The Pirate Bay

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The Pirate Bay (often abbreviated TPB) is an Internet site that bills itself as "the world's largest BitTorrent tracker," and also acts 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 (legally or otherwise), as well as Linux distribution discs. ThePirateBay.org is ranked 412^th in a list of the world's most-visited internet sites.Traffic statistics from Alexa internet ranking. [Alexa - Traffic details of The Pirate Bay]. Last accessed July 02, 2006.

The Pirate Bay was started by the Swedish anti-copyright organization Piratbyrån 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.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. 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]."[Svenska Dagbladet:The Pirate Bay tillbaka i Sverige (Swedish)] Upon reopening on June 3,2006, its number of visitors has doubled, the increased popularity attributed to greater exposure through the recent media coverage.

Legal threats

The Pirate Bay is known in the online file sharing community as one of the more prominent websites which distributes torrents that point to unlicensed copies of copyrighted material. In some countries, offering such torrents could be considered an illegal aiding of copyright infringement,See, for example, the 2005 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd.. but in Sweden and other countries this is not the case.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. In July 2005, new anti-piracy legislation was enacted in Sweden which made the distribution of software for the purposes of copyright violation illegal.[LinuxReviews.org article] The Pirate Bay is well known for the "legal" page it hostshttp://thepiratebay.org/legal.php, 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.[Image] of TPB's reply to Web Sheriff

May 2006 police raid

At around 11 a.m. CETThis 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#redirect [[Template:Fact]] 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.[Blog by Mikael Viborg], 1 June 2006 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.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." 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.["USA-hot bakom fildelningsrazzia", article in Swedish from Dagens Nyheter] There have been claims of ministerstyre (lit. "minister rule") in connection with this allegation.#redirect [[Template:Fact]] 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."#redirect [[Template:Fact]]

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."#redirect [[Template:Fact]]

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.[link] (Swedish language). Unofficial English translations are available at [link] and [link]

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 and current logo features the pirate ship as a stylized phoenix, in reference to the servers rising up again after the raid.

The reincarnated website was, as rumored, 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.[Pirate Bay Bloodied But Unbowed], Wired News, last accessed June 9, 2006. 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 policehttp://www.polisen.se/ went down due to high load. This was speculation to be 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.[link] 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 DDoS attack.[Online newspaper article on dn.se (Swedish)]

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.

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-piracy political party making a credible bid for seats in the Swedish parliament."[The Pirate Bay: Here to Stay?], Wired News, March 13, 2006. Last accessed July 13, 2006.

According to The Pirate Bay's blog, Petter Nilsson donated 50,000 SEK (approximately 6,500 US dollars) to help support the torrent tracker.[The Pirate Bay blog entry] 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 20% of his winnings to The Pirate Bay, which they used to buy new servers.

Letters and memos

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

See also