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The Pirate Bay

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The pirate ship in the Pirate Bay logo bears the Home Taping is Killing Music logo.

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 in 427th place on the world's most visited internet site.[1]

The Pirate Bay was started by the Swedish anti-copyright organization Piratbyrån in early 2004, but since October 2004 has been a separate organization. The site is currently run by "Anakata" and "TiAMO".

The server which runs Hypercube Tracking Software is located in Stockholm, Sweden. 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]".[2]

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[3], but in Sweden and other countries [4] this is not the case. In July 2005, new anti-piracy legislation was enacted in Sweden which made the distribution of software for the purposes of copyright violation illegal.[5] The Pirate Bay is well known for the "legal" page it hosts[6], 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.[7]

May 2006 police raid

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At around 11 a.m. CET [8] 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.

The raid, in which some 50 police officers participated, shut down the site and confiscated its servers, as well as all other servers hosted by The Pirate Bay's Internet service provider, 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.[9] Even though only the servers running The Pirate Bay were evidence for possible copyright violations, 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.[10] In addition, lots of equipment that couldn't be useful as evidence of file sharing was also seized, such as hardware routers, switches, blank CDs and faxes regarding the air conditioning. Whether the police were simply expected to trust the labels the server administrators had placed as to which server ran which site, or if their thorough sweep of evidence was precautionary or even legal remains unknown at this time.

It is not clear why the raid was carried out at this particular time. 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. There have been claims of "ministerstyre" (lit. "minister rule") in connection with this allegation. 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[11]: "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". Dan Glickman, CEO of MPAA, also stated that "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". The MPAA release goes on to say there were three arrests while in actuality they were only held for questioning.

Despite the fact that the release from the MPAA mostly contained information on the reasoning for the raid, and recent "piracy figures", it also contained an unfounded statement from John G. Malcolm, who claimed that the pirate bay was making money from the copyrighted material which was linked to by the torrents uploaded by its users.

“The bottom line is that the operators of the Pirate Bay and others like them are criminals who profit handsomely by facilitating the distribution of millions of copyrighted creative works and files protected under the law”
John G. Malcolm, Vice President for Anti-Piracy Operations for the MPAA.

As of June 2006, the website is 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 "exclusivly spent on the tracker".

The closure message initially caused some minor confusion, because on June 1, 2005 The Pirate Bay had posted a similar message stating that they were permanently down since they had been raided by the Swedish Anti-Piracy Bureau and IFPI, which was later admitted as a prank. The BitTorrent community, once assured of the story's truth, quickly spread the announcement across online news sites, blogs, and discussion forums.

The Pirate Bay was, at first, brought back online on a temporary server, and displayed a "SITE DOWN" message, in which they confirm that the police were in possession of search warrants alleging either breach of copyright law or assisting such a breach. The Pirate Bay recently posted pictures of the alleged empty servers raided by the police. Piratbyrån have set up a temporary news blog to inform the public about the incident.[12] Unofficial English translations are available.[13][14]

On June 1, 2006 it was reported on ThePirateBay.org that the site would be up and fully functional within a day or two. By the end of the day, June 2, 2006, ThePirateBay.org was back up and fully operational with their famous logo now depicting the pirate ship firing cannon balls at a Hollywood sign. The header displays the name The Police Bay and ThePoliceBay.org now redirects to ThePirateBay.org. The next, and current logo, features the pirate ship as a stylized pheonix, in reference to the servers rising up again after the raid.

Previous speculation that the Pirate Bay had rented servers in the Netherlands has proven true as the reinstated website is now indeed running on servers located in the Netherlands. As of June 3, the search function was not yet functioning, but it was possible to browse for .torrent files manually and download them; 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 some reliability issues relating to downloading. The Pirate Bay claimed that these issues were due to increased traffic as a result of all the publicity from the raid, and that everything should be running smoothly soon as minor software bugs are fixed and new servers are brought online to handle the increased traffic load. [15]. As of June 9, search is online and all downloads seem to be working.

During the afternoon of June 1, again on June 3 and again in the morning of June 4, the website of the Swedish police[16] went down due to high load. Speculations started immediately that this was a denial of service attack in retaliation of the raid against The Pirate Bay. This has not been confirmed, but according to a Swedish article in the IT news site IDG, the downtime is a result of many people connecting to a specific webpage which address is spread on IRC and various internet forums.[17] According to the article, the purpose of this action is to "show what you think of the police's behaviour".

On the 3 June, about 11.40 PM CET, the website of the Government of Sweden was hit by another DDoS attack.[18]

Demonstrations against the police action took place on June 3 in Gothenburg and Stockholm, organized by Piratbyrån and the Pirate Party in collaboration with some other parties' youth sections (the Liberal Youth League, Green Youth and Young Left). There were no reports of violence, and all permits required for the protests had been cleared. Approximately 500-600 people showed up at the Stockholm protest, and about 300 people for 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."[19]

According to The Pirate Bay's blog, Petter Nilsson donated 50,000 SEK (approximately 6,500 US dollars) to help support the torrent tracker.[20] Nilsson was a candidate on the Swedish reality show Toppkandidaterna (The Top Candidates), where young contestants have the opportunity to experience politics firsthand. The contestants win by convincing others of the value of their ideas. The winner of the contest then spends their prize money in the pursuit of these ideals. Nilsson, who won the contest, pledged to donate 20% of his winnings to The Pirate Bay, which they used to buy new servers.

See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to 2006-06-03 pirate demonstration in Sweden.

References

  1. ^ Alexa - Traffic details of The Pirate Bay, accessed on June 12, 2006
  2. ^ Svenska Dagbladet:The Pirate Bay tillbaka i Sverige (Swedish)
  3. ^ See, for example, the 2005 ruling of the Supreme Court of the United States, MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd..
  4. ^ In Spain a court (Juzgado de Instrucción número 8 de Alicante) recently (March 29 2006) ruled this kind of web pages are lawful
  5. ^ http://linuxreviews.org/news/2005/02/10_way_to_go_sweeden
  6. ^ http://thepiratebay.org/legal.php
  7. ^ http://static.thepiratebay.org/lensmannen.jpg
  8. ^ This 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[citation needed]
  9. ^ Blog by Mikael Viborg, 1 June 2006
  10. ^ Taken from http://www.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."
  11. ^ "Swedish authorities sink Pirate Bay" (PDF) (Press release). Motion Picture Association of America. 2006-05-31. {{cite press release}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  12. ^ http://piratbyran.blogspot.com
  13. ^ http://tpbeng.blogspot.com/
  14. ^ http://piratbyran-in-eng.blogspot.com/
  15. ^ Pirate Bay Bloodied But Unbowed from wired news, Accessed on 9 June, 2006
  16. ^ http://www.polisen.se/
  17. ^ http://www.idg.se/ArticlePages/200606/02/20060602004927_SOS/20060602004927_SOS.dbp.asp
  18. ^ Online newspaper article on dn.se (Swedish)
  19. ^ http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70358-0.html Pirate Party Intense national debate
  20. ^ http://thepiratebay.org/blog.php?id=21
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