After initially being taken offline by Swedish authorities, and after its first escape route failed, The Pirate Bay has returned with all guns blazing. With a modified copy of one of Churchill’s most famous speeches, The Pirate Bay team tells the public that they will defend the Internet, with or without the site.
To determine if the verdict in the Pirate Bay case was biased, the connections of Judge Tomas Norström to national and international pro-copyright lobby groups will be reviewed by another judge. However, the judge that was initially appointed has already been replaced because she was linked to the same organizations as Norström, and her replacement is not exactly unbiased either.
The Pirate Bay recently got a new range of IPs and to everyone’s surprise they are now linked to several movie and music industry lawyers involved in the TPB trial. According to the Pirate Bay’s Wikipedia entry the change was due to a hostile takeover, but most people know better.
Support for The Pirate Bay doesn’t stop at the Swedish border, nor it is limited to blogs and forums. Today, a group of Russian Pirate Bay supporters will throw a street party at Pushkin Square in the center of Moscow, with the full approval of the Russian government.
Earlier this week a Danish court decided that an ISPs have to block access to The Pirate Bay. In response to the judgment, three ISPs have already announced that they will take the case to the Supreme Court. In addition, The Pirate Bay itself now says it will sue the anti-piracy outfit IFPI if the ISPs fail to overturn the ruling.
The Pirate Bay has just released a Google-powered map of the tracker connections per country. The map is only the start of a much larger project that will cover more detailed statistics on the tracker’s users. However, it already reveals some interesting data.
In the fall of 2003, a group of friends from Sweden decided to launch a BitTorrent tracker named ‘The Pirate Bay’. Today, roughly 5 years after this historic day, the founders of the site are celebrities in Sweden, and rockstars on the Internet.
Only a few days before the largest BitTorrent tracker will celebrate its 5th anniversary, the Pirate Bay reached a new milestone. The site now tracks 25 million peers, which is more than the entire populations of Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland and Denmark combined.
The Pirate Bay has reached yet another milestone. Today, they track more than 20 million unique peers for the first time since the site was launched. It is estimated that the Pirate Bay tracks more than half of all BitTorrent users at any given point in time.
This August The Pirate Bay was “censored” in Italy following a decree from a public prosecutor. The Pirate Bay appealed the block and eventually won the court case. Earlier this week the Court of Bergamo detailed its decision, and ruled that no foreign website can be censored for alleged copyright infringement.
The Pirate Bay has been “censored” in Italy following an urgent decree from a deputy public prosecutor. Pirate Bay’s IPs and the domain name are inaccessible, as they are blocked by ISPs all over the country. Whether these blocks will be very effective, however, is doubtful, since The Pirate Bay has already announced several countermeasures.
