Pirates ride the torrent wave - part i
By Tuan Van Le
Last night Swedish police raided the servers of one of the most popular pirate websites in the world. Over fifty officers entered ten different server sites, confiscated all computers associated with The Pirate Bay website and arrested two members for alleged infringements of copyright law.
Almost immediately The Pirate Bay released a defiant statement through one of its members, ‘brokep’. “The police right now are taking all of our servers to check if there is a crime or not, they are not actually sure,” he wrote.
“We are not sure when it will return, but we are moving it to another country if necessary.”
The Pirate Bay started in early 2004 and, until yesterday, had over one and a half million registered users. The site proclaimed itself as the ‘largest bittorrent tracker in the world’, and backed those claims by offering over 157,000 files for download. In the last month the site averaged two million hits a day and was ranked as the 479th most visited website in the world. Users downloaded the latest movies, music, software and pornography. Within days of theatrical release, Hollywood blockbusters such as X-Men 3, Mission Impossible 3 and the Da Vinci Code had been downloaded thousands of times from the site.
The Pirate Bay received hundreds of legal threats from all over the world but, until July 2005, they hid behind the fact they operated under Swedish law, where no copyright laws existed.
The group gained notoriety for its legal threats section. Instead of being pressured into taking down links to pirated data, they would actually publish the threats for public ridicule. For years, companies such as Apple, Microsoft, Warner Bros, Dreamworks, Electronic Arts and Sega issued legal warnings. In reply, members of the Pirate Bay issued fake invoices charging for wasted time, threatened suing the companies themselves for making frivolous legal claims, and asked to be extradited under Japanese law so they could visit Tokyo.
“I’m running out of toilet paper,” reads one reply to a legal threat from Sega Europe, “so please send lots of legal documents to our ISP – preferably printed on soft paper.”
These antics have made The Pirate Bay famous in the online community as well as in their home country, Sweden. The group is so popular Petter Nilsson, winner of Swedish reality television show ‘The Top Candidates’, donated US$6,500 of his prize money to The Pirate Bay – the producers of the show were unhappy with his decision and refused to transfer the money directly to the group, making Nilsson pay income tax on the winnings, reducing the donation to US$4,500.
In Sweden, The Pirate Bay leads anti-copyright sentiment. In July 2005 the Swedish government, after pressure from neighbouring countries, agreed to adopt European Union conventions regarding copyright law. The Pirate Bay continued to operate despite the new regulatory environment. Their legal advisor, law student Mikael Viborg, argued that the site does not host any actual copyright content, only torrents which are part of a file sharing protocol that points users to other users from whom they download the files from. This argument is still being used after the raids - with the group assuring its fans that they may sue the government for compensation should the legal process conclude that their website is legal.
1 June 2006