The Pirate Bay
The Pirate Bay (sometimes abbreviated as TPB) is an online index of digital content of entertainment media and software.[1] Founded in 2003 by Swedish think tank Piratbyrån, 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 the BitTorrent protocol.
Type of site
Torrent index, magnet links provider
35 languages available, primarily English and Swedish
Advertisements, donations, merchandise, cryptocurrency mining
Optional, free
15 September 2003
Online
HTML, JavaScript, and PHP
The Pirate Bay has sparked controversies and discussion about legal aspects of file sharing, copyright, and civil liberties and has become a platform for political initiatives against established intellectual property laws as well as a central figure in an anti-copyright movement.[2] The website has faced several shutdowns and domain seizures, switching to a series of new web addresses to continue operating.[3]
In April 2009, the website's founders–Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde 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 (ISPs) have been ordered to block access to the website. Subsequently, proxy websites have been providing access to it.[5][6][7][8][9] The founders were all released by 2015 after serving shortened sentences.[3]
History[edit]
The Pirate Bay was established on 15 September 2003[10][11] by the Swedish anti-copyright organisation Piratbyrån (lit. 'The Piracy Bureau'); it has been run as a separate organisation since October 2004. The Pirate Bay was first run by Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm with Peter Sunde as the spokesperson;[12] the founders are known by their nicknames "TiAMO", "anakata" and "brokep", 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 seized by Swedish police, leading to three days of downtime.[13] The Pirate Bay claims to be a non-profit entity based in the Seychelles;[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 the founders and Carl Lundström were found guilty of assistance to copyright infringement and sentenced to one year in prison and payment of a fine of 30 million Swedish kronor (approximately US$4.2 million, £2.8 million sterling, or €3.1 million), 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 kronor.[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.[12]
The Pirate Bay was hosted for several years by PRQ, a Sweden-based company, owned by Neij and Svartholm.[20] PRQ is said to provide "highly secure, no-questions-asked hosting services to its customers".[21] From May 2011, Serious Tubes Networks started providing network connectivity to The Pirate Bay.[22] 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, and International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI).[23] On 10 August 2013, The Pirate Bay announced the release of PirateBrowser, a free web browser used to circumvent internet censorship.[24] The site was the most visited torrent directory on the World Wide Web from 2003 until November 2014, when KickassTorrents had more visitors according to Alexa.[25] On 8 December 2014, Google removed most of the Google Play apps from its app store that have "The Pirate Bay" in the title.[26]
On 9 December 2014, The Pirate Bay was raided by the Swedish police, who seized servers, computers, and other equipment.[27][28][29][30][31] 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.[28] 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.[32][33] Several copies of The Pirate Bay went online during the next several days, most notably oldpiratebay.org, created by isoHunt.[34][35]
On 19 May 2015, the .se domain of The Pirate Bay was ordered to be seized following a ruling by a Swedish court.[36][37] The site reacted by adding six new domains in its place.[38][39] The judgment was appealed on 26 May 2015.[40] On 12 May 2016, the appeal was dismissed and the Court ruled the domains be turned over to the Swedish state.[41][42] The site returned to using its original .org domain in May 2016.[43] In August 2016, the US government shut down KickassTorrents, which resulted in The Pirate Bay becoming once again the most visited BitTorrent website.[44]
Funding[edit]
Early financing[edit]
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 and Bevara Sverige Svenskt (Keep Sweden Swedish). During the talk show, Piratbyrån spokesman 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.[67][68]
Donations[edit]
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.[69] After that, the link was removed from the home page,[70] and the donations page only recommended donating "to your local pro-piracy group" for a time,[71] 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".[72] In 2006, Petter Nilsson, a candidate on the Swedish political reality show Toppkandidaterna (The Top Candidates), donated 35,000 Swedish kronor (US$4,925.83) to The Pirate Bay, which they used to buy new servers.[73][74]
In 2007, the site ran a fund intended to buy Sealand, a platform with debated micronation status.[75] In 2009, the convicted principals of TPB requested that users stop trying to donate money for their fines, because they refused to pay them.[76][77] In 2013, The Pirate Bay published its Bitcoin address on the site front page for donations,[78] as well as Litecoin.[79]
Merchandising[edit]
The site links to an online store selling site-related merchandise, first noted in 2006 in Svenska Dagbladet.[80][81]
Advertising[edit]
Since 2006, the website has received financing through advertisements on result pages. According to speculations by Svenska Dagbladet, the advertisements generate about 600,000 kronor ($84,000) per month.[82][83] In an investigation in 2006, the police concluded that The Pirate Bay brings in 1.2 million kronor ($169,000) per year from advertisements.[84] The prosecution estimated in the 2009 trial from emails and screenshots that the advertisements pay over 10 million kronor ($1.4 million) a year,[85] but the indictment used the estimate from the police investigation.[86] The lawyers of the site's administrators counted the 2006 revenue closer to 725,000 kronor ($102,000).[87] The verdict of the first trial, however, quoted the estimate from the preliminary investigation.[88]
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.[89] 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."[90] In response to claims of annual revenue exceeding $3 million made by the IFPI, 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.[89] In the 2009 trial, the defence estimated the site's yearly expenses to be 800,000 kronor ($110,000).[87]
There have been unintentional advertisers. In 2007, an online ad agency placed Wal-Mart The Simpsons DVD ads "along with search results that included downloads of the series".[91] In 2012, banner ads for Canada's Department of Finance Economic Action Plan were placed atop search results, as part of a larger "media buy", but were pulled "quickly".[92][93]
Cryptocurrency mining[edit]
In 2017, The Pirate Bay embedded scripts on its website that would consume resources on visitors' computers in order to mine the Monero cryptocurrency. Visitors were initially not informed that these scripts had been added.[94] After negative feedback, the operators published an announcement stating that it was a test to see if it could replace advertisements.[95] The mining script appeared and disappeared from the website repeatedly over the following months through 2018.[96]
Fee[edit]
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".[97] 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.[98]
In media[edit]
The Pirate Bay is featured in Steal This Film (2006), a documentary series about society and filesharing, produced by The League of Noble Peers; in the Danish Documentary Good Copy Bad Copy, which explores the issues surrounding file copyright; and the documentary TPB AFK. The Pirate Bay has been a topic on the US-syndicated NPR radio show On the Media.[260][261]
Björn Ulvaeus, member of the Swedish pop music group ABBA, criticised copyright infringing activities of The Pirate Bay supporters as "lazy and mean".[194][262] In contrast, Brazilian best-selling author Paulo Coelho has embraced free sharing online. Coelho supports The Pirate Bay and offered to be a witness in the 2009 trial. He accounts much of his growing sales to his work shared on the Internet and comments that "a person who does not share is not only selfish, but bitter and alone".[263][264][265][266]
