The priate bay
The Pirate Bay (sometimes abbreviated toTPB) is an online index of digital content of entertainment media and software.[3]Founded in 2003 by Swedish think tankPiratbyrån, The Pirate Bay allows visitors to search, download, and contribute magnet links and torrent files, which facilitate peer-to-peer file sharing among users of theBitTorrent protocol.
87 (September 2017)
In April 2009, the website's founders (Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm) were found guilty in The Pirate Bay trial in Sweden for assisting in copyright infringement, and were sentenced to serve one year in prison and pay a fine.[4] In some countries, Internet service providers have been ordered to block access to the website. Subsequently, proxy websites have been providing access to it.[5][6][7][8][9] Founders Svartholm, Neij, and Sunde were all released by 2015 after having served shortened sentences.[10]
The Pirate Bay has sparked controversies and discussion about legal aspects of file sharing,copyright, civil liberties and has become a platform for political initiatives against established intellectual property laws and a central figure in an anti-copyrightmovement.[11] The website faced several shutdowns and domain seizures, switching to a series of new web addresses to continue operating.[10]
History
The Pirate Bay in 2005
The Pirate Bay, the current homepage
The Pirate Bay was established in September 2003[12] by the Swedish anti-copyrightorganisation Piratbyrån (The Piracy Bureau); it has been run as a separate organisation since October 2004. The Pirate Bay was first run byGottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij, who are known by their nicknames "anakata" and "TiAMO", respectively. They have both been accused of "assisting in making copyrighted content available" by the Motion Picture Association of America. On 31 May 2006, the website's servers in Stockholm were raided and taken away by Swedish police, leading to three days of downtime.[13] The Pirate Bay claims to be a non-profit entity based in theSeychelles,[14] however this is disputed.[15]
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 tocopyright infringement and sentenced to one year in prison and payment of a fine of 30 million SEK (approximately 4.2m USD, 2.8mGBP, or 3.1m EUR), after a trial of nine days. The defendants appealed the verdict and accused the judge of giving in to political pressure.[16][17] On 26 November 2010, a Swedish appeals court upheld the verdict, decreasing the original prison terms but increasing the fine to 46 million SEK.[18] On 17 May 2010, because of an injunction against their bandwidth provider, the site was taken offline.[19] 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.[20]
The Pirate Bay was hosted for several years by PRQ, a Sweden-based company, owned by creators of TPB Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij.[21] PRQ is said to provide "highly secure, no-questions-asked hosting services to its customers".[22] From May 2011, Serious Tubes Networks started providing network connectivity to The Pirate Bay.[23] On 23 January 2012, The Pirate Bay added the new category Physibles. These are 3D files described as "data objects that are able (and feasible) to become physical" using a 3D printer.[24] In May 2012, as part of Google's newly inaugurated "Transparency Report", the company reported over 6,000 formal requests to remove Pirate Bay links from the Google Search index; those requests covered over 80,500 URLs, with the five copyright holders having the most requests consisting of: Froytal Services LLC, Bang Bros, Takedown Piracy LLC, Amateur Teen Kingdom, andInternational Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI).[25] On 10 August 2013, The Pirate Bay announced the release ofPirateBrowser, a free web browser used to circumvent internet censorship.[26] The site was the most visited torrent directory on theWorld Wide Web from 2003 until November 2014, when KickassTorrents had more visitors according to Alexa.[27] On 8 December 2014, Google removed most of the Google Play apps from its app store that have "The Pirate Bay" in the title.[28]
On 9 December 2014, The Pirate Bay was raided by the Swedish police, who seized servers, computers, and other equipment.[29][30][31][32][33][34] Several other torrent related sites including EZTV, Zoink, Torrage and the Istole tracker were also shut down in addition to The Pirate Bay's forum Suprbay.org.[30] On the second day after the raid EZTV was reported to be showing "signs of life" with uploads to ExtraTorrent and KickassTorrents and supporting proxy sites like eztv-proxy.net via the main website's backend IP addresses.[35][36] Several copies of The Pirate Bay went online during the next several days, most notably oldpiratebay.org, created by isoHunt.[37][38]
On 19 May 2015, the .se domain of The Pirate Bay was ordered to be seized following a ruling by a Swedish court.[39][40] The site reacted by adding six new domains in its place.[41][42] The judgment was appealed on 26 May 2015.[43] On 12 May 2016 the appeal was struck down and the Court ruled the domains be turned over to the Swedish state.[44][45] The site returned to using its original .org domain in May 2016.[1] In August 2016, the US government shut down KickassTorrents, which resulted in The Pirate Bay becoming once again the most visited BitTorrent website.[46]
Website
Content
The Pirate Bay allows users to search forMagnet links. These are used to reference resources available for download via peer-to-peer networks which, when opened in aBitTorrent client, begin downloading the desired content. (Originally,[47] the Pirate Bay allowed users to download BitTorrent files (torrents), small files that contain metadatanecessary to download the data files from other users). The torrents are organised into categories: "Audio", "Video", "Applications", "Games", "Porn" and "Other".[48] Registration requires an email address and is free; registered users may upload their own torrents and comment on torrents. According to a study of newly uploaded files during 2013 by TorrentFreak, 44% of uploads were television shows and movies, porn was in second place with 35% of uploads, and audio made up 9% of uploads.[49]
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. Since January 2012, it also features a "Physibles" category for 3D-printable objects.[50][51] The contents of these categories can be sorted by file name, the number of seeders or leechers, the date posted, etc.
Piratbyrån described The Pirate Bay as a long-running project of performance art.[52]Normally, the front page of The Pirate Bay featured a drawing of a pirate ship with the logo of the 1980s anti-copyright infringement campaign, "Home Taping Is Killing Music", on its sails.[53]
Technical details
Initially, The Pirate Bay's four Linux serversran a custom web server called Hypercube. An old version is open source.[54] 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 permillisecond on each of the four web servers,[55] as well as to create a more user friendly interface for the front-end of the website. The website now runs Lighttpd andPHP 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. As of September 2008, The Pirate Bay consisted of 31 dedicated servers including nine dynamic web fronts, a database, two search engines, and eight BitTorrent trackers.[56]
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.[57] This allowed UDP multicast to be used to synchronise the multiple servers with each other much faster than before.[58] Opentracker is free software.[59][60]
In June 2008, The Pirate Bay announced that their servers would support SSL encryption in response to Sweden's new wiretapping law.[61][62] On 19 January 2009, The Pirate Bay launched IPv6 support for their tracker system, using an IPv6-only version ofOpentracker.[63] On 17 November 2009, The Pirate Bay shut off its tracker service permanently, stating that centralised trackers are no longer needed since distributed hash tables (DHT), peer exchange (PEX), andmagnet links allow peers to find each other and content in a decentralised way.[64][65]
On 20 February 2012, The Pirate Bay announced in a Facebook post that after 29 February the site would no longer offer torrent files, and would instead offer only magnet links. The site commented: "Not having torrents will be a bit cheaper for us but it will also make it harder for our common enemies to stop us."[66] The site added that torrents being shared by fewer than ten people will retain their torrent files, to ensure compatibility with older software that may not support magnet links.[67]
Funding
Early financing
In April 2007, a rumour 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 consternation since Lundström, an heir to the Wasabröd fortune, is known for financing several far-right political parties and movements like Sverigedemokraterna andBevara Sverige Svenskt (Keep Sweden Swedish). During the talk show, Piratbyrånspokesman Tobias Andersson acknowledged that "without Lundström's support, Pirate Bay would not have been able to start" and stated that most of the money went towards acquiring servers and bandwidth.[68][69]
Donations
From 2004 until 2006, The Pirate Bay had a "Donate" link to a donations page which listed several payment methods, stated that funds supported only the tracker, and offered time-limited benefits to donors such as no advertisements and "VIP" status.[70] After that, the link was removed from the home page,[71]and the donations page only recommended donating "to your local pro-piracy group" for a time,[72] after which it redirected to the site's main page. Billboard claimed that the site in 2009 "appeals for donations to keep its service running".[73] In 2006, Petter Nilsson, a candidate on the Swedish political reality show Toppkandidaterna (The Top Candidates), donated 35,000 SEK (US$4,925.83) to The Pirate Bay, which they used to buy new servers.[74][75]
In 2007, the site ran a fund intended to buySealand, a platform with debated micro-nationstatus.[76] In 2009, the then-convicted principals of TPB requested that users stop trying to donate money for their fines, because they refused to pay them.[77][78] In 2013, The Pirate Bay published its Bitcoinaddress on the site front page for donations,[79] as well as Litecoin.[80]
Merchandising
The site links to an online store selling site-related merchandise, first noted in 2006 inSvenska Dagbladet.[81][82]
Advertising
Since 2006, the website has received financing through advertisements on result pages. According to speculations by Svenska Dagbladet, the advertisements generate about 600,000 SEK (US$84,000) per month.[83][84] In an investigation in 2006, the police concluded that The Pirate Bay brings in 1.2 million SEK (US$169,000) per year from advertisements.[85] The prosecution estimated in the 2009 trial from emails and screenshots that the advertisements pay over 10 million SEK (US$1.4M) a year,[86] but the indictment used the estimate from the police investigation.[87] The lawyers of the site's administrators counted the 2006 revenue closer to 725,000 SEK (US$102,000).[88] The verdict of the first trial however quoted the estimate from the preliminary investigation.[89]
As of 2008, IFPI claims that the website is extremely profitable, and that The Pirate Bay is more engaged in making profit than supporting people's rights.[90] 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."[91] 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.[90] In the 2009 trial, the defence estimated the site's yearly expenses to be 800,000 SEK (US$110,000).[88]
There have been unintentional advertisers. In 2007, an online ad agency placed Wal-MartThe Simpsons DVD ads "along with search results that included downloads of the series".[92] In 2012, banner ads for Canada'sDepartment of Finance Economic Action Planwere placed atop search results, as part of a larger "media buy", but were pulled "quickly".[93][94]
Fee
According to the site's usage policy, it reserves the right to charge commercial policy violators "a basic fee of €5,000 plus bandwidth and other costs that may arise due to the violation".[95] Co-founder Peter Sunde accused Swedish book publishers, who scraped the site for information about copyrighted books, of violating the usage policy, and asserted TPB's copyright on its database.[96]
Projects
"Jubilee!" – on the homepage 31 January 2008[97]
The team behind The Pirate Bay has worked on several websites and software projects of varying degrees of permanence. In 2007,BayImg, an image hosting website similar toTinyPic went online in June.[98][99] Pre-publication images posted to BayImg became part of a legal battle when Conde Nast's network was later allegedly hacked.[100][101] In July, "within hours after Ingmar Bergman's death", BergmanBits.com was launched, listing torrents for the director's films,[98][102][103] online until mid-2008.[104] 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.[105][106]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.[107][108] BOiNK was announced in October in response to the raid on Oink's Pink Palace, a music-oriented BitTorrent website.[109] A month later Sunde cancelled BOiNK, citing the many new music websites created since the downfall of OiNK.[110] A Mac dashboard widget was released in December, listing "top 10 stuff currently on TPB, either per category or the full list".[111][112] SlopsBox, a disposable e-mail address anti-spam service, also appeared in December,[113][114] and was reviewed in 2009.[115][116]
In 2008, Baywords was launched as a free blogging service that lets users of the site blog about anything as long as it does not break any Swedish laws.[117] In December, The Pirate Bay resurrected ShareReactor as a combined eD2k and BitTorrent site.[118] The same month, the Vio mobile video converter was released, designed to convert video files for playback on mobile devices such asiPhone, BlackBerry, Android, many Nokia andWindows Mobile devices.[119]
In 2009, Pastebay, a note sharing service[120]similar to Pastebin, was made available to the public as of 23 March.[121][122] The Video Bayvideo streaming/sharing site was announced in June to be "The YouTube Killer", with content viewable in HTML 5-capable browsers.[123][124] The site was in an "Extreme Beta" phase; a message on the homepage instructed the user "don't expect anything to work at all".[125] The Video Bay was never completed and As of 28 April 2013, The Video Bay is inaccessible.
A contest by Project Chanologyadvertised at The Pirate Bay in December 2009
On 18 April 2011, Pirate Bay temporarily changed its name to "Research Bay", collaborating with P2P researchers of theLund University Cybernorms group in a large poll of P2P users.[126] The researchers published their results online on "The Survey Bay", as a public Creative Commons project in 2013.[127][128][129] In January 2012, the site announced The Promo Bay; "doodles" by selected musicians, artists and others could be rotated onto the site's front page at a future date.[130][131] Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho was promoted, offering a collection of his books for free download.[132] By November, 10,000 artists were reported to have signed up.[133] TPB preserves a dated collection of exhibited logos.[134] On 2 December 2012, some ISPs in the UK such asBT, Virgin Media and BE started blocking The Promo Bay[135] but stopped a few days later, when the BPI reversed its position.[136]
Purchases
In January 2007, when the micronation ofSealand 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".[137][138] 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.[139]
The P2P news blog TorrentFreak reported on 12 October 2007 that the Internet domain ifpi.com, which previously belonged to theInternational 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"[140] 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.[141]
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