The Pirate Bay

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

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, games, movies and software as well as Linux distribution discs. ThePirateBay.org is ranked 246 (as of August 7, 2007) 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 Svartholm ("Anakata"), Fredrik Neij ("TiAMO") and Peter Sunde ("brokep").

On May 31, 2006, the site's servers, located in Stockholm, were raided by Swedish police, taking it offline for three days, when it came online with new hosting in the Netherlands -- The Pirate Bay has since taken measures to ensure a restoration time of hours rather than days, in the future. 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]."^[2] Upon reopening, the site's number of visitors 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. Directly after the raid, the advertisements generated about 75,000 USD per month according to speculations by Swedish newspaper SvD.^[3]

The raid, alleged to be politically motivated and under pressure from the MPAA, was reported as a success by the MPAA in the immediate aftermath, but with the site being restored within days and the raising of the debate in Swedish culture, The Pirate Bay and other commentators considered it "highly unsuccessful".^[4]

Legal and cultural background

The debate on peer to peer and file sharing is a global phenomenon. Peer to peer ("P2P") technology allows people worldwide to share files and data; a large proportion of the data shared is material passed freely between users that is oftentimes subject to copyright or other restrictions. Different legal systems, and different technologies, handle this differently. Some of the key background and distinctions relevant to the Pirate Bay's operations are as follows:

• P2P file sharing is used both legitimately (to distribute with permission or non-copyright materials), and illegitimately (in breach of copyright). It is highly popular and effective, with some estimates being that 15 - 35% of all internet traffic is P2P usage in some form or other.

• In some file sharing systems, the owner of a file share system directly distributes files themselves. In others, notably the technology called bit torrent, the organizer is not in fact distributing any copyright material. Rather, they act like a cataloger or co-ordinator, indexing files offered for sharing rather than themselves offering any such material. The data thus shared is called metadata - that is, data about data. The system performing the indexing is called a tracker. A typical Pirate Bay file provides a filename, a location it can be downloaded from, and various checksums which can be used to verify the file's integrity when downloaded. It does not, itself, contain any media material, whether legal or otherwise.

• In some countries, notably the United States, there is significant legal pressure from industry bodies to outlaw the provision of such information, where it is being used to facilitate or encourage illegal copyright breach. In the legal case MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd. it was held that even if a company itself does not violate U.S. copyright law, it can be guilty of inducing or assisting others to do so. However this is not the law for many other countries, notably several European countries.

The website and servers

The Pirate Bay website allows users to search for and download torrent files (torrents), small files that contain the machine-readable information necessary to download the (typically large) data files from other users. The torrents are organized in the categories: Audio, Video, Software applications, Games, and, for registered users only, Pornography. Registration requires an email address and is free; registered users may upload their own torrents and add comments to torrent descriptions. Downloading of data files from other users is facilitated by the Bittorrent tracker that also runs on a Pirate Bay server.

The four Linux servers run a custom httpd called Hypercube. 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.

Other Projects

The team behind the Pirate Bay have embarked on a number of other websites, including BayImg, an uncensored image host (similar to Photobucket) ^[5] and a video-sharing website to be called The Video Bay, possibly similar to the video-sharing service YouTube. ^[6] They also promote the general license known as kopimi that not only grants everyone the right to copy but that also explicitly encourages everyone to do so.

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,^[7] but in other countries this is not the case.^[8] 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.^[9]. The Pirate Bay is blocked by Türk Telekom, the largest ISP in Turkey, as per a court order.^{[citation needed]}

The Pirate Bay is well known for the "legal" page it hosts^[10], featuring copyright infringement notices and cease and desist letters that The Pirate Bay claims to have received from various organizations, along with mocking replies. One of the site's co-operators, Peter, explains: "They are rude in a polite way. We are rude in a rude way back at them."^[11]

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]

Politics and funding

According to The Pirate Bay's blog, Petter Nilsson donated 35,000 SEK (approximately 4,656 US dollars) to help support the torrent tracker.^[13] 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 25.1% of his winnings to The Pirate Bay, which they used to buy new servers.

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]}

May 2006 police raid

The raid

At around 11 a.m. UTC^[14] 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.^[15]

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.^[16] In addition, other equipment was also seized, such as hardware routers, switches, blank CDs and faxes regarding air conditioning.

Political issues

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 denies. Specifically, the claim is that the Swedish government was threatened with WTO trade sanctions unless action was taken against The Pirate Bay.^[17]

There have been claims of ministerstyre (lit. "minister rule") in connection with this allegation.^[4] A letter titled Re: The Pirate Bay from MPAA to Dan Eliasson, the Swedish State Secretary, was dated two months before the raid and hinted at trade reprisals ("It is not in Sweden's best interests to earn a reputation ... as a place where utter lawlessness is tolerated") and urged him to "exercise your influence to urge law enforcement officers in Sweden to take much needed action against Pirate Bay".^[18] Ministerstyre, when a politician pressures another government agency to take action, is a serious 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 reprinted John G. Malcolm's allegation that The Pirate Bay was making money from the distribution of copyrighted material, a criticism refuted by the Pirate Bay (see below).

Aftermath

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 April 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. 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 operational by the end of the next day, their logo now depicting the pirate ship firing cannon balls at the Hollywood sign. The header displayed the name The Police Bay. 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 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.

In May 2007 prosecutor Håkan Roswall made it clear that he intends to press charges against the administrators of The Pirate Bay.

Since the raid, Pirate Bay stated their disaster recovery plan of "a few days" worked correctly, but that they are now moving to redundant servers both in Belgium and Russia, and an aim of a few hours restoration time, should the servers be disrupted again.

Documentary and publicity

The documentary Steal This Film was produced and distributed (by Bittorrent) in the months following the raid. In the words of its speakers, it aimed to present the other side of the debate, until that time dominated by the media industry. The film was made available free, as donationware.

Other notable events

May 2007 attacks

In May of 2007, The Pirate Bay was hacked by a 'known' group of people.^[26] They managed to successfully steal a copy of the user database, which included over one and a half million users (1,500,000+). The Pirate Bay reassured its users that the data was of no value and that passwords and e-mails were encrypted and hashed. Certain blogs stated that a group known as the AUH (Arga Unga Hackare, Swedish for "Angry Young Hackers") were suspected in the attack, however the AUH stated through an article on Computer Sweden that they were not involved and would take revenge on those responsible for the attack. ^[27]

Ladonia, Sealand and the ACFI

On June 26 2006, TPB supported the 'Armed Coalition Forces of the Internets' against the Swedish micronation of Ladonia. In January 2007, when the micronation of Sealand was put up for 'sale', the ACFI and TPB tried to buy it. However, they could not buy the man-made platform because the Sealand government did not want to sell to TPB. A plan B was made, to buy an island instead, but this too was never implemented, despite the site having raised $20,000 in donations.

Swedish child pornography filter

In July 2007 it was revealed that the Swedish police intended to put The Pirate Bay on their filter list of child pornography sites, thus blocking it from general access. This decision was later revoked with the police claiming that the files containing child pornography had been removed. In IDG.se's more detailed interview of the police officer Stevan Kronqvist, who was controlling the filter list, explained that TPB didn't host any child porn itself and reason to filter was that they allowed to link to it. ^[28] As with the 2006 police raid this came with criticism and accusations that the intended Pirate Bay censorship was political in nature.

Whether child porn was to be found on The Pirate Bay or not, it was their official policy not to remove any content that has been labeled correctly, even if it is child porn. As they said:

"we do not remove any content, what-so-ever, if it is not wrongly labeled. Seriously, NO content will be removed. Whatever it is. Do not even write to us about it."

This policy was confirmed in January 24, 2007, when The Pirate Bays admin Peter "Brokep" was asked: "If I have understood everything correctly you never take off anything that has been distributed on the Pirate Bay, instead you point to the responsibility of the users and the decisions of authorities. Is there any line beyond which you could not accept yourselves? How would it feel, for example, to indirectly add to the spread of child pornography, even if you had the chance to stop it?" “Brokep” replied: "We do not censor anything. Again, it is the responsibility of the user."

Later, he stated in his blog that their internal policy was to inform police or ECPAT if they found suspicious content. He also stated that bittorrent is not popular for child porn because through the protocol it is very easy for police to track (and catch) those who are distributing files which are illegal under swedish criminal law. ^[29] Difference between distribute of child porn and common copyright infrigments in Sweden is that noncommercial copyright infrigment is more like misdemeanor and police have fever rights (like in rights to wiretapping) to track suspects compared to case of real crime (distributing child porn) where is no legal limitations to do so.

Since then the site text has been changed, indicating that they now will remove illegal content (child porn) from their search indexes:

"Seriously, NO legal content will be removed. Whatever it is. Do not even write to us about it."

The Pirate Bay continues to track and index torrents of erotic but legal photos of children. ^[30]

Notable Leaks

In July 2007, copies of The Simpsons Movie were uploaded to the site almost 24 hours after the first showing of the movie (not the première). During this time the Pirate Bay logo was altered to include the three administrators as they would appear if they were in an episode of The Simpsons.

In July 2007, a copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was uploaded to the site almost a week before the book's release. It consisted of digital photographs of each page of the book, which users quickly transcribed into pdf files.^{[31] [32]} The website was briefly updated with a new logo with the slogan "The Pirate Bay and the Torrent of Fire".

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.^[33][34][35]

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."^[36]

When asked directly about The Pirate Bay's economy, Peter “Brokep” explained that he knows nothing about their profit in 2006, their monthly income, or the cost of their most expensive ad-package.^[37] The latter costs 27,396 U.S. dollars per day, according to sales manager Luar Busó from Eastpoint Media, a company which sold ads for The Pirate Bay.^[38].

SuprBay

SuprBay.org is a community forum led by SuprNova.org and The Pirate Bay. The news was given unofficially on TorrentFreak on August 2, 2007 ^[39], as soon as everybody heard, members started to join. On August 6th, 2007 the news jumped to Digg^[40][41] making the frontpage, members skyrocketed by the hundreds.

Letters and memos

• Letter from John G. Malcolm, Executive Vice President of the MPA, to the former State Secretary, Dan Eliasson: [8]
• Response from Dan Eliasson: [9]
• The Swedish Governments "orders" to the authorities (in Swedish): [10] (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): [11] (pdf)

References

See also

• BitTorrent tracker
• Torrent Search Engine
• List of BitTorrent websites
• File sharing
• Digital-update
• BitTorrent
• Suprnova
• Pirate Party
• Steal This Film

External links

• The Pirate Bay (official site)
• May 2006 raid A list of articles and media
• BAYIMG.com Free uncensored image hosting. A Pirate Bay project.