After 15 Years, the Pirate Bay Still Can’t Be Killed – MEL Magazine

In a quiet corner of my high school’s study room in 2009, I booted up my busted laptop while making sure nobody could peer over my shoulder. I knew it was a risk to do this on a school Wifi connection, but it sure felt safer than doing it at home. All it took was one website and a desktop app. The result was getting my hands on, well, pretty much any digital content I wanted, all for free.

Little did I know that the site I was using, The Pirate Bay, was facing major legal turmoil at that time because of millions of users just like me. I also never expected that I’d still be using the same site, 10 years later, as if nothing ever changed.

The explosion of the internet in the early 2000s introduced me to many things: search engines, pornography, chat rooms, e-commerce. But nothing captured my attention quite like piracy, which seemed like a glorified label to give the act of illegally downloading copyrighted content. I grew up in the 1990s consuming VHS and cassettes. Now, here was an alternative — a trove of songs, TV and movies, ready for download with a few quick clicks thanks to the magic of so-called peer-to-peer file-sharing technology. For a kid without much money to spend on CDs, this was a godsend. The problem was that so many early programs came loaded with viruses, unreliable files and unstable connections.

Then there was The Pirate Bay.

Every longtime user of The Pirate Bay seems to remember how they fell in love with the site, which was born in 2003 but remains an online juggernaut today. John, a 35-year-old redditor in London who asked to use a pseudonym, describes discovering The Pirate Bay as “feeling a ray of sunlight, just beckoning me to a better world of pirating without dealing with garbage user interfaces and shit files.” Alex (also a pseudonym, since he’s a practicing lawyer), a 28-year-old in L.A., says The Pirate Bay became “the clear favorite” upon first use, thanks to the organization and layout that felt “way less sketchy” than other platforms. Thomaz Paschoal, one of my college roommates, sums it up best. “It was always easy to find exactly what you wanted, not like, clicking on a link that says Batman and you get some crazy porn movie,” he tells me with a laugh. “It changed everything.”

Unlike some early peer-to-peer file-sharing programs, The Pirate Bay uses a system of torrent files that allows for a faster, more efficient method of downloading content. Instead of receiving a shared file from a single uploader, torrents create decentralized downloads, meaning the data is assembled from multiple users in different places rather than the site or program itself. The more people share a file, the faster download speeds you can get.

But this general advantage of torrents doesn’t explain why the internet’s love affair with The Pirate Bay remains so strong. Other competitors have succumbed to lawsuits, criminal cases and the competitive marketplace. The people who created and run The Pirate Bay have been smacked by those blows, too. Yet despite widespread legal scrutiny, blockages in multiple countries, millions of dollars in fines and beyond, the site with the iconic mahogany pirate ship logo sails on, supported by an anonymous crowd of diehard pirates who revive the site every time it seems down for good. “It’s absurd to me that this platform still works and it’s still so widely popular, given that it’s so… illegal. I’m really impressed by the longevity,” Paschoal says. “I remember one time when they took down the original URL, the dot-org site, and the next day you could go on Google and find 100 identical Pirate Bay mirror sites with the same torrents.”

A decade ago, the Swedish government decided to try and punish the founders of The Pirate Bay, all Swedish men, with a barrage of 34 charges based on copyright infringement. While half of the charges were quickly dropped due to a lack of evidence, the case concluded with an unprecedented result: A year of prison and roughly $3.5 million in fines for the four defendants. Legal experts at the time considered it the most important file-sharing case in Europe, as significant as the previous U.S. crackdown against the pioneering P2P service Napster (which effectively died as a result of that verdict).

Copyright cases brought down other legacy names like Kazaa and Limewire as well as two of the biggest torrent sites in the world, Kickass Torrents and ExtraTorrents. Meanwhile, despite widespread concern that the Swedish case would cripple the site, The Pirate Bay lives today, still hosting torrents that have survived for 15 years. Part of the reason for the site’s longevity may simply be because it hasn’t been caught red-handed in a jurisdiction with tougher punishments, says Annemarie Bridy, a professor of law at the University of Idaho with extensive expertise on online piracy issues. “But part of the problem, too, is that there’s this legacy that The Pirate Bay has, where it’s grown into something more than the people who first operated the site,” Bridy tells me. “It’s a phenomenon. And there are people who are just ideologically committed to the operation of The Pirate Bay. For as long as that’s the case, it’s going to be very, very hard to shut down.”

This is the story of a plain-looking website that sprung from the most fertile period of the early internet, blatantly raised its middle fingers at intellectual property laws and copyright owners and lived for what is an eternity in the timeline of digital evolution. It’s thrived, growing from 25 million users to reportedly more than double that figure over the last 10 years, and shows little sign of slowing down. “It’s a testament to what an anonymous crew can do if they really believe in the cause of giving us access to these products that are so corporatized and endlessly monetized,” John says.

* * * * *

The prosecution of Pirate Bay began in 2006, a little past noon on May 31st, with a raid in a data center in Stockholm. While 65 police officers were enlisted for the high-profile mission, it went off without much drama: Surveillance footage shows the men calmly walking into the server room and searching through the aisles (and eventually, covering the cameras up).

The Pirate Bay was initially established three years prior by the Swedish anti-copyright group Piratbyrån, and its operations were managed by Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg. The two coders took the ideals of a free, uncensored internet seriously, but also appeared to find some joy in the act of pissing off authorities. In 2004, they created their own internet service provider, dubbed PRQ, that had a “no questions asked” hosting policy — even if other ISPs and web hosts had censored a site, it could find safe harbor there.

The duo were soon joined by Peter Sunde, a fellow Piratbyrån member, who became a third co-founder of The Pirate Bay and worked as its spokesman. It didn’t take long for the trio to attract negative attention, and in the months leading up to the May 2006 raid, Neij and Svartholm Warg noticed they were being followed and surveilled by private investigators. So Svartholm Warg wasn’t exactly shocked when he heard that police had arrived at the data center on the morning of May 31st. He immediately called Neij, urging him to get to the facility. At that point, the exact purpose of the raid wasn’t clear, but Neij paused before leaving his apartment. If the target was the torrent “tracker” for The Pirate Bay, it would be safest to back up the entire website immediately, Neij thought. So he did.

It’s a move that observers now consider the “pivotal” moment in time for The Pirate Bay’s survival. The confiscation of servers shut down the website, but the backup allowed the site to come back online within just two days (with a new logo featuring the ship firing cannonballs at a Hollywood sign, for kicks). TPB’s founders believed that the crackdown from Swedish authorities came as a result of pressure from powerful international industry trade groups, primarily the Motion Picture Association of America. They also stood defiant in the aftermath. “I’m quite sure we won’t be convicted, anyhow,” Sunde told ARS Technica two years later, as prosecutors began assembling the case.

In the meantime, the founders had work to do, too. They tried to create a physical safe haven for operations by buying the Isle of Sealand, a human-made structure seven miles off the coast of Britain that’s not technically part of any nation. But they couldn’t raise enough money, and instead “sold” The Pirate Bay off to a shadowy company named Reservella in the Seychelles, later claiming in court that it was a legit sale despite offering zero evidence of a transaction. Sunde, Svartholm Warg and Neij were also outright arrogant about ignoring content takedown requests from industry groups and copyright holders. One such request from Dreamworks SKG once inspired Svartholm Warg to reply, “It is the opinion of us and our lawyers that you are fucking morons, and that you should please go sodomise yourself with retractable batons.” That attitude didn’t dissipate as the actual trial kicked off in February 2009, with charges of copyright infringement against the three operators and Carl Lundström, a Swedish businessman accused of providing support for TPB.

The fact that half the charges were dropped due to insufficient evidence on the second day of the trial seemed auspicious, and the three founders remained confident as the examinations dragged on. At one point in the 2013 documentary TPB AFK, which follows the trial, we see Neij testify to how he literally programmed an email filter to ignore and forward messages that refer to a copyright takedown request. “I get a lot of spam. Spam are emails that I haven’t requested,” Neij concludes with a straight face. (Neij also won applause across the internet for stating that he had literally tweaked Pirate Bay code and fixed a site shutdown while sitting in court during the final trial day.)

Despite the attitude — or perhaps because of it, if allegations about the presiding judge’s bias for pro-copyright organizations are to be believed — the four men got hit with guilty convictions on April 17, 2009. They were each sentenced to a year in jail, plus an initial total of about $3.5 million in fines and damages. Once again, Sunde, Svartholm Warg and Neij refused to capitulate. “We can’t pay, and we wouldn’t pay,” Sunde said at a press conference. “Even if I had the money I would rather burn everything I owned, and I wouldn’t even give them the ashes.”

Instead, he made a sign with a sheet of paper, reading “I OWE U 31,000,000 SEK,” referring to Swedish Krona currency. “That’s as close as you’re going to get,” Sunde continued. “We have seen that some people that we don’t know have started collecting donations for us, so we can pay those silly fines. We firmly ask you NOT to do this. Do not gather or send any money. We do not want them since we will not pay any fines!”

They may have taken it in stride, with mocking smiles, but the incident divided the trio. Neij immediately bolted from Sweden for Malaysia and migrated into Laos, where he spent much of the next three years and even ended up marrying a Thai woman. He was arrested in November 2014 while crossing into Thailand, and was taken to Sweden to serve 10 months in jail. Thai officials at the time said a “U.S.-based movie association,” not Swedish government authorities, had hired a lawyer in Thailand to raise flags about Neij’s Interpol warrant with local immigration police and find him. (Leaked emails from Sony Pictures show MPAA leadership, including Executive Vice President Jan Van Voorn and anti-piracy head Mike Robinson, celebrating Neij’s arrest; Sony attorney Aimee Wolfson adds it’s a “huge win.”)

Svartholm Warg also went down a similar path, fleeing Sweden for Cambodia, where he would live peacefully until being tracked down and deported in 2012. He served his shortened sentence in Sweden but ended up back in jail on unrelated hacking charges in Denmark, and ultimately became a free man in 2015, cracking jokes about being imprisoned the entire way.

Sunde, meanwhile, managed to hide out in southern Sweden for two years before being caught and serving his own shortened sentence. “People ask if I would have done anything different if I could,” he told the Guardian while behind bars. “The answer is no. This has been nothing more than five months of wasted time.”

* * * * *

Since their respective releases from jail, the three co-founders have remained fairly low-key. Sunde has been the most visible, creating (and selling) the microtransaction app Flattr and being involved in socialist politics, even running for a seat in the European Parliament as the representative of Finland’s Pirate Party. Svartholm Warg is reportedly getting back into IT work, albeit behind the scenes. And Neij is back in Southeast Asia, raising a family with his wife.

Each of the founders say they’re no longer involved in The Pirate Bay. There’s no real way to prove that, but it’s accepted by experts that TPB operates via an anonymous staff. Three iconoclastic men have been replaced, in other words, by an obscured network of hardcore supporters. What remains is the trio’s vision: that a free and open internet is paramount, that the institution of copyright should be challenged and that running a technologically complex project like TPB is, in the words of Neij, “great fun.” That legacy is hard to fade. “The Pirate Bay was operated by a very vocal group of people that didn’t mind confronting copyright holders. They were unique in that sense,” says Ernesto Van der Sar, who uses a pseudonym as editor and founder of TorrentFreak.com, which covers the industry closely.

Pirate Bay is no longer the gleaming standard for decentralized file-sharing on the internet, he adds, and it’s easy to find complaints that it’s not as reliable, or feature-rich, as some newer platforms like YTS or 1337x. But the current proliferation of torrenting, and the evolution of other technologies used for pirating digital content, is directly tied to the experience The Pirate Bay created 15 years ago. Ironically, the raid and trial helped boost its appeal higher than ever — the operators reported that traffic doubled practically overnight after the 2006 raid shut the site down for a day, for starters.

Van der Sar notes, though, that even if the site is still up, the 2009 prosecution did shatter the myth that legislators and law enforcement couldn’t actually levy concrete punishments to people who run decentralized file-sharing sites. While the death of Napster had shown the danger of running a file-sharing program that directly connected people to copyrighted material, the clever tech behind torrents were supposed to create plausible deniability. “So to many people, the site appeared to be invincible, but the prosecution showed that this wasn’t the case. It was a turning point,” he adds.

Perhaps that created a silver lining, of sorts. The Pirate Bay has since been more mobile and flexible than ever, with staffers relocating operations to “the cloud” rather than a physical location, among other savvy moves. Even a massive 2014 raid, which led to a two-month shutter for TPB, didn’t kill the original site. It seems Sunde was right when, in a Reddit AMA in 2013, he wrote, “TPB being blocked in a country has, in every single attempt, given more traffic to it. It’s like trying to shoot a black hole with a bow and arrow.”

Naturally, the site’s biggest fans are relieved for now, but are unsure about how prosecuting tactics will adapt in coming years. Alex says that he has always supported the site as a kind of “Robin Hood” figure, providing content to the masses without unfair price tags. He’s also worried that the political climate around copyright and piracy hasn’t changed much, even with a number of studies that show illegal downloads don’t impact bottom-line revenues for artists and creators. “The Pirate Bay came back, again and again. I don’t know the future, but it’s still standing. But the problem of the system is still there, the persistent pursuit of the government against people who advocate for something like The Pirate Bay,” Alex says. “That hasn’t changed at all.”

Bridy, the legal expert, agrees that anti-piracy efforts remain a focus of industry groups like the MPAA or the Recording Industry Association of America. She says it’s worth keeping an eye on the decision to extradite the operator of Kickass Torrents, Artem Vaulin, to the U.S. for trial. But a critical distinction, she adds, is that torrent sites like The Pirate Bay are no longer the white whales for prosecution. “Most civil efforts are targeted at illegal streaming services and sites now. They’re more popular in 2019 than ever. So yeah, they’ll keep going after stream rippers and other cases the industry thinks it can win, and where it’s good PR for them,” Bridy tells me. “There is this whole seamy underbelly that’s suing peer-to-peer file-sharing sites, but they’re mostly pornography suits. The trade groups aren’t about that anymore.”

I admit I still log onto The Pirate Bay every once in a while, but the evolution of legal streaming sites like Netflix, Hulu and Spotify has taken a big edge off my piracy appetite. Like Alex, Bridy is quick to observe that affordably priced content remains the “No. 1 fix to piracy.” But we’re also seeing the splitting of streaming services, with Disney pulling out of Netflix for its own site and other major networks planning similar platforms. To my eyes, this feels like a consumer threat — now I’m going to have to pay for two sites to get a similar amount of content?

It’s a question many people are mulling as they consider the value of their entertainment in 2019. And it’s a question that makes me think The Pirate Bay still has a long journey ahead, even if Sunde has recently been deeply cynical about TPB and the “lost war” for a free internet. It also reminds me of a scene in TPB AFK, when the three men were far more idealistic about the world and their role in it. Sunde and Svartholm Warg are at a press conference, where a moderator asks what will happen to The Pirate Bay if the operators are found guilty.

“Nothing,” Sunde says. He looks at Svartholm Warg, who nods.

“What are they going to do about it?” the latter adds. “They already tried shutting it down once. They’re welcome to come and fail again.”