Pirates of the Internet: At Intellectual Property’s End
The ever controversial Pirate Bay is messing with Hollywood again. They’ve put up a new logo which links to pirated copies of the blockbuster movie “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End”. To make it even more juicy, they are also selling a T-shirt with the logo on it in the new and improved Pirate shop.
It turns out that The Pirate Bay is not really a big fan of Jack Sparrow and his pirates:
“Hollywood is trying to ridicule us pirates by portraying us as crazy but sympathetic adventurers. Not far from the truth, but in the 21st century real pirates are riding other torrents than that of the ocean”
This is not the first time that The Pirate Bay is rebranding their site to piss off content owners. When Apple’s OSX x86 leaked. in July 2005, they renamed the site to the Pear Bay, and linked to the leaked torrent. Back in July 2005 The Pirate Bay put up a logo inspired on Grand Theft Auto for the release of their new website, the Grand Theft Bay. Apart from being creative with their logo’s TPB is known for their hilarious responses to copyright owners who request takedowns.
This pirate attitude is picked up by more mainstream media, and as a result the TPB admins have a chance to ventilate their opinions in the Sunday Times, Vanity Fair, and Forbes to name a few. The Pirate Bay fares well thanks to all this publicity and is currently tracking over 4 Million torrents. Moreover, it is estimated that approximately 50% of the public .torrent files are now tracked by TPB trackers.
Arrr.
