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The Pirate Bay
The Pirate Bay, commonly abbreviated as TPB, is a free searchable online index of movies, music, video games, pornography and software. Founded in 2003 by Swedish think tank Piratbyrån, The Pirate Bay facilitates the connection among users of the peer-to-peer torrent protocol, which are able to contribute to the site through the addition of magnet links. The Pirate Bay has consistently ranked as one of the most visited torrent websites in the world.
Over the years the website has faced several server raids, shutdowns and domain seizures, switching to a series of new web addresses to continue operating. In multiple countries, Internet service providers (ISPs) have been ordered to block access to it. Subsequently, proxy websites have emerged to circumvent the blocks.
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. They were all released by 2015 after serving shortened sentences.
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.
The Pirate Bay was established on 15 September 2003 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; 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. The Pirate Bay claims to be a non-profit entity based in Seychelles; however, this is disputed.
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. On 26 November 2010, a Swedish appeals court upheld the verdict, decreasing the original prison terms but increasing the fine to 46 million kronor. On 17 May 2010, because of an injunction against their bandwidth provider, the site was taken offline. 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.
The Pirate Bay was hosted for several years by PRQ, a Sweden-based company, owned by Neij and Svartholm. PRQ is said to provide "highly secure, no-questions-asked hosting services to its customers". From May 2011, Serious Tubes Networks started providing network connectivity to The Pirate Bay. 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). On 10 August 2013, The Pirate Bay announced the release of PirateBrowser, a free web browser used to circumvent internet censorship. 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. On 8 December 2014, Google removed most of the Google Play apps from its app store that have "The Pirate Bay" in the title.
On 9 December 2014, The Pirate Bay was raided by the Swedish police, who seized servers, computers, and other equipment. 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. 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. Several copies of The Pirate Bay went online during the next several days, most notably oldpiratebay.org, created by isoHunt.
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The Pirate Bay
The Pirate Bay, commonly abbreviated as TPB, is a free searchable online index of movies, music, video games, pornography and software. Founded in 2003 by Swedish think tank Piratbyrån, The Pirate Bay facilitates the connection among users of the peer-to-peer torrent protocol, which are able to contribute to the site through the addition of magnet links. The Pirate Bay has consistently ranked as one of the most visited torrent websites in the world.
Over the years the website has faced several server raids, shutdowns and domain seizures, switching to a series of new web addresses to continue operating. In multiple countries, Internet service providers (ISPs) have been ordered to block access to it. Subsequently, proxy websites have emerged to circumvent the blocks.
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. They were all released by 2015 after serving shortened sentences.
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.
The Pirate Bay was established on 15 September 2003 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; 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. The Pirate Bay claims to be a non-profit entity based in Seychelles; however, this is disputed.
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. On 26 November 2010, a Swedish appeals court upheld the verdict, decreasing the original prison terms but increasing the fine to 46 million kronor. On 17 May 2010, because of an injunction against their bandwidth provider, the site was taken offline. 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.
The Pirate Bay was hosted for several years by PRQ, a Sweden-based company, owned by Neij and Svartholm. PRQ is said to provide "highly secure, no-questions-asked hosting services to its customers". From May 2011, Serious Tubes Networks started providing network connectivity to The Pirate Bay. 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). On 10 August 2013, The Pirate Bay announced the release of PirateBrowser, a free web browser used to circumvent internet censorship. 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. On 8 December 2014, Google removed most of the Google Play apps from its app store that have "The Pirate Bay" in the title.
On 9 December 2014, The Pirate Bay was raided by the Swedish police, who seized servers, computers, and other equipment. 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. 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. Several copies of The Pirate Bay went online during the next several days, most notably oldpiratebay.org, created by isoHunt.