The Pirate Bay is an online index of digital content of entertainment media and software. Founded in 2003 by Swedish think tank Piratbyrån, The Pirate Bay allows visitors to search, download, and contribute magnet links and torrent files. In April 2009, the website’s founders were found guilty in the Pirate Bay trial in Sweden for assisting in copyright infringement.
About The Pirate Bay in brief
The Pirate Bay is an online index of digital content of entertainment media and software. Founded in 2003 by Swedish think tank Piratbyrån, The Pirate Bay allows visitors to search, download, and contribute magnet links and torrent files. It has become a platform for political initiatives against established intellectual property laws as well as a central figure in an anti-copyright movement. In April 2009, the website’s founders were found guilty in the Pirate Bay trial in Sweden for assisting in copyright infringement and were sentenced to serve one year in prison and pay a fine. In May 2010, because of an injunction against their bandwidth provider, the site was taken offline. The site claims to be a non-profit entity based in the Seychelles; however, this is disputed. On 9 December 2014, the Swedish police raided the site’s servers, who seized computers and other equipment. Several other torrent related sites, including EZTV, Torrage and the Istole tracker were also shut down. On the second day after the raid, The piratebay.org forum Suprbay was reported to have been shut down by police. The Piratebay’s site was the most visited torrent directory on the World Wide Web from 2003 to November 2014, until KickassTorrents removed most of the most popular Pirate Bay apps from its store until 8 December 2014. On 23 January 2012, ThePirateBay added the new category Physibles. These are 3D files described as ‘data objects that are able to become physical’ using a 3D printer.
On 26 November 2010, a Swedish appeals court upheld the verdict, decreasing the original prison terms but increasing the fine to 46 million SEK. On 10 August 2013, The Pirates Bay announced the release of PirateBrowser, a free web browser used to circumvent internet censorship. On 17 May 2014, Google reported over 6,000 formal requests to remove Pirate Bay links from the Google Search index; those requests covered over 80,500 URLs, with the five copyright holders having the most requests consisting of: Froytal Services LLC, Bang Bros, Takedown Piracy LLC, Amateur Teen Kingdom, and International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. On the same day, Google removed most Pirate Bay app from its app store until it was replaced by a new app called The PirateBay. In some countries, Internet service providers have been ordered to block access to the website. Subsequently, proxy websites have been providing access to it. The website faced several shutdowns and domain seizures, switching to a series of new web addresses to continue operating. It was hosted for several years by PRQ, a Sweden-based company, owned by creators of TPB Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij. It has been run as a separate organisation since October 2004. The defendants appealed the verdict and accused the judge of giving in to political pressure. The defendants were all released by 2015 after having served shortened sentences.
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This page is based on the article The Pirate Bay published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 19, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
