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The Pirate Bay defiantly breaks copyright law.

Sat, 2006-03-18 10:19 — PMunn

It turns out that in Sweden, having a torrent tracker listing copyrighted materials is completely legal, as long as the material itself isn't on the server.

The Pirate Bay is one such site that laughs in the face of MPAA takedown notices from various content publisher heavyweights like Dreamworks and Warner Bros. No, they really laugh in their faces by posting the takedown letters and issuing mocking replies after them on their site.

Wired News talks about how it's become a major port in the storm of takedowns that snagged other torrent sites here, and the Pirate Bay itself is here.

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Fri, 2006-11-10 19:55 — PMunn

Crackdown = growth.

For the Pirate Bay, the crackdown has equaled growth. The site has grown 30% is just the last three months, say the site's owners. BroadbandReports links to the news about the 400,000 torrents and 5 million peers they serve.

Thu, 2006-08-17 14:58 — PMunn

A Nation Divided?

Wired's followup article is A Nation Divided over Piracy.

I don't think that's an accurate title. The country is quite pro-piracy. It's other nations that have the biggest problem with it.

They briefly mention the Pirate Party (political party) leader, the MPAA's representative in Sweden, and how the Pirate Bay founders feel it's not their problem to figure out how to compensate artists when their works are pirated.

Quote:
It's not the problem of the pirates, he tells me later, to figure out how to compensate artists or encourage invention away from the current intellectual property system -- someone else will figure that out. Their job is just to tear down the flawed system that exists, to force the hand of society to make something better.

That's all well and good, but if the current copyright system has the force of law behind it, you'd better be ready for a fight.

Thu, 2006-08-17 11:46 — PMunn

The Secrets of the Pirate Bay

Wired has launched a number of articles talking about The Pirate Bay and the people behind it. The first, Secrets of the Pirate Bay is pretty entertaining stuff.

Quote:
Harbored by a country where 1.2 million out of 9 million citizens tell the census that they engage in file sharing, the Pirate Bay is as much a national symbol as it is a website.
...
The pirates delivered a victory message to the MPAA, and the Swedish equivalent, APB, through the site's reverse-DNS, which now read: hey.mpaa.and.apb.bite.my.shiny.metal.ass.thepiratebay.org.
...
The Bay's T-shirt vendor alone now has four people working full time to fill orders for apparel sporting the site's pirate ship logo, and a skull-and-crossbones with a cassette tape as the skull. "They are behind something like 2,000," says Neij. "They are working day and night."

From there they explain the site's origins, how it grew, and the legal climate it now faces.

The raid, it seems was evidence-gathering. No takedown notice was ever given by the Swedish government, and recent court cases show that the Bay could be held liable for secondary copyright infringement.

Quote:
But as the case unfolds, there is nothing preventing the Pirate Bay from continuing -- the raid was an evidence-gathering mission only, there's no court order against the site. That leaves it far from clear that the courts will shutter the Pirate Bay before the inevitable march of technology does the job itself. Once charges are filed, it could be many months before the trial starts. Appeals in the Swedish legal system aren't likely to be exhausted for three to five years after that.

By then, BitTorrent will no longer be the prime mover of pirated content online, says Neij. "The Pirate Bay will outlive its usefulness."
Ah, so then what will replace it?

Thu, 2006-06-15 11:37 — PMunn

Swedish authorities sued for taking down other servers.

The Swedish authorities are being sued by a number of legitimate businesses whose servers were accidentally taken down along with the Pirate Bay servers in the raid. Oops.

Mon, 2006-06-12 19:33 — PMunn

double the traffic, double the fun

PirateBay is running in the Netherlands now, and they're boasting that their traffic has doubled since the raid. I imagine the ad revenue will help pay for the new servers someday.

http://www.broadbandreports.com/shownews/75305

Mon, 2006-06-05 16:31 — PMunn

back online with backup servers

The PirateBay site is back online, with sets of redundant servers in other countries in case it gets taken down again.

http://www.broadbandreports.com/shownews/75078

Fri, 2006-06-02 14:35 — PMunn

Backlash to the PirateBay raid?

Ars reports on what is apparently a bit of backlash related to the PirateBay raid. The Swedish police website has suffered a DDoS attack and is still apparently unreachable.

Wed, 2006-05-31 12:06 — PMunn

Pirate Bay servers confiscated.

BroadbandReports reports that the Pirate Bay servers have been confiscated. No word on whether any accusations of actual crimes have been leveled at them, and considering their avoidance of prosecution in the past one wonders if this will come to anything, but the police have indeed taken the server farm.

I kid you not I actually went and did a few searches on that site last night for the first time since I originally posted about it. "Hey, I wonder if that site is still up, and what does it look like?"

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