Pirate Bay, The

The Pirate Bay, file-sharing Web site founded in 2003 by the Swedish anti-copyright group Piratbyrån (“Bureau of Piracy”). The Pirate Bay is the most popular site in the world to use the BitTorrent protocol that allows the distribution of very large files such as those containing movies and electronic games. The site is an enthusiastic defender of information piracy and is often the target of legal complaints from music companies, movie studios, and other content providers whose works can be found there.

The Pirate Bay allows the sharing of audio, video, software, and electronic games, with newly released movies and recently transmitted television programs being the most popular content. The site does not host any files itself but only the information about where to find files. The files themselves are distributed among the users of The Pirate Bay site. Files are shared using the BitTorrent protocol in which files are divided into smaller pieces, distributed among various users, and then reassembled. The Pirate Bay originally hosted a torrent tracker that recorded where the files resided. However, since November 2009 The Pirate Bay has used a system called magnet links, in which files are assigned values for which a user can then search. Thus, The Pirate Bay has no record of where the files are located.

When presented with legal notices of copyright infringement to remove materials from their Web site, the operators of The Pirate Bay sometimes posted these notices on their Web site and responded with ridicule and contempt, claiming that they were operating in accordance with Swedish law (and thus antipiracy laws such as the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act did not apply) and that the very nature of file-sharing technology meant that there were no materials to be removed. The Pirate Bay has also defended itself against claims that it profits from piracy by noting that it does not charge users for its services and relies on advertising on the site for revenue.

In 2004 The Pirate Bay became independent from Piratbyrån. In May 2006 the Swedish police raided PRQ, the Internet service provider that hosted The Pirate Bay, and confiscated several servers. The raid shut down the Web site but only for three days. In January 2008 the operators of The Pirate Bay, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, and Peter Sunde, and businessman Carl Lundström, who had supplied servers and bandwidth to the site, were charged with copyright infringement, and in April 2009 they were sentenced to one year in prison and the payment of a fine of 30 million kronor ($3.6 million). In November 2010 the jail terms of Neij, Sunde, and Lundström were reduced upon appeal; however, their fine was increased to 46 million kronor ($6.6 million). (Warg was ill at the time, and his sentence was upheld.) A final appeal was rejected by the Swedish Supreme Court in 2012. That same year Lundström served his four-month sentence under house arrest. Neij, Sunde, and Warg had already left the country. Warg was arrested in Cambodia in 2012. Neij and Sunde were arrested in Thailand and Sweden, respectively, in 2014. The Web site was briefly shut down by Swedish police in December 2014 but reopened the next month. As of 2015 the site received about nine million visitors per day.