TPB is the online repository of digital entertainment media and other software content known as The Pirate Bay. The Pirate Bay was established by Piratbyrn in Sweden in 2003. It allows users to search, download and share torrent files. This encourages peer-to-peer file-sharing between BitTorrent protocol users.
The Pirate Bay has sparked debate and discussion about the legal elements in file sharing, copyright and civil liberties. It also serves as a forum for political initiatives against established intellectual property laws, and as a key figure in anti-copyright movements.
After multiple domain seizures and shutdowns, the website was forced to move to several different addresses.
Fredrik Neij and Peter Sunde, the website’s creators, were found guilty in April 2009 of copyright infringement. They were sentenced to one-year imprisonment and a fine. The website has been blocked by several internet service providers (ISPs), in many countries. Proxy websites were made available to allow access. After serving shorter sentences, Svartholm and Neij were released in 2015. Sunde was also freed.
Histories
The Piracy Bureau, a Swedish anticopyright organization, founded the Pirate Bay in September 2003. Since October 2004, it has been operated as an independent entity. Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Stvartholm, also known as “anakata”, were the first to manage the Pirate Bay. They were accused by the Motion Picture Association of America of “assisting in making copiedrighted information accessible.” On May 31, 2006, Swedish authorities raided and removed the website’s Stockholm servers. This resulted in three days of inaccessibility. Although Pirate Bay claims it is a non-profit organization based in Seychelles, this claim is not supported.
In a variety of lawsuits, the Pirate Bay was named both as a plaintiff or defendant. After a nine-day trial Peter Sunde and Fredrik Neij were found guilty in assisting copyright violation. They were sentenced to one years imprisonment and a fine 30 million SEK (roughly, 4.2 million USD or 2.8 million GBP or 3.1 million EUR). The defendants appealed, claiming that the court had given in to political pressure. The decision was confirmed by a Swedish appeals court on November 26, 2010. It reduced the original sentence to 46 million SEK, but increased the fine to 46 millions SEK. Due to an injunction against their broadband supplier, the site was taken down on May 17, 2010.
The website access was restored with a statement on its home page mocking the injunction. Piratbyrn was split in June 2010, after the death of Ibi Kopi Botani, an important member and cofounder of the organization.
PRQ, a Sweden-based company owned by Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm, hosted The Pirate Bay for many years.
PRQ is supposed offer customers “very secure and no-questions-asked” hosting services. In May 2011, Serious Tubes Networks started offering network connectivity to The Pirate Bay. On January 23, 2012, the Pirate Bay added the category Physibles. These 3D files can be described as “data objects that are possible (and practical) to become physical” when printed with a 3D printer.
Google’s “Transparency Report” was launched in May 2012. The company received over 6,000 requests to remove Pirate Bay links. These requests were for over 80,500 URLs. Froytal Services LLC and Bang Bros were the top recipients (IFPI). PirateBrowser was released by the Pirate Bay on August 10, 2013. This free web browser can be used to bypass any filtering. The site was the most visited torrent directory from 2003 to November 2014. KickassTorrents had fewer visitors.
Google removed all Google Play apps that had “The Pirate Bay”, in their titles, from its app store on December 8, 2014
The Pirate Bay was raided by the Swedish authorities on December 9, 2014. They confiscated servers, computers and other devices.
Other torrent-related websites, such as EZTV, Zoink and Torrage were also shut down. EZTV, which was reportedly showing “signs of Life” the second day following the raid, uploaded to ExtraTorrent and KickassTorrents. Support for proxy sites such as eztvproxy.net via its backend IP addresses was also reported to have been available. In the following days, several replicas of The Pirate Bay were made available online, including oldpiratebay.org which was created by isoHunt.
The Pirate Bay’s.se domain was confiscated by a Swedish court on May 19, 2015. The site responded by creating six additional domains. The decision was appealed on May 26, 2015. On May 12, 2016, the Court dismissed the appeal and ordered that domains be transferred to the Swedish government. The site was redirected to its original.org domain in May 2016. The Pirate Bay was once again the most popular BitTorrent site after KickassTorrents was shut down by the US government in August 2016.
Per Gottfrid Svartholm Wrang, a Swedish computer specialist, is most well-known as co-owner of PRQ hosting and co-founder at BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay with Fredrik Neij (alias Anakata).
This film includes excerpts from an interview Svartholm conducted about the May 2006 raid on The Pirate Bay by police officers. He is prominently featured in the documentary TPB AFK.
Svartholm warg is alleged to have collaborated with WikiLeaks on the 2010 publication of Collateral Murder. This helicopter cockpit gunsight footage was taken during a US-led airstrike in Baghdad in July 2007. WikiLeaks claims that Svartholm was a technical consultant who oversaw critical infrastructure. WikiLeaks computers were hosted previously by Svartholm’s companies.
On November 27, 2013, he was extradited from Denmark and charged with hacking the Danish driver’s license database and social security databases. While awaiting his court appearance, he was held in isolation prison.
He was sentenced to three and a quarter years imprisonment by the jury on the 31st October 2014. The sentence was challenged by him immediately, but the judges decided that the sentence should be remanded in custody for the appeal court trial. They believed that he might attempt to avoid his punishment.
After three years spent in different jails in Sweden, Denmark, he was released on September 29, 2015. He is now working in IT.
