The Story of The Pirate Bay

Recently, the project The Pirate Bay celebrated its 10th anniversary. Founded in 2003 by a group of hackers and activists, a small Swedish torrent tracker grew up becoming an icon of Internet piracy. Let's take a look at how the project went from a small site located on a server with a 1.3 GHz processor and 256 MB of RAM to a global pirated resource with a world name.

The project was founded in the summer of 2003 by Piratbyrån . Excerpt from Wikipedia:

The Pirate Committee (literally, the Pirate Bureau) is a Swedish non-profit organization that promotes the abolition of copyright and the support of people fighting against copyright. Appeared in Sweden long before the party of pirates. The founder of the famous BitTorrent tracker The Pirate Bay, but since the beginning of October 2004 is not legally connected with it. The committee is not involved in illegal or illegal activities, but is trying to popularize the point of view on the dissemination of information, the opposite point of view of modern lobbyist groups of copyright.

Many of the members of this organization launched Internet projects that fought for the freedom of the Internet. One goal was to counter the local anti-piracy movement Antpiratbyrån. There was an obvious need to launch a torrent tracker to facilitate the free flow of information.
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“At that time there was one large torrent tracker called Suprnova. But it was an international project, and we needed a local one to distribute content in Scandinavia. Therefore, we launched The Pirate Bay. ”- says one of the founders Peter Sunde (Peter Sunde).

First, the site was located in Mexico, on the server of the company, where one of the creators of the project, Gottfrid Svartholm, aka Anakata, worked. Later The Pirate Bay moved to Sweden to a server from a Pentium III 1GHz laptop with 256 MB of RAM that belonged to Fredrik Neija aka TiAMO:



Very soon, the existing server resources were not enough to maintain the site. By the end of 2004, the tracker had over 60 thousand torrent files and a million peers. At the same time, the project began to go beyond Scandinavia and become global - more than 80% of users were from other countries. Due to the growth of popularity in 2005, it took a redesign of the site, as well as translation into several languages. The Pirate Bay before redesign:



After these changes, the project became even faster to gain popularity around the world, and by the end of 2005 there were already 2.5 million peers on the tracker. At the same time, Piratbyrån completely distanced itself from the project The Pirate Bay, which had to go in a single voyage.

The increase in traffic to the pirate site has not gone unnoticed by the media companies. The right holders began to pressure the project, and eventually, under the influence of Hollywood and the US government, the Pirate Bay was raided by the Swedish police: on May 31, 2006, the tracker 65 servers were disconnected from the data center.

The site was disconnected for three days, and was launched again on other servers. In honor of the raid, the founders renamed the project “The Police Bay”, and also depicted a cannon in the logo, shooting at the inscription “Hollywood”. A few days later, the logo depicted a phoenix, personifying the restoration of Pirate Bay.



Despite the criminal case brought against the founders of the project, The Pirate Bay continued to work and gain popularity. In early 2009, more than two years after the investigation was completed by the Swedish police, the three founders and Carl Lundstrom, who financed the project, went to court.

In April 2009, all four were convicted of contributing to copyright infringement. They were sentenced to one year in prison and fines totaling $ 3.62 million. During the appeal in 2010, the sentences were reduced, but the charges increased to $ 6.5 million. To date, two of the four convicts have served their sentences.

The company's assets were sold to the Reservella Seychelles offshore, which manages the project to this day. After the change of ownership on the site, there were several technical changes. In 2012, TPB switched to magnet links instead of storing torrent files.

Today, The Pirate Bay is the most censored site on the Internet. In recent years, the courts of Denmark, Italy, Great Britain, the Netherlands and other countries have obliged Internet providers to limit access to the tracker to their users. According to Pirate Bay, 8% of their users access the site through a proxy.

At the end of last year, The Pirate Bay made another change to improve its sustainability by moving to the cloud. To protect its users from hosting providers, clouds are scattered around the world, which ensures stable tracker operation.

More recently, fearing new sanctions from governments, Pirate Bay switched to the Greenland domain, and later - to Icelandic. But soon they moved to the .sx domain.

Despite numerous locks, trials and prison sentences, The Pirate Bay continues to operate and remains one of the most visited sites on the Internet. It is expected that legal pressure from the right holders will only grow. See if Pirate Bay can survive in this fight.

Interesting Facts

• In 2007, Nine Inch Nails placed links to their songs from their new album through The Pirate Bay on the band’s official website, but this did not prevent the album from taking second place on the Billboard list.
• In March 2012, representatives of The Pirate Bay announced the possibility of placing part of the service equipment on an unmanned aerial vehicle under GPS control, launched into neutral waters to host a project outside the jurisdiction of any state.

via torrentfreak.com