kopimi, meaning "copy me"[2]. They have joined other kopimist groups such as the Armed Coalition Forces of the Internets (ACFI) to promote the anti-copyright philosophy through various political actions.[3]

The website is located in Stockholm, Sweden, hosted on Linux servers running a custom httpd developed by Svartholm.[4] On June 1, 2005, The Pirate Bay website was updated to reduce bandwidth usage, which served 2,000 HTTP requests per second on each of four web servers, and to improve its user friendliness.

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 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]."[5] Upon reopening on June 3, 2006, its number of visitors has doubled, attributed to recent media exposure. This in turn increased advertising revenues to founders Svartholm and Neij to about 75,000 USD per month, as estimated by Swedish newspaper SvD.[6]

On January 9, 2007, TPB announced that it was seeking donations in order to buy the Principality of Sealand, to claim a country of its own. TPB later announced that it would instead buy its own island, as well as supporting The FreeNation Foundation in their plans to do so.[7]

Contents

[edit] Philosophy

The Pirate Bay began as an anti-copyright organization Piratbyrån (The Pirate Bureau) in early 2004. They hold the philosophy that copyrights are inherently wrong and should be abolished. The term they use for describing supporters of this philosophy is kopimist. A kopimist (or kopimist intellectual) is a person that holds the philosophical belief that all information should be freely distributed, as well as unrestricted. This philosophy opposes copyrights in all forms and encourages piracy of all types of media, including music, movies, TV shows, and software. Kopimists have resented being involved with computer piracy and the distribution of copyrighted materials with the use of peer-to-peer software. The involvement with piracy activities initially started as a BBS and on IRC.[5] The term kopimist originates from the root word kopimi, meaning "copy me".[6]

Original Kopimi Logo
Original Kopimi Logo

Kopimi started as a simple graphic, which the creator encourages others to copy and modify as they see fit, similar to the Creative Commons license: Attribution, ShareAlike. On their website, they encourage users to include the graphic on their personal websites, blogs, in books, or anywhere else.[7]

[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."[8] (The copyright criticism climate in Sweden have spawned many organizations, most of which developed on separate tracks. Particularly, it should be noted that the Pirate Bay is not organizationally affiliated with the Pirate Party, even if they share common views on copyright in the public debate.)

According to The Pirate Bay's blog, Petter Nilsson donated 35,000 SEK (approximately 4,656 US dollars) to help support the torrent tracker.[9] 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] Legal threats and actions

The Pirate Bay is known in the online file sharing community as one of the more prominent websites which distributes torrent files(torrents) that point to unlicensed copies of copyrighted material. In some countries, offering such torrents can be considered an illegal inducement of copyright infringement,[10] but in other countries this is not the case.[11] In Sweden it is not yet settled by any court whether torrent trackers are legal or not. In July 2005, new anti-copyright infringement legislation was enacted in Sweden which made the distribution of software for the purposes of copyright violation illegal.[12] The Pirate Bay is blocked by Türk Telekom, largest ISP in Turkey, as per court order.[citation needed]

The Pirate Bay hosts a "legal" page[13] featuring copyright infringement notices and cease and desist letters that The Pirate Bay claims to have received from various organizations, and the responses to these letters.

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.[14]

[edit] May 2006 police raid

People in Stockholm protesting the raid, June 3, 2006.
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.
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.
"Site Down" message on 31 May 2006.
"Site Down Hoax" message on 1 June 2005.
"Site Down Hoax" message on 1 June 2005.

At around 11 a.m. UTC[15] 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.[16] 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[17] 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.[18] 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."[19] 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.[20]

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,[21] 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.[22] 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[23] 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.[24] 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.[25]

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 of Sweden, 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] Sealand

In January 2007 Pirate Bay attempted to purchase Sealand, a man-made off-shore installation named HM Fort Roughs that claims to be an independent state, in order to circumvent international copyright laws. The Pirate Bay made the announcement, “With the help of all the kopimists on Internets, we want to buy Sealand. Donate money and you will become a citizen and nobleman.", on their buy Sealand website, http://buysealand.com/. The beginnings of Sealand shared some philosophic beliefs with kopimist when they started a pirate radio station. Sealand still remains free of any copyright laws or internet restrictions aside from a ban on child pornography. [8] The Pirate Bay raised over $20,000 USD, but the plan ultimately failed. In an interview on the CBC's The Hour, Royal Highness Prince Michael of Sealand stated "buying Sealand is probably a good way to circumvent international copyright law" but he would not sell Sealand to The Pirate Bay. Sealand is still for sale and valued at £504 million.[26] The Pirate Bay has announced their intent to instead buy a small island and set up their nation there.[citation needed].


[edit] Criticisms

Investigations by some journalists suggest that the site is making money on a level that far exceeds its operating costs, leading to opinions that the Pirate Bay is more engaged in making profit than supporting people's rights.[27][28][29]

Operators of the site have 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 wouldn't be working late at the office tonight, I'd be sitting on a beach somewhere, working on my tan."[30] Supporting evidence for these refutations include the fact that $60,000 worth of equipment alone was taken during the 2006 raid.[citation needed]

[edit] Letters and memos

  • Letter from John G. Malcolm, Executive Vice President of the MPA, to the former State Secretary, Dan Eliasson: [9]
  • Response from Dan Eliasson: [10]
  • The Swedish Governments "orders" to the authorities (in Swedish): [11] (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): [12] (pdf)

[edit] References

  1. ^ Traffic statistics from Alexa internet ranking. Alexa - Traffic details of The Pirate Bay. Last accessed July 28, 2006.
  2. ^ Kopimi website
  3. ^ Implodeladonia website
  4. ^ 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.
  5. ^ Svenska Dagbladet:The Pirate Bay tillbaka i Sverige (Swedish)
  6. ^ Svenska Dagbladet: Pirate Bay drar in miljonbelopp (Swedish)
  7. ^ BuySealand.com
  8. ^ The Pirate Bay: Here to Stay?, Wired News, March 13, 2006. Last accessed July 13, 2006.
  9. ^ The Pirate Bay blog entry
  10. ^ See, for example, the 2005 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd..
  11. ^ 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.
  12. ^ LinuxReviews.org article
  13. ^ http://thepiratebay.org/legal.php
  14. ^ Image of TPB's reply to Web Sheriff
  15. ^ 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]
  16. ^ Blog by Mikael Viborg, 1 June 2006
  17. ^ 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."
  18. ^ "USA-hot bakom fildelningsrazzia", article in Swedish from Dagens Nyheter
  19. ^ Motion Picture Association of America (2006-05-31). Swedish authorities sink Pirate Bay. Press release.
  20. ^ [1] (Swedish language). Unofficial English translations are available at [2] and [3]
  21. ^ mp3 audiofile of the interview
  22. ^ Pirate Bay Bloodied But Unbowed, Wired News, last accessed June 9, 2006.
  23. ^ http://www.polisen.se/
  24. ^ [4]
  25. ^ Online newspaper article on dn.se (Swedish)
  26. ^ The Pirate Bay plans to buy island The Local. James Savage, 12th January 2007. Retrieved March 26, 2007.
  27. ^ Lehti: Pirate Bayn rahavirrassa sveitsiläinen välisatama, digitoday, July 10, 2006. Last accessed September 13, 2006. (Finnish) Unofficial English translation here.
  28. ^ TPB Raking in Millions, Rixstep. Last accessed September 13, 2006.
  29. ^ Has Pirate Bay Sold Out the BitTorrent Community?, Zeropaid, July 11, 2006. Last accessed July 21, 2006.
  30. ^ Daly, Steven. "Pirates of the Multiplex" Vanity Fair Mar. 2007. Last Accessed: 14 Feb. 2007

[edit] See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

[edit] External links

[edit] Related to the raid May 2006

Wikinews has news related to:
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BitTorrent (category)
Companies   BitTorrent, Inc.
Prominent individuals   Bram Cohen • Ashwin Navin • Ludvig Strigeus
Technology   Tracker • Client • Super-seeding • Peer exchange • Broadcatching (BT RSS List)
Prominent clients (category)   Official BitTorrent Client • ABC • Azureus • BitComet • BitTornado • KTorrent • Transmission • µTorrent • Halite
Prominent sites (category)   LokiTorrent • Suprnova.org • The Pirate Bay • AnimeSuki • Demonoid • Mininova • isoHunt • TorrentSpy • Empornium • UKNova
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