The Pirate Bay for 15 years and could not kill

The Internet continues to evolve with unprecedented speed, but one thing remains unchanged - The Pirate Bay

Once in 2009, in a quiet corner of the reading room of my school, I loaded my laptop, beaten with life, while ensuring that no one was peering over my shoulder. I knew that it was risky to do this using the school WiFi network, but it still seemed safer to do it there than at home. All it took was to go to one site and run one program on the computer. In the end, I could get almost any digital content for free.
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I did not know that the site I used - The Pirate Bay - would be involved in serious legal problems due to millions of users like me. I also did not expect at all that ten years later I would use the same site as if nothing had happened.

Thanks to the explosive development of the Internet in the early 2000s, I became acquainted with many things: search engines, pornography, chat rooms, online stores. But nothing attracted my attention as much as piracy — it seemed like it was just an embellished label for illegally downloading copyrighted content. I grew up in the 90s, a consumer of video tapes and audio tapes. And now there is an alternative - a treasury of songs, TV shows and movies, ready to download in just a few clicks thanks to the magic of the peering file sharing system. For a guy with a minimal amount of free money that could be spent on CDs, it was a good luck. The problem was that many of the early programs were distinguished by the presence of viruses, unreliable files and unstable communications.

And there was The Pirate Bay .

Every long-time user of The Pirate Bay remembers how he fell in love with this site, which opened in 2003, but still remains a symbol of irresistible force . The 35-year-old Reddit user, who identified himself as John, describes his discovery of The Pirate Bay as if he "felt a ray of sunshine leading me to a better world of piracy, where you don’t have to mess around with ugly user interfaces and junk files." Alex (also a pseudonym because he works as a lawyer), a 28-year-old resident of Los Angeles, says The Pirate Bay became a “clear favorite” after his first use, thanks to an organization and structure that seemed “far less superficial” than other sites. Thomas Pascoal, one of my neighbors in a college dormitory, managed to sum up all this better than the others. “It was always easy to find what you need, instead of clicking on the movie with Batman, to find some silly porn there,” he told me with a laugh. “The site has changed everything.”

Unlike early peer-to-peer file sharing programs, The Pirate Bay uses a torrent system that allows you to download content faster and more efficiently. Instead of receiving a file from a single source, torrents create a decentralized network for downloading, and data is collected from pieces received from multiple users from different places, rather than from a single site. The more people decide to share this file, the faster the download speed.

However, this advantage of torrents, in general, does not explain why the intrigue of the Internet and The Pirate Bay remains so strong to this day. Other rivals fell under the pressure of lawsuits, criminal cases and competition. People who founded and supported The Pirate Bay, also suffered such a fate. However, despite large-scale legal research, blocking in many countries, fines of millions of dollars, etc., the site with the red-brown pirate ship's iconic logo continues its voyage, supported by an anonymous crowd of indomitable pirates who restore the site every time it seems , disappears forever. “It seems to me absurd that this platform is still working, and still has such huge popularity, given its illegality. I am impressed with such longevity, says Pascoal. “I remember once, when the site’s original URL, .org, was taken away from the site, the next day, one could find a hundred identical mirrors with the same torrents in Google.”

A decade ago, the Swedish government decided to try to punish the founders of The Pirate Bay, the citizens of Sweden, with a wave of 34 accusations of copyright infringement. Half of the charges were rejected for lack of evidence, but the case ended with an unprecedented sentence: a year in prison and a fine of $ 3.5 million for four defendants. At that time, lawyers considered this the loudest file distribution case in Europe, as important as the previous US attack on the first Napster peering service (which in the end was, in fact, killed by this case).

The lawsuits have closed other historical projects, such as Kazaa and Limewire , as well as the two largest torrent sites in the world, Kickass Torrents and ExtraTorrents . Meanwhile, despite the widespread concern that the Swedish lawsuit will kill the site, The Pirate Bay lives to this day, still hosts the torrents, surviving for 15 years. One of the reasons for his longevity may be that he was not caught red-handed in a stricter jurisdiction, said Annemari Bridy , a law professor at the University of Idaho, who has experience with online piracy. “But another part of the problem is the legacy of The Pirate Bay, which has grown into something more than just the people who opened this site,” she tells me. - This is a whole phenomenon. And then there are people who are simply ideological devotees to the work of the site. And while this is so, it will be very, very difficult to close. ”

Here is the story of a simple-looking site that appeared in the most fruitful period of the early Internet, boldly showing the middle finger to intellectual property laws and copyright owners, and lived, by the standards of the digital revolution, eternity. It flourished, growing from 25 million users to, as they say, more than doubled in the last 10 years base, and almost without showing signs of slowing down. “This is a testament to what an anonymous team can do that really believes in the common cause of accessing these products, which is so prone to corporatism and monetization,” says John.

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The prosecution of The Pirate Bay began in 2006, shortly after noon on May 31, when a raid on a data center in Stockholm occurred. Although the operation was carried out by 65 police officers, nothing particularly dramatic happened: on the recordings from surveillance cameras one can see how people calmly enter the server room and look for something in racks (and then they close the cameras).



The Pirate Bay was opened three years earlier by the Swedish group, which opposed the dominance of copyright, Piratbyrån [“Pirate Bureau”], and was supported by Frederick Nei and Gottfried Svartholm . Two coders not only took the ideals of the free Internet uncensored to heart, but also, apparently, were pleased to anger the authorities. In 2004, they created their own Internet provider PRQ, whose website hosting policy was particularly free — even if other providers and web hosting companies censored the site, he could find his refuge.

Then Peter Sunde , a member of the Pirate Bureau, who became the third co-founder of The Pirate Bay and its official representative, joined the duet. Pretty quickly, the trio attracted negative attention, and a few months before the 2006 raid, Ney and Svartholm discovered that they were being watched by private investigators. Therefore, Svartholm was not particularly surprised to learn about the arrival of the police in the data center on May 31. He immediately called Nea, demanding to arrive at the place. At that moment, the exact purpose of the raid was not clear, but Ney did not immediately decide to leave the apartment. If the target was The Pirate Bay torrent tracker, it would be safer to back up the site first. So he did.

Observers regard this moment as a “ turning point ” in the survival of The Pirate Bay. The confiscation of the servers turned off the site, but the backup copy allowed it to be returned online in just two days (and the new logo showed how the ship shoots guns into Hollywood - just for fun). The founders of The Pirate Bay believed that the attack by the Swedish authorities was due to pressure from influential international trade groups, mainly the Motion Picture Association of America. They all held on rebelliously. “I am sure that in any case they will not condemn us, ” Sunde said two years later in an interview when prosecutors prepared the case for trial.



In the meantime, the founders also had to do something. They tried to create a physical safe haven for work, having bought the island of Sealand , a structure erected by human hands seven miles from the British coast, technically not belonging to any country. However, they did not manage to raise money for this, and as a result they “sold” The Pirate Bay to an incomprehensible Reservella company registered in the Seychelles, and later in court stated that the sale was real, despite the lack of evidence of any money transfer. Sunde, Svartholm and Nei also haughtily ignored any requests for content removal by industrial groups and traffickers. One such request from Dreamworks SKG even made Svartholm reply : "In our opinion and the opinion of our lawyers, you are just fucking morons, so go ahead and stick your telescopic batons in your ass." This attitude did not disappear even when the court proceedings began in February 2009, in which three site operators and Karl Landstrom, a Swedish businessman accused of supporting them, were accused.

The fact that the charges were dropped for lack of evidence already on the second day of the trial seemed to be a favorable sign, and the three founders remained self-confident while the investigation lasted. In the 2013 documentary film The Pirate Bay AFK , which describes the trial, Ney testifies about how he set up his email filter so that he ignored messages asking for content removal. “I get a lot of spam. Spam is letters that I did not order, ”Nei concluded with a serious face. (He also earned the recognition of the entire Internet, admitting that he had corrected the site code and returned it online, right in the courthouse during the final day of the proceedings).



Despite this attitude — or, perhaps, thanks to him, according to rumors of a judge ’s bias towards the dealers — the four of them were sentenced on April 17, 2009. Each was awarded a prison year, and the total fine was $ 3.5 million. But Sunde, Svartholm and Ney refused to capitulate. “We cannot pay, and we will not pay, ” Sunde told a press conference. “Even if I had money, I'd rather have burned everything that I have, and I wouldn't even give the ashes to them.”

Instead, he made a sign from a piece of paper, where it was written "I MUST YOU 31,000,000 HQ", referring to the Swedish krona. “That's all you get,” said Sunde. “We noticed that some unknown people had already started collecting money for us to pay for these stupid fines.” We ask you not to do this. Do not collect, do not send money. We do not need them, since we will not pay any fines! ”

They could have come out of the water with mocking smiles, but this case divided the trio. Nei escaped from Sweden to Malaysia, and then to Laos, where he spent most of the next three years, and even married a secret woman. He was then arrested in November 2014 while crossing the border with Thailand and extradited to Sweden for serving 10 months in prison . Thai authorities reported that the American film association , and not the Swedish government, hired a lawyer from Thailand who, together with the local police, executed a search warrant for Ney, issued by Interpol. Then, when letters were leaked from Sony Pictures, it became known that the MPAA leadership, including Vice President Jan van Voorn and the head of the anti-piracy branch, Mike Robinson, celebrated Ney's arrest; Sony attorney Aimee Wolfson wrote that it was a “big win”.

Svartholm was waiting for about the same fate as when he fled from Sweden to Cambodia, where he lived quietly until he was found there and deported in 2012. He served a shorter term in Sweden, but then went back to prison because of unrelated charges of hacking in Denmark, and eventually was released in 2015, releasing jokes during the entire term of his sentence.



Sunde hid in the south of Sweden for two years before he was caught and forced to serve a shorter term. “People ask me if I could do something different if I could,” he told the Guardian newspaper while in jail. - I will answer: no. This is only five months of wasted time. ”

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Since leaving prison, the three co-founders lead a relatively quiet life. Sunde is seen most of all; he created and sold the Flattr microtransaction application; he was involved in politics as a socialist; he ran for the European Parliament from the Pirate Party of Finland. Svartholm, as they say, quietly returned to the IT-sphere. She lives in Southeast Asia again, raising children with his wife.

They all say that they no longer work with The Pirate Bay. This can not be proved, but experts believe that now The Pirate Bay is managed by anonymous operators . Three rebels were replaced by a hidden network of loyal fans. What remains is their idea: how important it is to maintain an open and free Internet, to challenge the copyright institution, and what to support such a technically complex project as The Pirate Bay, as Ney said , is “very cool.” His legacy is hard to overshadow. “The Pirate Bay was ruled by very expressive people who were not confronted with the confrontation with the Right-Martins. In this sense, they were unique, ”says Ernesto van der Sar, founder and editor of TorrentFreak.com, which describes this industry in detail.

He adds that The Pirate Bay is no longer a brilliant example of the standard of decentralized file sharing on the Internet, and it is easy to find complaints that it is not as reliable or feature rich as newer platforms like YTS or 1337x . However, the current prevalence of torrents and the evolution of other content piracy technologies is directly related to the fact that The Pirate Bay created 15 years ago. Ironically, the raid and the court helped to further increase its attractiveness - operators say that the number of visitors doubled almost in one day after the 2006 raid closed the site for a day.

Van der Sar notes that even if the site is still in operation, a 2009 court ruling disproved the myth that lawmakers and law enforcement agencies would not be able to punish the people who manage the decentralized file-sharing sites. If the death of Napster demonstrated the danger of supporting a file-sharing program that directly links people to content protected by copyright, the ingenious technology of torrents should have created an opportunity to shirk responsibility on a plausible excuse. “Therefore, many people considered the site invulnerable, but its prosecution showed that it was not. It was a turning point, ”he adds.

Perhaps there is something good in it. Since then, The Pirate Bay has become more mobile and flexible, operators have moved it “to the cloud” instead of physical hosting, and have taken all sorts of other clever measures. Even during the massive raid of 2014, because of what the site was closed for two months, did not kill him. Sunde, apparently, was right when he wrote in 2013: “Blocking The Pirate Bay in any country increased the number of visitors to the site each time. It’s like trying to shoot arrows with a bow at a black hole. ”

So far, the greatest fans of the site have sighed calmly, but are not sure how the tactics of legal prosecution will be able to adapt to the situation. Alex says that he has always supported a site that performs a “robingud” mission, giving content to the masses without having to pay an unfair price. He is also worried about the fact that the political climate associated with copyright and piracy has not changed much, even after much research has proven that illegal downloading does not affect the profits of creative people and content creators. “The Pirate Bay was coming back again and again. I don’t know the future, but for now it works. However, the problem of the system has not gone away, the government continues to harass people who are fighting for something like The Pirate Bay, says Alex. “That hasn't changed at all.”

Bridie, a law expert, agrees that industry groups like the MPAA or the Recording Industry Association of America continue to focus on combating piracy. She says that it is worth tracking the decision to extradite the founder of Kickass Torrents, Artem Vaulin, to the United States for his trial. However, the critical difference, she says, is that The Pirate Bay-type torrent sites are no longer the favorite victim of prosecutors. “Most of the court proceedings are connected with illegal streaming services . In 2019 they gained the most popularity. So, yes, they will continue to attack streamers and other cases in which the industry expects to win and get good PR. There is some ugly side associated with claims to peer-to-peer sites, but mostly claims are related to pornography. Trade groups are no longer interested. ”

I admit that I visit The Pirate Bay from time to time, but the evolution of legal streaming services like Netflix, Hulu and Spotify has seriously dulled my proclivity towards piracy. Bridy, like Alex, notes that affordable prices are the primary anti-piracy measure. However, we also observe a split of streaming services, when Disney is separated from Netflix for the sake of its own website, and other major networks are planning to do something similar. From my point of view, this threatens users - what, now I have to pay two sites to get about the same amount of content?

This question reflects many people who value the cost of entertainment in 2019. It makes me think that The Pirate Bay has a long way to go, even though Sunde recently spoke extremely cynically about The Pirate Bay and the “lost war” for the free Internet. It also reminds me of a scene from The Pirate Bay AFK, in which the trinity was much more idealistic about the world and its role in it. Sunde and Svartholm participate in the press conference, and the moderator asks what happens to The Pirate Bay if the operators are found guilty.

“Nothing,” says Sunde. He looks at Svartholm, and he nods back.

“What can they do? - adds one. - They have already tried to close it once. Please let them break again. ”