The Pirate Bay

About

The Pirate Bay (TPB) is a torrent hosting website where users can share files using the BitTorrent protocol. The site has often been criticized by companies in the entertainment media industry for facilitating Internet piracy and copyright infringement.

History

The Swedish anti-copyright organization Piratbyrån (“The Pirate Bureau”) was established on August 1st, 2003, which aimed to support file sharing on the Internet in opposition to the Swedish Anti-Piracy Bureau. On September 15th, 2003, Piratbyrån members Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij launched the torrent sharing site The Pirate Bay.^[10] In 2004, TPB began accepting donations on the website in order to fund its operations. On April 1st, 2005, TPB posted an April Fool’s Day prank claiming they had been raided by the Swedish Anti-Piracy Bureau.^[1] In 2006, the donate page was removed and the site began running advertisements on the search results page. In May of that year, Swedish reality star Petter Nilsson donated US $4,656 to the torrent site, which was used to buy new servers. In January of 2007, TPB attempted to purchase the micronation of Sealand in a legal maneuver to protect itself from prosecution but was denied by the Sealand government. On June 23rd, 2010, Piratbyrån disbanded following the death of Ibi Kopimi Botani, creator of the Kopimi copyright alternative concept. In January of 2012, the category Physibles was added to TPB, which contained files for objects that could be fabricated using a 3D printer.

Domain Name Change

In April of 2013, TPB changed to a Greenland-based .gl domain after they were warned that Swedish authorities were planning to seize their .se address.^[6] In less than 48 hours, the telecommunications company controlling the .gl domain announced they would block the site for promoting illegal activity.^[7] On April 11th, The Register^[8] published an article about the domain problems, which was subsequently posted to the /r/worldnews^[9] subreddit the same day. Within 24 hours, the post received over 3,700 up votes and 690 comments.

Documentary

On February 8th, 2013, director Simon Klose released a documentary titled “The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard,” which chronicled the early history of the website and its founders (shown below). Within two months, the video had received over 1.77 million views and 7,600 comments on YouTube.

2014 Police Raid & Seizure

On December 9th, The Pirate Bay abruptly went offline worldwide. The outage was first reported by P2P-related news site TorrentFreak^[19], which initially speculated technical malfunctions as the reason behind the downtime of an unprecedented scale, but upon further inquiry, it was able to confirm^[20] that at least two data centers in Stockholm and Nacka had been raided and seized by Swedish police as part of a coordinated operation to protect intellectual property. The raid came just about a month after the arrest of Hans Fredrik Lennart Neij, the last Pirate Bay co-founder who had remained at large, at the Thailand-Laos border in early November. In addition to The Pirate Bay, a number of other reports of outage came from several Torrent-related sites, including EZTV, Zoink, Torrage and the Istole. On the following day, the site was temporarily back up on the domain ThePirateBay.ch.^[21]

Highlights

Operation Payback

Operation Payback was a series of DDoS attacks organized by users of 4chan’s /b/ (random) board that started on September 17th, 2010 against the entertainment industry websites for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the MPAA. The operation was launched in retaliation for DDoS attacks against The Pirate Bay by the Indian company Aiplex Software.

Kopimism

Kopimism is an online movement espousing the benefits of free file-sharing that is officially recognized as a religious community by the Swedish Legal, Financial and Administrative Services Agency. The concept was created Ibi Kopimi Botani, a member of TPB’s founding group Piratbyrån who designed the movement’s official logo as well (shown below).

Controversies

In November of 2004, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) unsuccessfully filed a complaint with Sweden to shut down TPB for violating copyright.

On May 31st, 2006, TPB and several people involved with the site were raided by Swedish police on orders given from Judge Tomas Norström to investigate the alleged copyright violations. As a result, the website was temporarily shut down and several servers were confiscated.

In September of 2008, torrents containing autopsy photos of two murdered children surfaced on TPB, leading the father Nicklas Jangestig to request that the files be removed from the site.^[4]TPB refused to remove the torrent file from the site, with spokesperson Peter Sunde stating “I don’t think it’s our job to judge if something is ethical or unethical or what other people want to put out on the internet.”

The Trial of the Co-Founders

On January 31st, 2008, Swedish persecutors charged Pirate Bay staff members Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Peter Sunde, and Swedish businessman Carl Lundström, with breach of copyright law and claims for damages of US $13 million. On February 16th, 2009, the trial began at the district court of Stockholm, Sweden. During the trial, defense attorney Per Samuelson presented an argument attempting to illustrate how TPB admins had no control over the actions of their users, which would later be known as the “King Kong defense.”

“EU directive 2000/31/EC^[37] says that he who provides an information service is not responsible for the information that is being transferred. In order to be responsible, the service provider must initiate the transfer. But the admins of The Pirate Bay don’t initiate transfers. It’s the users that do and they are physically identifiable people. They call themselves names like King Kong… According to legal procedure, the accusations must be against an individual and there must be a close tie between the perpetrators of a crime and those who are assisting. This tie has not been shown. The prosecutor must show that Carl Lundström personally has interacted with the user King Kong, who may very well be found in the jungles of Cambodia.”

On April 17th, 2009, the defendants were found guilty of accessory to crime against copryright law and sentenced to one year in jail and US $3.5 million in fines and damages. Three days later, the ad-hoc group of Internet users known as “Anonymous” retaliated by taking down the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) website with a DDoS attack as part of “Operation Baylout” and called for supporters of TPB to boycott the entertainment industry for the next two months. The verdict was immediately appealed by the defendants, which resulted in an increase of fines for a reduction of jail time. On February 1st, 2012, the Supreme Court of Sweden refused to appeal the case, which prompted admins to change the site’s domain name from .org to .se as an attempt to avoid United States copyright laws.

Gottfrid Svartholm Warg’s Arrest

On August 30th, 2012, The Pirate Bay’s co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm Warg^[12] was arrested in Cambodia^[13] under an international warrant that had been issued for failing to serve his jail sentence or pay his share of the fine ordered during his 2009 trial in Sweden. On September 11th, Warg was subsequently extradited to Sweden to begin his one-year jail sentence as well as to be questioned by the police as part of a separate hacking investigation. In April 2013, the Swedish government formally accused^[14] him of participating in a high-profile hack against several government agencies and a local bank while in hiding, which resulted in what is being reported as the largest data breach in Sweden’s history.^[15]

On May 19th, 2013, a number of documents relating to his capture in Cambodia and new charges against him were made available on Wikileaks^[16], including several requests from Warg’s mother Kristina to grant her son access to a graphic calculator and a distance learning math class. Additional accounts of the trial have been made available on supporter Niklas Femerstrand’s website.^[17] The verdict of the hacking trial is expected to be delivered on June 14th, and if found guilty, Warg will receive between two and four additional years of jail term.

Peter Sunde’s Arrest

On May 31st, 2014, Swedish police officials arrested Pirate Bay’s co-founder Peter Sunde, who has been wanted by Interpol for almost two years following his conviction and sentencing for breaching copyright laws in 2012, in the southern Swedish county of Skane. Though no longer directly involved with the peer-to-peer file-sharing service, Sunde has continued to maintain an active presence within the tech community during his years at large. He is now expected to serve the eight-month sentence and pay a fine of 46 million SEK (approximately $7 million) that were handed down to him by the Swedish courts in 2010.

Fredrik Neij’s Arrest

On November 4th, 2014, the Thai immigration police arrested Fredrik Neij, the third co-founder of The Pirate Bay who had moved to its neighboring country Laos to evade the arrest warrant issue by Interpol, as he tried to enter Thailand by driving across the border in the northeastern city of Nong Khai. According to local media, Neij would be transferred to Bangkok and eventually deported back to Sweden. With the arrest of Neij, all three founders of The Pirate Bay are now in police custody.

Danish Hacking Investigation

As the trial in Sweden came to its conclusion in June 2013, Danish police accused Warg of involvement in yet another large-scale cybercrime investigation^[18], specifically for aiding an unnamed Danish hacker gain illegal access to a number of databases holding sensitive information between April and August 2012. According to Denmark’s national police chief Jens Henrik Hoejbjerg, Warg and the 20-year-old Danish accomplice are suspected of illegally obtaining millions of social security numbers, driving license records and official e-mail messages from databases run by the multinational IT company Computer Sciences Corp (CSC). While the police has not found any evidence that suspects abused or sold the downloaded data, they revealed that the Danish man has been arrested and was being held in jail as part of the investigation. As for Warg, depending on the outcome of his trial in Sweden, he may be extradited to Denmark as early as June 17th for a second trial of what is being considered one of Denmark’s biggest hack attacks.

Traffic

On May 31st, 2008, TPB published a blog post reporting that they had grown to over 2.7 million registered users, 2.5 million peers and were ranked as a top 100 website in the entire world. As of April 2013, ThePirateBay.se is ranked 63 in the United States and 74 in the entire world, according to the web traffic analytics site Alexa.^[5]