The Pirate Bay today unveiled their new mission. They’re working on ‘hosting’ parts of their site in GPS-controlled drones, instead of old-fashioned data centers.

“Everyone knows WHAT TPB is. Now they’re going to have to think about WHERE TPB is,” The Pirate Bay team told TorrentFreak. We were further informed that the first drone will probably fly above international waters.

“We’re already the most resilient and the most down to earth. That’s why we need to lift off, being this connected to the ground doesn’t feel appropriate to us anymore,” TPB told us. Although the line between reality and fantasy can be rather thin at The Pirate Bay, we were assured that the plan to launch a drone is real.

In a blog post Hollywood’s arch-rivals half reveal some more details about the unconventional plan.

“With the development of GPS controlled drones, far-reaching cheap radio equipment and tiny new computers like the Raspberry Pi, we’re going to experiment with sending out some small drones that will float some kilometers up in the air. This way our machines will have to be shut down with aeroplanes in order to shut down the system. A real act of war.”

“We’re just starting so we haven’t figured everything out yet. But we can’t limit ourselves to hosting things just on land anymore. These Low Orbit Server Stations (LOSS) are just the first attempt. With modern radio transmitters we can get over 100Mbps per node up to 50km away. For the proxy system we’re building, that’s more than enough.”

The drone plan is yet another move to make it harder to censor or shutdown The Pirate Bay. Last month the file-sharing site traded in torrents for magnets for the exact same reason, and behind the scenes The Pirate Bay team is making more adjustments.

Looking ahead, The Pirate Bay team thinks the site may no longer be hosted on this planet.

“When the time comes we will host in all parts of the galaxy, being true to our slogan of being the galaxy’s most resilient system. And all of the parts we’ll use to build that system on will be downloadable.”

Interesting times…..

Source: The Pirate Bay Attacks Censorship With Low Orbit Server Drones

The raid eventually led to the conviction of four people connected to The Pirate Bay, but the site itself remained online.

Today, the Pirate Bay team has informed TorrentFreak that a second raid is being prepared by the Swedish authorities. The site’s operators, who are well-connected in multiple ways, learned that a team of Swedish investigators is gearing up to move against the site in the future.

The suspicions were also made public by The Pirate Bay a few minutes ago.

“The Swedish district attorney Fredrik Ingblad initiated a new investigation into The Pirate Bay back in 2010. Information has been leaked to us every now and then by multiple sources, almost on a regular basis. It’s an interesting read,” the Pirate Bay crew notes.

“We can certainly understand why WikiLeaks wished to be hosted in Sweden, since so much data leaks there. The reason that we get the leaks is usually that the whistleblowers do not agree with what is going on. Something that the governments should have in mind – even your own people do not agree.”

The Pirate Bay team confirmed to TorrentFreak that the announcement is no prank. The authorities have obtained warrants to snoop around in sensitive places and two known anti-piracy prosecutors, Frederick Ingblad and Henrik Rasmusson, are said to be involved.

Employing a little psychological warfare aimed at putting the investigators off-balance, the Pirate Bay team has chosen to make the news public to make the authorities aware that they are not the only ones being watched.

According to The Pirate Bay team they aren’t doing anything illegal, but nonetheless they noticed that the investigation intensified after the site’s recent move to a .SE domain.

“Since our recent move to a .SE domain the investigation has been cranked up a notch. We think that the investigation is interesting considering nothing that TPB does is illegal,” they say.

“Rather we find it interesting that a country like Sweden is being so abused by lobbyists and that this can be kept up. They’re using scare tactics, putting pressure on the wrong people, like providers and users. All out of fear from the big country in the west, and with an admiration for their big fancy wallets.”

Behind the scenes The Pirate Bay team is working hard to ensure that the site will remain online in the event that servers, domain names and Internet routes are cut off. In this regard The Pirate Bay has learned a valuable lesson from its former operators.

Those who are aware of the site’s history know that without a few essential keystrokes in May 2006, The Pirate Bay may not have been here today. When Pirate Bay founder TiAMO heard that something was amiss, he decided to make a full backup of the site before heading off to the datacenter, where he was greeted by dozens of police officers.

TiAMO’s decision to start a backup of the site is probably the most pivotal moment in the site’s history. Because of this backup the Pirate Bay team were able to resurrect the site within three days. If there hadn’t have been a recent backup, things may have turned out quite differently.

It was a close call at the time, and a defining moment in the history of the site. The determination to get the site back online as soon as possible set the defiant tone for the years that followed. Today, the site prides itself in being the most resilient torrent site around.

In recent years The Pirate Bay has implemented a variety of changes to guarantee that the site remains online. It added several backup domains, placed servers all over the world, and removed resource intensive processes.

Earlier this week The Pirate Bay took another important step by removing .torrent files altogether to become a “magnet link” site. As a result, the entire site can now be reduced to a few hundred megabytes, small enough to fit on the tiniest thumb drive.

For the police, this makes a successful Pirate Bay raid almost impossible. While they can take steps to put the site out of business briefly, it’s inevitable that it will re-appear in a matter of hours, or days.

Or to use the words of the Pirate Bay team. “We’re staying put where we are. We’re going no-where. But we have a message to hollywood, the investigators and the prosecutors: LOL.”

Source: Leaked: Police Plan to Raid The Pirate Bay

Alongside the millions who protest against these increasing censorship initiatives, there’s also a group of people who come up with ways to route around it. One of these projects is the RePress plugin for WordPress.

The plugin is developed by the hosting company Greenhost and allows everyone with a WordPress blog to start a proxy for sites that are censored elsewhere in the world. As an example, Greenhost have setup a Pirate Bay and Wikileaks proxy.

“By adding this plug-in to your WordPress website it will start functioning as a proxy and uncensor any blocked website you’d like,” Greenhost explains. “The only thing you’ll need is a WordPress website and the ability to install new plug-ins. After that you can maintain a list of websites you’d like to keep open freely available on the web.”

One of the main motivations for the plugin’s developers was to provide people in the Netherlands full access to The Pirate Bay when the recent court order is enforced. However, if SOPA or PIPA pass there might also be a need for people in the US to have a tool like this.

“We hope people outside Holland use the plug-in to uncensor piratebay.org, as it is in danger of being blocked in our country after a court-ruling. In the Netherlands we could then uncensor websites for people in oppressive regimes like Iran, Syria or the US after SOPA is passed.”

“[SOPA and PIPA] are said to defend the interests of the Entertainment industry, but will mainly cause grave and undeniable damage to the Open and Free web and all of its users: from the end-consumer to the cutting edge developers and inventors. Our aim is to make this impossible,” the Greenhost team notes.

Although the plugin can’t prevent domain names from being seized, it is indeed a good solution to bypass all of the common blocking measures that are used today.

The RePress initiative is applauded by several politicians, including European Parliament member Marietje Schaake. “This is a fantastic opportunity for human rights activists and a solution for people who face technological censorship and repression,” she told Webwereld.

To those eager to start their own proxy of blocked websites, RePress can be downloaded in the WordPress repository.

Source: WordPress Plugin Unblocks Censored Sites, Including The Pirate Bay

But on the horizon looms threats of a different kind, the PIPA and SOPA bills.

While SOPA has been put on hold temporarily, the PIPA bill is going full steam ahead. If it passes, The Pirate Bay and other torrent sites may be the first to be targeted. Depending on the final text of the bills, these sites may be blocked by ISPs, censored by search engines, and in some cases they may even lose their domain names.

These developments cause some concern among the people running The Pirate Bay, but interestingly enough they don’t fear for themselves.

“Of course we’re worried. Not so much for The Pirate Bay, as there are many workarounds, but for democratic reasons,” a Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak.

Indeed, recent history has shown that no matter what technical measures are put in use to block The Pirate Bay, the site and its users find ways around it. Whether it’s a backup domain, alternative DNS-servers or proxy sites, PIPA and SOPA can be easily circumvented. In addition, the site’s advertising partners don’t fall within reach of the US Government.

Anticipating future censorship, The Pirate Bay yesterday released a modified version of the CGIPROXY software so anyone with access to a webserver can easily start their own Pirate Bay proxy. And since The Pirate Bay plans to ditch .torrent files completely, the resources that have to be invested are minimal.

For opponents of the PIPA and SOPA bills, The Pirate Bay’s stance is yet even more ammunition to get the pending legislation thrown out completely. When even the biggest target isn’t worried at all, why put the future of the Internet at risk?

The Pirate Bay itself is amazed by the unprecedented power the entertainment industry has in Washington.

“It’s crazy what politicians will do in the name of copyright! They are either totally paid off, stupid or copyright holders. Or all of them – that’s not as uncommon as you might think. The worst part is that it’s so obvious that pretty much everyone in and outside the US, including major corporations, are against this bill,” the Pirate Bay insider said.

“The minority will now decide to get to control the majority, for reasons that only help the minority and not society as a whole. It’s disgusting. If the law was discussed in Iran or China, we might understand it – and criticize it just as much. But this… come on!”

The Pirate Bay urges the International community to take a clear stand in the issue, preventing the US from taking control of the Internet. The European Parliament set the first step in this direction recently, by condemning domain name seizures, but there is still a long way to go according to The Pirate Bay.

“It’s obvious that the US has too much influence on the internet and the world’s politics. SOPA/PIPA is one of many newer laws that is passed in the US but really is in effect outside of their borders. The UN and other bodies should actually fight back and say that this is not OK, ” the insider said.

“The internet is a global infrastructure and can’t be run in one single country. Besides fighting SOPA, we must also take away the possibility for a single country to rule over the global infrastructure.”

For now, however, the battle is far from over. SOPA can be revived any minute and PIPA is still very much alive and up for vote in Congress next week. As a protest, many websites large and small will go on strike tomorrow, but not The Pirate Bay, for the torrent site it’s business as usual.

Source: The Pirate Bay: PIPA/SOPA Won’t Stop Us!

True to The Pirate Bay spirit, the Promo Bay campaigns are free of charge.

“As you might have seen we sometimes replace our front page logo with others. Sometimes we link to important political issues like internet censorship and sometimes it’s to some cool indie musicians we like. We would now like to improve this feature,” The Pirate Bay announces.

Artists who want to participate have to offer something free in return, so a link to the iTunes store wont work, but apart from that pretty much anything goes. The promos can be targeted to a maximum of 3 countries, but if an artist manages to impress the Pirate Bay team, they may choose to promote it worldwide.

The Pirate Bay is no stranger to helping out artists. The site has been one of the key partners of the indie movie distribution platform VODO, and they’ve also run several promotional campaigns for content creators on their own.

On the other hand, many artists are already releasing their work voluntarily on The Pirate Bay, and not just basement bands either. To promote their new single, Radiohead turned to The Pirate Bay in 2009, and Nine Inch Nails have made pretty much all their music available on the torrent site.

Best selling author Paulo Coelho is another dedicated fan of The Pirate Bay, sharing his books on there every time his publisher looks away. “I am openly supporting their site,” Coelho told TorrentFreak when the site’s founders were defending themselves in a Swedish court.

There is little doubt that the new promotion platform will be welcomed by artist all across the globe. Perhaps there will even be a few established names that sign up who want to take advantage of this free advertising opportunity. To those who are about to try we have one piece of advice; please make sure your website can handle the load – with 1.8 billion page views a month a worldwide promotion can be quite a hit.

Source: The Pirate Bay Launches Promo Platform For Artists

The Pirate Bay argued that BitTorrent trackers have been made redundant by technologies such as DHT and PEX. In addition, The Pirate Bay team said that they might move away from torrents entirely and switch to offering magnet links instead.

“We’re talking to the other torrent admins on doing magnet links and DHT and PEX for all sites. Moving away from torrents and trackers totally – like pick a date and all agree ‘from this date, we’ll not support torrents anymore’,” a Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak at the time.

Now, two years later, that date is coming soon.

Today, The Pirate Bay made the first step towards this new future by making magnets the default download links instead of torrents. TorrentFreak was further informed that in “a month or so” the largest torrent site on the Internet will stop serving torrent files indefinitely.

The announcement is bound to lead to confusion and uncertainty among many torrent users, but in reality very little will change for the average Pirate Bay visitor. Users will still be able to download files, but these will now be started through a magnet link instead of a .torrent file.

The Pirate Bay team told TorrentFreak that one of the advantages of the transition to a “magnet site” is that it requires relatively little bandwidth to host a proxy. This is topical, since this week courts in both Finland and the Netherlands ordered local Internet providers to block the torrent site.

Perhaps even better, without the torrent files everyone can soon host a full copy of The Pirate Bay on a USB thumb drive, which may come in handy in the future.

Unlike the site’s users, existing torrent sites that scrape .torrent files from The Pirate Bay will have to make some drastic changes. If they want to continue serving .torrent files they will have to fetch them from DHT. Also, hotlinks to .torrent files will stop working and will soon redirect to The Pirate Bay’s detail page for the files in question.

One of the potential downsides of using magnets is that it could take a bit longer for downloads to start, especially if there are relatively few people sharing a file. This is because the .torrent file has to be fetched from other users instead of being downloaded directly from the site. More background on these and other technicalities can be found here.

The good news is that all mainstream BitTorrent clients support magnet links. This wasn’t the case back in 2009, but when The Pirate Bay hinted that in the future they could become a magnet-only site, all developers quickly made their clients fully compatible.

There’s no doubt that a torrent-less Pirate Bay will certainly mark the end of an era. At the moment it’s hard to predict what the impact of The Pirate Bay’s decision will be on the BitTorrent community. But torrents, however, will never disappear completely.

Source: The Pirate Bay Will Stop Serving Torrents

In the years that followed the BitTorrent site made history as it grew to become one of the most recognized brands on the Internet.

At a time where cyberlockers are quickly catching up with BitTorrent as the preferred way to share files online, today the founders of The Pirate Bay launch a brand new file-sharing venture called Bayfiles. One of the main reasons for this move is to provide users with a more reliable option for sharing and storing files.

“BitTorrent is increasingly throttled or even filtered by ISPs, HTTP usually is not,” Bayfiles co-founder Fredrik Neij tells TorrentFreak.

“Storage and transfers on Bayfiles also preserve users’ privacy. And another advantage is that users can be sure that content stays up, which is important for personal backups. It also guarantees that other personal files such as your MP3 collection are always accessible, so users are able to stream it live to any device,” Fredrik says.

Bayfiles works similarly to other one-click-hosting services such as Megaupload, RapidShare and Hotfile. With just a single click, users can upload files to the Bayfiles server, and then easily share them with the online public. The site itself offers no search functionality or file directory to find content that other people have uploaded.

How strictly the above policy will be enforced is yet to be seen, but co-founder Fredrik Neij told TorrentFreak that their Hong Kong based company Bayfiles Limited has officially registered DMCA agents. After all the trouble they had to go through in court for The Pirate Bay, Fredrik and former Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde want to avoid running into more trouble with their new venture.

Looking forward, Neij told TorrentFreak that Bayfiles will be much more than just a simple cyberlocker. There are ideas to expand it into a more feature rich cloud hosting service comparable to the likes of Dropbox. As with The Pirate Bay, the ultimate goal is to make sharing both effortless and efficient.

As for the features, unregistered users can share files up to 250MB, regular members have a limit of 500MB and premium members can upload files as large as 5GB with unlimited storage. The premium accounts do come at a price, 5 euros per month or 45 euros for a full year. Unlike other cyberlockers, Bayfiles does not offer a reward program where uploaders of popular content can be paid for their services.

In the past The Pirate Bay founders have launched many side-projects, with varying success. None of these projects ever rivalled the popularity of The Pirate Bay, but if one site can outgrow the famous BitTorrent site in terms of users, it certainly is Bayfiles.

The popularity of cyberlockers has increased exponentially in recent years. Just a few days ago we reported that 8 of the 10 largest English language file-sharing sites are related to cyberlockers, each with hundreds of millions of pageviews a month. It is not unthinkable that Bayfiles will join this list in the future.

In terms of copyright law, Bayfiles is a perfectly legal operation as long as the site doesn’t encourage or promote copyright infringement. Previously a U.S. federal court ruled that RapidShare, a competing file-hosting service, is not liable for any copyright infringements its users may commit.

That said, we doubt whether Hollywood will be happy with this new venture from a team of people who’ve been their arch rivals for more than half a decade. Exciting times ahead.

Source: Bayfiles: The Pirate Bay Founders Launch File-Hosting Site

Aside from the main criminal trial, they also obtained a wide variety of interim injunctions through the courts.

In 2009, a Stockholm district court injunction ordered founders Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg to cease assisting in The Pirate Bay’s operations or face fines of 500,000 kronor ($78,000). Former Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde was later presented with a similar injunction.

Neij and Svartholm Warg were prohibited from assisting in the operation of The Pirate Bay website, and any website that hosts torrents available through The Pirate Bay, and The Pirate Bay tracker.

However, an interesting situation arose in the fall of 2009 when The Pirate Bay decided to remove their in-house tracker. As the setup of the site had changed the Appeal Court ruled that the interim injunction against the site’s founders was no longer valid. The Pirate Bay no longer consisted of all three elements, the Court ruled.

The movie studios and record labels were not pleased with this outcome and filed for a new interim injunction against Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde in June 2010 and against the other founders, Neij and Swartholm Warg, in October last year.

The injunction against Sunde was made final in October last year after a decision by the Court of Appeal, and the injunction against Neij was made final in February this year. Swartholm Warg was unfindable. The new injunctions in force no longer prohibit the site’s founders from operating all three elements of the site, but any.

Last week the companies dropped the enforcement action under the old injunction to replace it with one that applies to the broader injunction. If this order is violated, Neij faces a fine of 500,000 kronor.

Whether or not the update was needed has to be questioned. The founders of The Pirate Bay have stated many times that they handed over the operation of the site and all its aspects to the Seychelles-based company Reservella.

During the past several years the entertainment companies initiated several civil cases in addition to the criminal trial, and by doing so managed to obtain several injunctions. Two of these prevented the site’s former ISPs Portlane and Black Internet to serve the site as a customer.

In the months that followed anti-piracy outfit IFPI threatened several ISPs around the world against daring to host The Pirate Bay, quoting the injunctions above. Needless to say, the paperwork was one of the most powerful tools they have to chase down The Pirate Bay and make the lives of those who operate it as difficult as possible. Eventually this forced The Pirate Bay to seek shelter with the local Pirate Party.

With the new and more broad injunction and the injunction against Portlane, the movie studios and record labels now have even more ammunition to go after companies who dare to provide services to The Pirate Bay. This means that the new mountain complex where the servers are currently located is probably on the top of their hit list.

Source: Hollywood Beefs Up Injunction Against Pirate Bay Founders

Although downtime is nothing new for users of the popular BitTorrent site, this time around the connectivity issues appear to be affecting only a select group.

Several tests and numerous user reports reveal that Comcast subscribers from all across the United States are unable to connect to The Pirate Bay. The traceroute from Comcast connections stops at thepiratebay.piratpartiet.se, as it’s supposed to, but The Pirate Bay website does not appear.

Further tests show that the blockade is not DNS related. What is actually causing the issue is uncertain at this point.

Although there’s been a lot of talk about censorship lately, it seems doubtful that this is an intentional blockade on Comcast’s part. That said, there is clearly a mismatch between the Comcast network and The Pirate Bay site which leaves access to the rest of the Internet unaffected.

TorrentFreak spoke to The Pirate Bay team who confirmed that there’s a significant drop in visitors from the U.S. They are currently investigating the issue to see if there’s anything they can do on their end.

When it comes to BitTorrent blocking, Comcast already has quite a reputation. In 2007 TorrentFreak broke the news that Comcast was actively blocking BitTorrent traffic. Comcast initially denied, but later admitted its wrongdoings.

Comcast’s BitTorrent blocking fueled the Net Neutrality debates and eventually resulted in an FCC investigation and various lawsuits. A class action lawsuit was settled by the ISP who reserved a $16 million fund for affected subscribers.

In the light of all the previous legal issues it therefore seems unlikely that Comcast has ventured out on its own to block The Pirate Bay website.

When there’s more information available on the current issues we’ll update this article. In the meantime Comcast users can access the site through Anonymouse and other proxies.

Update: It appears that a subset of Rogers users in Canada have problems accessing the site as well, same with some Optus users in Australia. However, this doesn’t appear to be as widespread as with Comcast.

Update: Jason Livingood, Executive Director Internet Systems Engineering at Comcast told TorrentFreak: “Please note that we do not block websites and we are NOT blocking The Pirate Bay.”

Update: After affecting only Comcast users for about 15 hours, The Pirate Bay seems to be inaccessible pretty much everywhere now. The Pirate Bay team is looking into it. (Update: one webserver died, should be back for most people who are not on Comcast now).

Source: Comcast Users Blocked From The Pirate Bay

To deal with illicit sites on the Internet, the group suggested the adoption of a China-like firewall to block websites deemed ‘inappropriate’. The controversial proposal immediately met resistance from various sides, including ISPs who would be tasked with maintaining the blocklist.

The copyright lobby on the other hand welcomes the initiative which they’ve been suggesting for years.

One of the sites that has a fair share of experience with being blocked is The Pirate Bay. The popular BitTorrent site is currently censored in Ireland, Italy and Denmark, and almost lost its domain name to the U.S. Government last year.

Needless to say, they are not happy with the EU’s latest censorship proposal. In fact, today they declare war on the proponents of Internet censorship, most prominently the entertainment industry (MAFIAA) lobbyists.

In a slightly edited version of Winston Churchill’s “this was their finest hour” speech, in which they replace Nazi-Germany with MAFIAA, The Pirate Bay team declares war on Internet censorship advocates. Action has to be taken before it’s too late, is the message they convey.

“I expect that the Battle of Internets is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of an Uncensored civilization! Upon it depends our own free life, and the long continuity of our sites and our trackers. The whole fury and might of the enemy will very soon be turned on us,” The Pirate Bay writes.

“MAFIAA knows that they will have to break us in Brussels or lose the war. If we can stand up to them, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.”

“Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the free Internets and its multitude of sites last for a thousand years, citizens will still say, This was their finest hour,” they add.

The speech, signed by “Winston Bay,” clearly shows The Pirate Bay’s concern with censorship proposals as opted by the European Union recently. The big question remains, is there really something that can be done to stop it, or has that ship sailed already?

Source: The Pirate Bay: “The Battle of Internets is About to Begin”

Tube+ is a newly launched service that combines all the above, and more. In what can be described as a file-sharing hybrid, the site offers the latest movies and TV-shows streamed directly to user’s browser. In addition, Tube+ also offers links to the files on BitTorrent, cyberlockers and eMule.

As far as we know this kind of hybrid approach has never been tried before. Although the site is still quite buggy and doesn’t always suggest the correct links, the fact that it’s being promoted by The Pirate Bay means that it will quickly gather a significant audience.

As users may have noticed, Tube+ is being promoted on The Pirate Bay next to their torrent and magnet links. There appears to be some geographical restrictions, meaning that the Tube+ link is not shown globally, but it is available to the majority.

The Tube+ site itself is not a project of The Pirate Bay people but nonetheless, the prominent ‘plug’ will pique the interest of many curious users. In just a few days the Tube+ Facebook page has quickly swollen to over 10,000 users, who all appear to ‘like’ the site.

Aside from linking to a variety of file-sharing and streaming sources, Tube+ also lists the IMDb ratings for movies and films. In addition, users can search for content based on genre or the year that it was released. According to the reviews on Facebook, these features are liked by many.

With backing from The Pirate Bay, Tube+ is destined to become a big player, that is, if the promotion lasts long enough. The downside from a user perspective is that one has to navigate though a minefield of ads. Aside from a few authorized releases, the site also appears to list unauthorized content. The latter means that Tube+ will not receive a very warm welcome in Hollywood circles.

It is of course needless to say that Tube+, though its ‘partnership’ with The Pirate Bay, already has big target on its back. This hasn’t gone unnoticed by the people who run the site either as they recently changed their domain from .com to .me in anticipation of a possible domain seizure. For now at least, the hybrid file-sharing platform is still open to the public.

Source: The Pirate Bay Plugs Hybrid File-Sharing Platform

The Pirate Bay team informed TorrentFreak that they were doing all they could to patch the vulnerability, and later said that the site was fully secure again. Two month later, however, it became apparent that The Pirate Bay backend had been exploited, this time by spammers.

At the time a large number of The Pirate Bay users received an email, allegedly from the site’s operators, inviting them to join the private BitTorrent tracker DemUnoid. The emails were sent out using a unique combination of real Pirate Bay user names and the email addresses those people signed up with, indicating that the sender had exploited the user database.

How this happened, and whether there was a connection to the earlier hack attempt remained a mystery, but it has now become apparent that this spam attempt was not an isolated incident.

Starting mid-February TorrentFreak started receiving reports of another spam attempt. This time Pirate Bay users are being encouraged to visit a website where they can allegedly download instructions on how to make money from torrent sites like The Pirate Bay.

Below is a copy of one of the original emails. A slightly edited version was sent out as recently as yesterday.

–

Subject: Attention to all PirateBay Users

Dear *Username*

A course has been put together to show you how to use The PirateBay to make some serious money. This seriously works.

Please visit http://www.sams101.com/ccount/click.php?XXX

and download the course instructions. Because you are a torrent user and you use TPB you can do this.

Pirate Team

–

The staff at The Pirate Bay are definitely not sending out these emails, so from where do they originate? As far as we can see it appears to be another exploit of a vulnerability in The Pirate Bay user database, one that is used for malicious purposes. Another possibility is that the same people are reusing the previously obtained data.

The emails that TorrentFreak has seen all follow the same structure and link to the same page. They are sent from various addresses such as super.affilates002@gmail.com, the.pirates.teams@gmail.com and the.pirate.teams@thepiratesteam.com and all use the unique combination of a Pirate Bay username and email address of the user in question.

One Pirate Bay user who received the spam email told TorrentFreak that he only used the email the spam was sent to once, to sign up at The Pirate Bay, which is a clear sign that the spam results from a compromised user database. How this info was collected is unclear at this point, and from the information we have it appears that only a subset of users is affected.

During recent weeks users have mentioned the spam mails at the Pirate Bay forums, but no official explanation has been given thus far. With nearly 5 million users The Pirate Bay database is a lucrative target for spammers so new users should be weary of this and if possible use a throwaway email address when signing up.

A Pirate Bay moderator told TorrentFreak that users who want to change their email address can ask for it on IRC or at the forums. An option to let users change their email addresses on the site is being considered.

Source: Pirate Bay User Database Compromised and Exploited, Again

Today, Friday November 26, the Swedish Appeal Court announced its decision. Compared to the District Court ruling, the court has decreased the prison sentences for the three defendants, but increased the damages that have to be paid to the entertainment industries.

“The Pirate Bay has facilitated illegal file-sharing in a way that results in criminal liability for those who run the service. For the three defendants the court of appeal believes it is proven that they participated in these activities in different ways and to varying degrees,” the court stated.

The court did consider the individual input of all three, which resulted in varying prison sentences ranging from 4 to 10 months . The total damages of 46 million kroner ($6.5 million) will be equally shared among Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij and Carl Lundström.

Peter Sunde (born September 13, 1978) alias ‘brokep’

Fredrik Neij (born April 27, 1978) alias ‘TiAMO’:

Carl Lundström (born April 13, 1960)

The total damages are higher than in the District Court ruling. “This is because the court of appeal, to a greater extent than the district court, accepted the plaintiff companies’ evidence of its losses as a result of file-sharing,” the court noted.

All Nordic entertainment industry companies get the entire amount they asked for, and the remaining companies get about half of what they requested.

The fourth defendant, Gottfrid Svartholm, is not included in the verdict because he was absent at the court hearings due to medical circumstances. His case will be reviewed later.

From the verdict it also appears that the court chose for prison sentences to set an example, but that such sentences are generally not fit for copyright related violations.

“They’re giving us jail even though it’s not the right thing for the ‘crime.’ It’s just to scare people. That’s what you did in the 1600s…,” defendant Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak.

“This was a political trial from the start and it must be resolved politically,” Rick Falkvinge, leader of the Pirate Party said in a response to the verdict. “The public has lost all confidence in the justice system in these matters, and it is beyond sad that the courts still persist in running special-interest justice.”

Entertainment industry insiders, on the other hand, applauded the verdict. “It’s a relief that the court of appeal finally affirmed that you’ll be sent to prison if you carry out this type of activity,” movie industry lawyer Monique Wadsted said.

Although none of the defendants has officially commented on how to proceed, it is very likely that this will not be the end of the case. It is expected that it eventually will go all the way to the Supreme Court.

Defendant Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak that they are all appealing at the Supreme Court as soon as possible.

Whatever happens next, not much will change for the users of the popular BitTorrent indexer. The Pirate Bay website will remain online and operating as usual. None of the defendants are involved in the site anymore, and all assets are reportedly owned by the Seychelles based company Reservella.

Source: The Pirate Bay Appeal Verdict: Guilty Again

The Pirate Bay boasted the title of “the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker” for half a decade, but a year ago this title no longer applied. On November 17, 2009 The Pirate Bay decided to shut down its tracker for good. According to the Pirate Bay team central trackers had become obsolete.

“Now that the decentralized system for finding peers is so well developed, The Pirate Bay has decided that there is no need to run a tracker anymore, so it will remain down! It’s the end of an era, but the era is no longer up-to-date,” the team announced.

The Pirate Bay argued that BitTorrent trackers have been made redundant by technologies such as DHT and PEX. In addition, The Pirate Bay team said that they might move away from torrents entirely and switch to offering Magnet links instead.

“We’re talking to the other torrent admins on doing magnet links and DHT and PEX for all sites. Moving away from torrents and trackers totally – like pick a date and all agree ‘from this date, we’ll not support torrents anymore’,” a Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak at the time.

The announcements led to confusion and uncertainty among many torrent users, but in reality very little changed for the average torrent user. The Pirate Bay’s dominant position as a tracker has been taken over by two new ones, and even after a year .torrents are still available on The Pirate Bay.

What was interesting to see, however, is the response that came from the development community and torrent site owners. Before last year most torrent clients didn’t have support for Magnet links, and those that did spent little time on making them compatible and easy to use. However, after The Pirate Bay’s call for Magnet support this quickly changed.

BitTorrent clients such as Transmission, BitComet and Ktorrent all implemented support for Magnets this year. The clients that already offered Magnet support, such as uTorrent and Vuze, didn’t sit still either and spent time optimizing their implementation.

Similarly, the operators of other torrents sites were also listening in and nearly all of the larger torrent sites that didn’t already offer Magnet links soon added them. In January, this was followed by the launch of the first ‘Magnet-only’ torrent index named TorrIndex. Clearly, the words uttered by The Pirate Bay operators had not been in vain.

As for the tracker that was shut down, aside from the sentimental value it hasn’t really been missed. OpenBitTorrent and PublicBitTorrent quickly took over and have been going strong ever since, and not without a reason.

Larger torrents with thousands of peers will work just fine without a central tracker thanks to technologies such as DHT and PEX. But the majority of torrents out there only have a handful of peers and for these files a central tracker is still an essential part of the downloading process.

The shut down of The Pirate Bay tracker last year marked the end of an era, but as it stands now BitTorrent trackers are not defunct yet.

Source: The Pirate Bay, One Year After The Tracker Shut Down

First to appear was Fredrik Neij’s lawyer, Jonas Nilsson. He said that the Pirate Bay website was never intended to infringe copyright and further noted that the defendants haven’t committed copyright infringement themselves. The users may have, but it is unclear whether these crimes occurred in Sweden or if the defendants can be held responsible for the actions of the users of the site.

Nilsson further argued that The Pirate Bay should be seen as a service provider. Under the E-commerce directive that would mean that the defendants are not liable for the actions of their users. Backing up this argument, the lawyer referred to a recent file-sharing related ruling in Spain which concluded that users are responsible for their own actions, and that website operators could not be held accountable.

The lawyer further argued that Neij was not aware that any of the torrent files listed in the indictment ever existed. This means that he could not have removed them from the site even if he wanted to.

Nilsson then came back to the E-commerce directive, arguing why the Pirate Bay should be seen as a service provider. He also referred to the landmark ruling in the UK regarding the movie and TV show embedding site, TV-Links. In that case the court ruled that under section 17 of the E-commerce directive the site was deemed a mere conduit of information.

Next to make his arguments was Peter Althin, Peter Sunde’s lawyer. He opened by saying that it is unclear who or what is on trial here. He wondered whether this was a trial against a technology that can possibly be used by people to infringe copyright. Neither The Pirate Bay itself or the defendants committed any criminal acts, he argued.

Althin went on to compare the trial to the opposition against other technologies such as the VCR, radio and even libraries.

“As soon as a new technology emerges there are worries. So the question is whether one can legislate against new technology. The outcome of this case is very important for Peter, but also for society as a whole,” he said.

Sunde’s lawyer then moved on to the damages being claimed by the entertainment industry. He said that there is no clear evidence that file-sharing leads to a decrease in sales. In addition, he said that the experts brought in by the prosecution to discuss the damages all have a stake in this case as they are industry insiders.

On the other hand, Althin found it strange that the testimony of professor Roger Wallis was not even mentioned once in the District Court ruling. Wallis had argued that piracy is not doing any harm to the music industry.

Althin told the court that Peter Sunde is just the spokesman of The Pirate Bay and did not hold the position on the site that the Prosecution claims. He further said that his client did not make any money from the operation.

The lawyer then questioned the objectivity of the District Court, with very strong words. “I get the impression when I read the District Court’s ruling that it has decided to draw a conclusion and then try to find direct and indirect ways to reach that conclusion,” he told the Appeal Court.

After Althin stepped down, E Samuelson, lawyer for Carl Lundström, appeared for his closing arguments. Samuelson said that a criminal case is one where the Court has to decide whether the defendants assisted in a criminal act. However, according to the lawyer, the prosecution has not made clear what crimes have occurred.

Samuelson then referred to a Supreme Court case where it was ruled that evidence has to show that each of the defendants is directly complicit in criminal acts. In the current case this has not been proven, and instead the indictment refers to indirect complicity, something that doesn’t exist under Swedish law.

Samuelson went on to explain the mistakes the District Court made in its verdict. Among other things he pointed out that the Court had violated the principle of legality, since the verdict stated that the defendants were indirectly aiding criminal acts.

Samuelsson further described his client as a businessman who is only vaguely connected to The Pirate Bay. One of his customers (PRQ) hosted the site, but his client didn’t own the site, nor was he involved in maintaining or coding it. That the prosecutor wants to hold Lundstom directly accountable for the downloads of Pirate Bay users seems to be far fetched according to the lawyer.

After the lunch break Samuelsson went on to distance his client from The Pirate Bay. After he was done the prosecution had the opportunity to respond to the final arguments of the defense team. Both sides argued about the applicability of the UK based TV-links case and the question whether E-commerce law applies to The Pirate Bay, but nothing new was brought up.

This concluded the appeal, and after the paperwork was dealt with the Court announced that the verdict will be made public on Friday the 26th of November.

Source: The Final Day of The Pirate Bay Appeal

Today, during the second to last hearing at at the Appeal Court, the trial went over to live action again as the prosecution made its final pleas. Members of the prosecution and representatives for the music and movie industries presented their closing statements to the court.

Prosecutor Håkan Roswall stepped up first, claiming that the evidence against the four defendants is now even stronger than before. He further laid out why each of the defendants had been actively involved in the operation, maintenance or financing of the site.

The prosecutor said that both Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm have admitted their role in the operation, but there’s also strong evidence that the other two defendants are complicit.

Roswall doesn’t believe Peter Sunde’s statements that he was just the site’s spokesman. He said that Peter was deeply involved, referring to claims that Peter worked on technical issues for the site.

In addition the prosecutor noted that advertiser Daniel Oded communicated with Fredrik and Gottfrid through Peter. Roswall also said that Peter helped to design and develop the site and had contact with some advertisers.

Lundstrom was also actively involved according to the prosecutor. Some computers that were found during the raid on The Pirate Bay were bought by Lundstrom’s company Rix Telecom, Rosswall said. In addition he claimed that there were other financial ties, including those to the Israeli advertiser Daniel Oded. Lundstrom also gave business advice and operational suggestions to the other defendants.

Roswall further argued that the E-Commerce Directive doesn’t apply to The Pirate Bay because it’s not simply transmitting data like an ISP does. The Pirate Bay is actually involved in the communication between downloaders, he said. The prosecutor compared the site to an electronic bulletin board where users and moderators interact with each other, which would not fall under the directive.

Concluding his final arguments Roswall demanded jail sentences for all four defendants. “The correct punishment is a year in prison,” he said.

Next up to make his closing statement was Peter Danowsky of the IFPI. He began by saying that the music labels want more compensation than the amount awarded to them by the District Court. The margin of error that the District Court applied to the Pirate Bay’s download counters resulted in less damages than the record companies are entitled to, Danowsky argued.

Danowsky further suggested a compensation of 6.5 Euro per downloaded album, which means that every download is counted as a lost sale. In addition, he wants the recording industry to be compensated for the damage The Pirate Bay has cost the music industry in general.

Danowsky went on to state that The Pirate Bay offers a service that is very similar to that offered by legal online music stores. However, the site doesn’t charge for the music and keeps the advertizing revenue to themselves instead of compensating the rights holders.

Physical piracy is exactly the same as illicit file-sharing according to the music industry lawyer, it simply utilizes newer technology.

Danowsky went on to note that The Pirate Bay was founded with only one (ideological) purpose: “Not to respect copyright.” Next, Danowsky stressed a slightly contradicting statement that The Pirate Bay is strictly a commercial operation.

Comparing The Pirate Bay to Google doesn’t make any sense according to Danowsky, because Google works with the rights holders to prevent piracy. The Pirate Bay on the other hand constantly mocks rights holders and does not cooperate with takedown requests, he said.

After the lunch break Henrik Pontén made his final plea. Pontén claimed that The Pirate Bay clearly operated as a business, making money from advertising revenue. “It was probably Sweden’s best-known brand at the time,” he said.

He argued that the defendants deserve a prison sentence because they “need a reboot” after their criminal activities. Pontén continued saying that imprisonment will also deter others from starting similar sites. He claimed that this effect already became apparent after the District Court verdict.

The damages claim should cover the loss in revenue for the entertainment industry, as well as the damage in goodwill that the site has caused, Pontén noted.

The police can’t possibly go after all The Pirate Bay users and the defendants are therefore responsible for the whole damage claim, he further argued.

Finally Monique Wadsted took the stand for her closing comments. She said that the defendants were running a massive copyright infringement operation. The purpose of the site and tracker was to attract as many users as possible, and turn this traffic into a profit, Wadsted added.

Wadsted further elaborated on the role each of the defendants played in the site’s operation, and why they should be held accountable for the copyright infringements that were committed by the site’s users. The defendants willingly damaged the movie industry, she argued.

Siding with the prosecutor, Wadsted said that the E-Commerce Directive doesn’t apply to The Pirate Bay, since the site isn’t fully automated and passive. The Pirate Bay has added categories to make it easier to index files, users can add comments, and moderators actively remove files, she said.

After having laid out the details of the damages requested by the movie companies, Wadsted added that the total sum of their request is not excessive. “This is about an intentional crime committed by adult men,” she noted.

That concluded the day, the appeal will continue on Friday with the final arguments of the defense.

Source: Pirate Bay Prosecution Calls for Jail Time and Damages

The day started off with presentations by Ludwig Werner of IFPI Sweden and the CEO of Universal Music Per Sundin, who talked about the damage The Pirate Bay has done to the music industry. Kristoffer Schollin from Gothenburg University then discussed BitTorrent and was followed by media professor Roger Wallis who informed the court about the effect of music piracy on sales.

Due to the fact that some sensitive information was discussed today, the Appeal Court did not make any audio feeds available. This means that our report is based solely on information from people who were present at the hearing, and recordings from the hearings at the District Court last year.

Ludwig Werner of IFPI Sweden was the first to take the stand. Most questions to him dealt with the amount of damages the entertainment industry suffered, with the defense questioning whether or not the figures presented by the entertainment industry are justified.

Werner said that music sales declined in 2002 and 2003 and that illegal file-sharing was the main reason for the decline in sales in recent years. He further confirmed that artists are allowed to upload their own music to the Pirate Bay if their contracts permits them to do so.

Werner’s questioning was followed by the hearing of Per Sundin, the CEO of Universal Music. Again, this was a recorded hearing of the questioning that took place during the 2009 trial.

When Per Sundin was asked whether the decline in sales could be fully attributed to illegal filesharing, he said yes. Sundin went even further and claimed that 50% of the loss in sales the music industry has suffered can be linked to The Pirate Bay.

He had to admit, however, that he has no evidence to back these claims up. “It is what they see and experience every day,” Sundin said.

Sundin’s hearing was followed by that of Kristoffer Schollin, who spoke via telephone from Gothenburg University. Schollin was interviewed about the technology behind The Pirate Bay, and BitTorrent in general.

Schollin explained that he is a lecturer in IT law with a particular interest in file-sharing and has written a paper on Digital Rights Management (DRM). He also made a special witness report for the Court.

Answering questions from the defense, Schollin explained that .torrent files are a more sophisticated type of Internet link (such as an http hyperlink) and that The Pirate Bay is an “open database” of .torrent files. Several large companies are using BitTorrent technology said Schollin, including Blizzard who use it for World of Warcraft.

When asked about TPB specifically, Schollin noted that the site is essentially a BBS (Bulletin Board) for .torrent files, attached to a forum for debate. He was also asked, in his opinion, if TPB is illegal. “That’s for the court to decide,” he said, while noting that the technology behind the site is not illegal in any way.

When asked about the type of content indexed on TPB, Schollin said: “My God, everything,” noting that both copyright and copyright-free material can be found.

When speaking with Carl Lundstrom’s lawyer Per E Samuelsson, Schollin admitted that while searching for .torrents via Google (using Harry Potter as an example) more results could be found than with TPB’s search alone. Indeed, said Schollin, EU law documents are easier for him to find via Google than they are on the EU’s own website.

Touching again on the issue of exactly whose tracker is used when a torrent file is activated, Schollin said that just because a .torrent is available on TPB, it doesn’t automatically follow that the file uses TPB’s tracker.

Schollin went on to explain how to make a .torrent file which links to content. He said that in the creation stage, it doesn’t even require an Internet connection and everything is done on the user’s PC with a torrent client, not on TPB. Once created the .torrent file could then be uploaded on to the Internet. It would then be indexed by Google, which then allows anyone to access the .torrent via a Google search.

Then it was Prosecutor Håkan Roswall’s turn to question Schollin. He put it to Schollin that kudos could be achieved in file-sharing circles if an individual put pre-release material up on the Internet, a point with which Schollin agreed.

Next up to question Schollin was Monique Wadsted, representing the movie companies. She asked Schollin if he had heard the rumor that 40% of the Internet’s traffic is down to TPB. Schollin said this was incorrect and it was more likely that they were responsible for 40% of all BitTorrent traffic. Wadsted then put it to Schollin that 50% of all the world’s .torrent files sit on TPB, and he denied this amount too, but recognized that there would be a significant number.

Schollin was then asked by the defense if he believed that TPB has a role in transmitting communications on the Internet. Schollin agreed it did. When asked if TPB might be considered a ‘service provider’ under the law, he said that was for the Court to decide.

Up next was the District Court recording of Roger Wallis. Wallis is a media professor, composer and Chairman of the Swedish Composers of Popular Music and is involved in other outfits dedicated to the rights of musicians. However, Wallis previously said that he did not see the difference between TPB and other search engines such as Google and has criticized the music industry for being too slow in adopting technology.

Speaking with Peter Altin (Peter Sunde’s lawyer), Wallis said he specializes in developing the music industry on the Internet and because of this some have incorrectly drawn the assumption that he works for the industry – he doesn’t.

Wallis referred to a report he wrote which detailed the music industry’s approach to digital technology. He said there were elements who would do anything to smother it, referring to the backlash against cassette tapes in the 1970′s.

Altin asked Wallis if there is any connection between illicit downloads and lost sales in the music industry. Contradicting the opinion of John Kennedy of the IFPI in his testimony yesterday, Wallis said that downloading caused an increase in sales of live event tickets and although there has been a reduction in CD sales, this won’t continue.

Wallis went on to explain that while some people download, these people also tend to buy more CDs than others that don’t. It’s not just downloading causing competition for the industry, other things have an effect such as the growth of computer games, he said.

Wallis believes the music industry is shooting itself in the foot by going after file-sharers, for the reasons mentioned in the previous paragraph. He said that on the whole, file-sharing is beneficial to the music and movie industries, while pointing out that the movie industry just had its most successful year ever. But the music industry doesn’t help itself he argues. Anyone who has bought a Beatles single in the past, simply cannot buy the same single in the digital domain due to licensing issues. “This is madness,” he said.

Next up to question Wallis was IFPI’s Peter Danowsky, who immediately started to annoy him by questioning his credentials. Danowsky mused if Wallis was even a proper professor, while disputing the year when Wallis qualified as such, calling him into doubt and criticizing him. “Have you no better questions to ask?” Wallis replied, reportedly visibly annoyed.

Media professor Roger Wallis was then questioned by Henrik Pontén from Sweden’s Anti-Piracy Office. Pontén continued where Danowsky left off and asked the professor if he could elaborate a bit more on how he acquired his title. “Can you use Google? Wallis replied. “Then you could easily find my CV,” he added, and the Court agreed with his assessment that they have already been over this.

Pontén then showed some graphs from a study that showed that 18% of those who download copyrighted music buy less, while only 8% buy more. These figures caused some confusion in Court, and Wallis responded by saying that they do not correspond with his findings. “I believe that it has no relevance,” Wallis added. The prosecution asked some more questions about the contradicting results of the other study, but Wallis didn’t want to go into it.

That concluded the day, the trial continues tomorrow.

Source: Pirate Bay Appeal Day 6: Is Piracy Hurting Music Sales?

In response to a question from prosecutor Håkan Roswall, Lundström admitted that he knew that there was piracy connected with The Pirate Bay, and that he understood that the site is a “file-sharing site, a torrent site”.

Speaking of the advertising strategy, Lundström took responsibility for the plan believing it was a way the site could pay for itself in the future. He went on to say that he had no idea of any political motivations behind the site and what interested him was the desire of the other defendants to make the biggest BitTorrent site in the world.

“And I liked that,” Lundström said.

“I can understand that,” Roswall replied.

The prosecution then moved to a discussion about the hardware that Lundström gave to The Pirate Bay. Lundström made clear that he never wanted to become a partner in the site. He was merely ‘interested’ in the project and gave some advice to The Pirate Bay team a few times.

Lundström was further questioned by the prosecution about his contacts with the Israeli (Oded Daniel), who handled advertising on The Pirate Bay. Lundström admitted to knowing Oded very well.

When movie industry lawyer Monique Wadsted asked Lundström why a 48 year-old businessman hangs out with people from The Pirate Bay, his lawyer jumped in and told his client not to respond.

The only ‘fresh’ news thus far today is that the Israeli businessman didn’t show up in court.

The court went on to show a video of IFPI lawyer Magnus Mårtensson. The court heard that Mårtensson has been working for the IFPI for 15 years, specializing in anti-piracy work.

The IFPI lawyer explained that he worked gathering evidence against The Pirate Bay by downloading various music albums via .torrent files he obtained from the site using Internet Explorer and the Azureus client.

Mårtensson’s technological ability was called into question by the defense lawyers and he acknowledged that it was difficult for him to answer some technical questions.

Furthermore, it quickly became apparent that his evidence consisted only of screenshots. When asked if he had any network equipment logging exactly what was going on ‘behind the scenes’ of any of his sample downloads, he replied that he didn’t.

When asked if he verified in any way during the download process that he had any contact with The Pirate Bay’s tracker, again the answer was negative.

Defendant Gottfrid Svartholm questioned Mårtensson on his evidence gathering techniques. The following questions are particularly interesting as they show that the prosecution has no evidence that the Pirate Bay trackers were actually used.

Gottfrid: Before taking the screenshot, did you turn off DHT and Peer Exchange?

Mårtensson: DHT was obviously on. I wanted to be like an average user.

Gottfrid: So in other words, you can’t check if the tracker was used?

Mårtensson: The tracker address was visible on the screen. From that I assumed it was used in some way.

Gottfrid: But since you had DHT on, you have no possibility to state to the court as to whether The Pirate Bay’s tracker was actually used or not?

Mårtensson: No.

(TF: It is unbelievable that these simple screenshots were brought in as evidence. In a response, Piratbyran created a screenshot generator that produced similar evidence.)

Mårtensson was further asked if he was aware that Google can also act as a torrent search engine. The IFPI lawer seemed to be unaware of that, and he stated that they never had any problems with Google.

In the afternoon the Court played the recording of IFPI’s John Kennedy who testified in English, through a Swedish translator.

IFPI’s John Kennedy confirmed he was the CEO of IFPI and summarized his duties there, noting the group has 1500 members worldwide and it’s main aims were to ‘improve’ copyright laws through government lobbying and fight piracy around the world since “piracy has done immense damage to the music industry.” Kennedy says that IFPI takes up strategic litigation against various targets worldwide.

Kennedy noted the transition to digital music was a great threat to them, and although more music is currently being consumed than ever before, “less is being paid for than ever before.” If music is available for free, says Kennedy, many people find that temptation too much to resist and new business models can’t flourish.

The discussion then moved to the claim for damages. Kennedy said the claims were “justified and maybe even conservative, since the damage is immense.” Talk moved to the link between the cost of downloading legally and the claim for damages. Kennedy said that for the industry, CDs were more profitable than digital downloads are today.

He said that artists, studio producers, songwriters, music publishers, studio staff and the marketing and promotion people all have get paid and the music industry spends more money than most other industries on R&D. It invests 20% of its revenue on finding new artists and although some suggest that this isn’t needed in the Internet age, they are wrong said Kennedy.

Kennedy went on to explain that music marketing is designed to take effect in “Week One” of an album’s release and in an ideal world a new release would chart at #1 and would reach its sales targets in that first week. But if products are made available on Pirate Bay during that time he said, “then purchases are taken out of the market and because of the illegal use of music, the legal use of music under-performs and in some countries that can have a dramatic effect.”

Kennedy was asked about CD sales in the last 10 years. He said they dropped from $27 billion to $18 billion. He said that the Top 10 CDs in 2001 sold 69 million units and the Top 10 CDs in 2008 sold 46 million units. 9 years ago the #1 record sold 13 million units but in 2008, Coldplay sold half of that.

Kennedy was asked what impact legal downloads have on these figures, but he denied they made up the difference. The music industry has always relied on young people for sales he said, and these same people have got used to using illegal sites. “Many legitimate sites have struggled to compete with free. It’s impossible to compete with free,” said Kennedy.

When put to him that some claim that illegal downloading promotes sales, Kennedy labeled this as old-fashioned thinking and said that people don’t think this way anymore. When asked about P2P providing live performance promotion, Kennedy said that every single live performance success is linked to a previously successful recording career/sales.

When asked about the differences between TPB and Google, Kennedy said there is no comparison. “We talk to Google all the time about preventing piracy. If you go to Google and type in Coldplay you get 40 million results – press stories, legal Coldplay music, review, appraisals of concerts/records. If you go to Pirate Bay you will get less than 1000 results, all of which give you access to illegal music or videos. Unfortunately The Pirate Bay does what it says in its description and its main aim is to make available unauthorized material. It filters fake material, it authorizes, it induces.”

Kennedy says TPB threat is growing all the time. “They are proud of this with their statistics – there are 22 million users, 1 million visitors each day, 1.6 million .torrent files and they say they are responsible for 55% of BitTorrent traffic. They pride themselves on the quality of what they deliver.”

When questioned about the IFPI’s 10X damages multiplier for pre-release material, Kennedy felt this was fair considering the damage it does to the launch of a product. Kennedy says they have teams of experts monitoring the Internet everyday for piracy.

He went on to say that people who download music from TPB spend much less on music than they would otherwise and if they didn’t get it for free they would buy it. “It is common sense, if they couldn’t get it for free they would buy it and when we ask them, they confirm that.”

When asked if downloaders have less money than others, Kennedy said that younger people have the money but just don’t spend it on music anymore. Kennedy said that the reduction in sales in the music industry is directly attributable to illegal downloading.

When asked about scientific research on the issue, Kennedy said that of several reports, only one said there was no causal link between file-sharing and lost sales – all the rest say there is. Discussion of certain reports on the issue took place, with defense lawyers questioning Kennedy on the details of the reports.

The defense lawyers pointed out that in one of the reports Kennedy refers to, lesser known artists appear to be downloaded a lot on TPB but Kennedy said although he is 56 years old, he recognizes nearly all of the artists in the TPB Top 100 list.

Carl Lundstrom’s lawyer asked about the profit on the industry’s $18bn turnover from 2008. “Terrible,” Kennedy replied. Of the big players “..only one company is making a profit.” Kennedy was pushed, if he knows the turnover, why doesn’t he know the profit. He said it was difficult to say.

He was also asked how much of this $18bn turnover is used to fight piracy, Kennedy said there are three main areas of expenditure. Funding the RIAA in US, IFPI globally and more local groups such as IFPI (Sweden). They all have budgets and a large proportion of this is used to fight piracy.

The global amount used by IFPI on lobbying and fighting piracy is £75 million.

Kennedy said he qualified as a lawyer since the 70?s but hasn’t practiced recently. He was asked if he understood BitTorrent. Kennedy said he did, but in “very vague terms.” When the defense lawyers asked more detailed questions, about uTorrent for instance, Kennedy said he’d heard of it but had no idea of the details. It was very clear he knew nothing about any remotely technical issues.

Kennedy was asked if IFPI has taken any action against the actual sharers of the music made available via TPB, as detailed in this case. He said he couldn’t say and didn’t know who these individuals are. He then admitted to not knowing how The Pirate Bay works so the defense lawyers put it to him – if you don’t understand how TPB works, how can you say they are to blame? Again he was pressed why he took no action against the actual sharers but he said he didn’t know and admitted “It’s probably unlikely we took action.”

Kennedy was asked why they haven’t sued Google the same way as TPB. He said that Google said they would partner IFPI in fighting piracy and he has a team of 10 people working with Google every day, and if Google hadn’t announced they were a partner, IFPI would have sued them too.

That ended the day, the hearings continue of Friday Monday.

Source: Pirate Bay Appeal Day 5: Screenshots Prove Nothing

Roswall further detailed why the prosecution thinks the defendants are complicit in the copyright infringements that occur through the site.

Then, the prosecution and defense argued about the jurisdiction concerning the alleged copyright infringements. According to the prosecution at least a third of the users were Swedish at the time, but this was contested by defense lawyer Jonas Nilsson.

Nillson further stated that the alleged crimes were committed in the country where the computers of the file-sharers were located. Compensation can only be paid for infringements that occurred in Sweden, he said, which is not always the case in this regard.

This reasoning was backed up by defense lawyer Peter Althin who referred to a case that dealt with a violation of Sweden’s Lotteries Act. Based on this case, it is unclear whether many of the infringements actually occurred in Sweden, the lawyer said.

The Court then moved on to play a video of the interrogations of defendant Fredrik Neij at the District Court.

The Court heard that Fredrik was never a member of Piratbyran and he had no ideological motivations to join The Pirate Bay. Instead, Fredrik was attracted to the site by the BitTorrent technology. He joined to “..play with The Pirate Bay, just as I wanted,” he said.

Fredrik was then questioned about his relationship with the Israeli businessman who handled The Pirate Bay’s ad sales. When the prosecution asked if the businessman was involved in the technical aspects of The Pirate Bay, Fredrik replied: “No, he’s not good at that. He uses Windows, so…” Fredrik further said that he couldn’t recall when he first met him.

Fredrik recalled that he knew co-founder Gottfrid through online chats, and that he became involved in The Pirate Bay when Gottfrid asked if he had server space available.

Fredrik was asked about the significance of the site’s name, but shrugged and repeated that his interest is merely in the technology. “It just sounded good,” he said referring to the name.

In respect of the operation of the site, Fredrik said that there was no clear leader. If something broke, someone would simply go in to fix it.

The prosecution then referred to the police interview where Fredrik admitted being aware that there may be links to copyrighted material on the site. Fredrik said he knew about these because of the legal complaints the site received. He went on to deny having received any of these personally.

According to the defense, Fredrik has been mindful of the law and had a desire to operate within it, consulting lawyers to ensure his activities were legal.

After the video ended the prosecution started asking Fredrik additional questions.

Fredrik said that he never removed any torrent files linking to copyrighted material from the site, but only viruses and other malicious files. He is not aware of any links to copyrighted material that have been removed from The Pirate Bay.

The prosecution then moved on to the joint venture agreement between Fredrik and Gottfrid which lists both as owner of the site. According to Fredrik this agreement was made because the two had plans to start daughter sites such as the YouTube spinnoff The Video Bay.

Next, the prosecution moved on to mention several emails that implicate the involvement of another defendant, Carl Lundstom, in the operations of The Pirate Bay. Fredrik said that he doesn’t remember what the emails in question were about.

Fredrik admitted that, according to the aforementioned agreement, he is one of the original founders of The Pirate Bay.

The purpose of The Pirate Bay is to share files, Fredrik said. Users can browse the site’s index or put something in the search box, he further explained.

After more questions about his motivation to run The Pirate Bay, Fredrik again stressed that it has nothing to do with ideology or politics. “I just did it because it’s really fun to run a large site, ” Neij said.

After the lunch break the Court played the rest of the previously recorded interrogations at the District Court of Fredrik. The Prosecutor handed over a printed page from The Pirate Bay and said: “This is a printout from a part of your web page.” “You call this a screenshot?” Fredrik answered: “This isn’t a screenshot, just a printed page.”

Fredrik then explained what’s on the print (a Pink Panther torrent), and how the upload process on TPB works.

Next up was the recorded interrogations of Peter Sunde that were filmed at the District Court last year.

Prosecutor Håkan Roswall brought up Piratbyran – the Swedish Bureau of Piracy – and asked Peter if this organization is critical of copyright. “Not critical directly,” Peter replied. “There are many differing views.”

Roswall then turned to Peter’s stance toward copyright. “This is a difficult question to answer,” Peter said. “I like things that are not protected by copyright, this is a non-issue.”

Peter was asked if he knew of The Pirate Bay’s “legal” page. He said he was aware of it. Roswall, presumably trying to speak the same ‘language’ as the somewhat techie defendants, got tied up a little;

“When did you meet [Gottfrid] for the first time IRL?” asked the Prosecutor. “We do not use the expression IRL,” said Peter, “We use AFK.” “IRL?” questioned the judge. “In Real Life,” the Prosecutor explained to the judge.

“We do not use that expression,” Peter noted. “Everything is in real life. We use AFK – Away From Keyboard.” “Well,” said Roswall. “It seems I am a little bit out of date.”

Trying to pin down Peter’s role in The Pirate Bay, the prosecutor asked about his position as spokesman – Peter said he took the unofficial position since no-one else in the team wanted to do it. A request from a journalist or someone else for a comment on something came in, said Peter, and he simply took it in hand.

Then the attention turned to Peter’s relationship with the Israeli advertiser and whether or not Peter has handled money from him. “Have you never wondered why you got these earnings reports? Isn’t this type of thing a little beyond your role of spokesman?” asked Roswall.

“I think it is his [the advertiser] way of trying to motivate people. He sends so much weird email, I don’t read half of it. He could have been using me to get more contact with Fredrik and Gottfrid,” said Peter. The Prosecutor continued to struggle with the apparent lack of a formal decision-making structure at TPB, continually referring to TPB as a “company”.

It was revealed that Peter and Gottfrid met the Israeli advertiser in 2005/2006. Carl Lundström and Peter Sunde met just a handful of times.

“Is it true you went to Israel to meet [the Israeli advertiser] in 2006?” said Roswall. “Yes,” responded Peter.

“Why did you go to meet him?” questioned Roswall. “Because he asked me to go there as his guest,” said Peter. “Did you not go there to go to the beach?” “Yes, I did, very often.”

At one stage Peter said he came up with the idea of selling statistics from TPB, believing people would be interested to read them in newspapers etc. When Roswall asked Peter if he ever expected to receive money from TPB, the answer was “no”.

Then it was IFPI’s Peter Danowsky turn to start questioning Peter, beginning with his education. Peter said he dropped out of school but later learned English and computer programming from the Internet. Danowsky then turned his attention to ad-company Random Media, again referring to emails from TPB.

Later during his questioning Danowsky’s asked “Did you hold a lecture called “How to dismantle a billion dollar industry?” “Yes I did,” replied Peter.

Danowsky started to quote some of Peter’s comments from his blog at Brokep.com. Peter said that everything he writes on his blog isn’t about TPB even if prosecutors would like it to be the case.

Pressed further on his opinions on copyright, Peter asked Danowsky, “That is a political issue. Is this a political trial or a legal trial?” Danowsky continued, ignoring the question but Peter pulled him back. “I want an answer from the lawyer Danowsky. Is this a political trial? Can I get a reply?”

“How can copyright law be a political issue?” said Danowsky, but had no follow up questions. Peter was surprised, “No follow-ups? Ok, let me elaborate…” and he went on at length about the context of Danowsky’s various questions.

Danowsky asked Peter about a time when he said that rights holders had acted illegally. Peter said this was a reference to Warner Brothers that had attacked file-sharing sites with hacking, aka anti-p2p activity.

Danowsky asked Peter what the purpose of TPB was. “It is to enable users to share their material with others,” said Peter. “Even though it is copyrighted?” questioned Danowsky. “That can sometimes be the sad consequences,” Peter replied.

After a brief appearance by movie company lawyer Wadsted, the video recording and today’s hearing ended.

Source: The Pirate Bay Appeal Day 4: It’s Fun to Run

Lundström is the grandson of Karl Edvard Lundström who founded the famous Wasabröd company in 1919. Carl Lundström inherited a large sum of money from his father who died in 1973.

He started several companies, including Rix Telecom (Port 80) which sold colocation space and bandwidth to The Pirate Bay’s former hosting company PRQ.

Lawyer Per E Samuelson refuted claims from the prosecution that his client was actively involved in financing the Pirate Bay. In the fall of 2004, Carl Lundström met with Fredrik Neij at Dreamhack, who introduced him to the The Pirate Bay website, the lawyer said. This was after the website was founded.

Lundström later hired Neij as an employee for Rix Telecom in Gothenburg, the lawyer explained. The two made a deal to cut the wage of Neij in half in exchange for rack-space in the Rix Telecom datacenter where The Pirate Bay’s servers were placed. According to the defense, there was a verbal agreement that The Pirate Bay would eventually pay for itself.

In the hour that followed, Lundström’s lawyer disconnected his client even further from The Pirate Bay. Among other things, he presented an agreement between the three other defendants, an Israeli businessman and an advertising company. The agreement related to The Pirate Bay’s operation but didn’t include Lundström.

The rest of the morning was spent discussing Lundström’s (dis)connection to The Pirate Bay. No mention was made about the legality of the site itself or any of the crimes that the defendants are charged with.

The Appeal Court announced a lunch break at 11:45. After the lunch a video of the interrogations of defendant Gottfrid Svartholm at the District Court was played. The appeal will not question any of the defendants during the appeal, except from some additional questions to Fredrik Neij who was not present today due to illness.

During the interview the prosecution emphasized the financial issues, and specifically the link with the Israeli businessman who handles the ads. When asked if Gottfrid was in charge of ad sales he answered: “No, I tried to get away from that because of time issues. I had a business to run before you came and took it all away.”

The prosecution further questioned Gottfrid about moderation issues, replies to copyright holders and his involvement in developing the site. The prosecutor pushed hard on whether Peter Sunde had worked on the layout and graphics for the site. “To my knowledge, he is neither designer nor graphic artist,” Gottfried replied.

Movie industry lawyer Monique Wadsted later asked Gottfrid how they handle torrents that (allegedly) link to child porn. He said that in such a case they would inform the police.

She then asked if they removed those torrents. He said “some”. “Not all?” was Wadsted’s reply. Gottfrid explained that it is not up to them to investigate crimes, but that they do inform the police. “We can’t do investigations of our own. And if the police say we should remove a torrent, we will,” he said.

When asked about the revenue The Pirate Bay made Gottfrid said that the figure of 1.2 million Swedish Krona that the prosecution estimated could be right, but that would be before any bills were paid.

Gottfrid further said that Peter Sunde has nothing to do with technical administration, design, layout, ad sales or any hands-on stuff with the site. He’s just been a spokesperson for The Pirate Bay. “Neither me or Neij work well in furnished rooms. Peter was better on the verbal issues and media,” he said.

The video ended around 15:30 and he trial continues on Monday.

Source: The Pirate Bay Appeal Day 3: The Wasa Connection

Via the backend of The Pirate Bay website the hackers were able to delete torrents and expose usernames, IP-addresses, emails and MD5-hashed passwords. Once informed about the vulnerability, The Pirate Bay team quickly put a team of people on the issue and promised that it would be fixed as soon as possible.

In the weeks that followed the site continued to operate as usual and nothing was heard from the hackers or the vulnerability again. This week, however, worrying news came in that people affiliated with the private BitTorrent tracker DemUnoid.com (note the ‘U’, not DemOnoid) appear to have gained access to The Pirate Bay user database. Whether the two incidents are related is unclear, but it seems to show that the user database can or could be accessed by outsiders.

In a mass mailing that was sent out a few days ago, many Pirate Bay users received the following message in their email inbox, with the URL redirecting to the registration page of DemUnoid:

Subject: The Piratebay Private Invitation

Hello *Username*

Have a look at the new site we just launched

http://bulkmail.guaranteedmail.net/link.php?*uniqueidherelinkingtoDEMUNOID*

The Piratebay

The private tracker DemUnoid.com is obviously not related to The Pirate Bay, and this has been confirmed by a Pirate Bay insider. So who sent it then?

At first this might look as an innocent spam message from people who claim to be affiliated with The Pirate Bay, but a few small details give a clear indication that the senders have access to (parts of) the Pirate Bay user database.

First of all, the emails were sent to the email address that the receivers used to sign up with The Pirate Bay. TorrentFreak spoke to one user who received the message on an email address that he never posted in public and only used to register at The Pirate Bay.

If we combine this with the fact that all the spam messages begin with the accurate Pirate Bay username of the receiver (Hello *Username*) it’s clear that the Pirate Bay user database has been compromised. Without access to the Pirate Bay user database the addresses simply can’t be linked to the correct usernames.

Thus far we haven’t received an official response from the Pirate Bay team regarding this issue, but one of the people close to the site told us that all will be done to find out how this could have happened, and what the source of the leak is.

TorrentFreak also attempted to contact the staff of DemUnoid.com, but we have had no response from their side either. In theory, it could be that a third party used the compromised Pirate Bay user database to send people to DemUnoid, so there is no undisputed evidence that the site’s operators are behind the mass mailing.

It seems that, while some of the people formerly affiliated with The Pirate Bay are on trial, the site itself is facing more and more problems recently. Just two weeks ago, hackers also exploited the site’s ad-server to offload trojans. The ad server issues are fixed now.

Source: Pirate Bay User Database Exploited By Spammers

After this minor interruption the hearing started where it left off yesterday, with prosecutor Håkan Roswall presenting more evidence to the Court regarding ad revenues and other financial transactions that involve the defendants. Roswall showed emails and bank statements which he claims proves that all defendants received money for their involvement with The Pirate Bay.

Most, if not all of the information that is being brought up has already been discussed in the District Court hearings last year, and it is assumed that the prosecutor is trying to label The Pirate Bay as a commercial operation. Several advertising deals were discussed, most of which involve an Israeli businessman and his advertising company. Aside from ad revenue, Roswall also discussed the money trail behind the servers that were bought for The Pirate Bay.

Roswall then went on to explain the various tasks the defendants fulfilled according to his claims. Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik were the main programmers. Peter Sunde is seen as a general ‘office manager’ who coordinated the programming and helped with optimizing the database, layout and search of The Pirate Bay. In addition, Sunde was involved in contracting advertisers. The fourth defendant, Carl Lundstrom, was a financer and was involved in strategic planning according to Roswall.

After the prosecutor finished, Peter Danowsky of music industry group IFPI took the stand. His introduction caused a few chuckles in the audience as Roswall mispronounced IFPI and introduced him as a member of the “International Federation of the Pornographic Industry.”

Danowsky asked the Appeal Court for extensive damages to compensate the record labels he represents for claimed losses. The defendants willingly ignored copyright law and allowed users to freely share copyrighted music, he said. The Pirate Bay’s download counters were used as evidence to show how many albums were downloaded.

According to Danowsky, the damages claimed from The Pirate Bay are the same as if the site had ‘legally’ obtained licenses to distribute the music world-wide, regardless of whether all the downloaders had later decided to buy the music or not. Effectively, he is trying to say that one download equals one lost sale.

Danowsky further argued that for some recordings the damages per infringement should be significantly higher. Beatles albums are given as an example because the band’s music isn’t available legally online. This is an interesting argument, since there would be no need to download these albums if they were available online. Music that is shared before the official release date should also receive greater compensation, he argued.

After Danowsky finished talking, Henrik Ponten – representative of the movie studios – issued his claims. Ponten stated that he will detail the request for damages next week when Bertil Sandgren, a board member of the Swedish film institute, is scheduled to testify.

The hearing continued after a lunch break with Monique Wadsted, representing the U.S. movie industry. She explained how The Pirate Bay can be used to transfer large files quickly. She further noted that it is very easy for the operators to delete a torrent file, but that the defendants nonetheless chose not to remove any infringing files.

Wadsted further stated that The Pirate Bay is not a ‘passive’ site. The categories, which have been ‘actively’ put up by The Pirate Bay’s operators, make it easier for users to find torrents. She further reiterated what the prosecution has already said, claiming that the defendants earned a significant amount of money, up to 35 million Swedish krona according to an expert report.

Wadsted concluded by saying that the movie studios want compensation for the titles in the lawsuit, but also damages for the losses the industry suffered in general due to The Pirate Bay. She said that The Pirate Bay makes it harder for copyright holders to recoup their investments in films.

The last one and a half hours of the day were for the defense team, starting with Jonas Nilsson, Fredrik Neij’s lawyer. Nilsson rejected most of the prosecution’s claims and started by refuting the claim that the majority of the torrents on The Pirate Bay point to copyrighted material. The lawyer said that the opposite is true.

The lawyer continued by stating that his client has three objections to the indictment.

Firstly, The Pirate bay is merely a search engine and does not store any copyrighted material. Besides, Neij is not aware of all the content that can be downloaded via the site, so he cannot be seen as aiding or abetting copyright infringements. Lastly, The Pirate Bay is a transmission instead of a hosting service, meaning that under the E-Commerce Directive the operators can’t be held responsible for the actions of the site’s users.

Nilsson continued by saying that Fredrik Neij was not involved in founding the site, but that he merely agreed to help out on the technical side. The Pirate Bay itself was never a commercial operation and all the proceeds went to investments in hardware and other technical equipment.

The defense lawyer further said that the purpose of The Pirate Bay website is to share files, not to infringe copyrights. Users interact with the site automatically and the people who are operating the site are not involved in the actual file-transfers or the uploading of .torrent files to the site. BitTorrent as a file-sharing protocol is perfectly legal, Nilsson stated.

Nilsson then went back to the E-Commerce Directive, stating the the operators of The Pirate Bay never changed or edited any torrent files, because they are not considered to be liable for what users share. Under the Directive the site should be seen as merely a transmission service, not a hosting platform, he argued.

The last speaker of the day was Peter Sunde’s lawyer Peter Althin, who spoke for twenty minutes. He refuted the claim of the prosecution that his client was actively operating the website. Sunde did have contact with the Israeli businessman who handled the advertisements, but that was because he was contacted as a spokesperson of the site when others were too busy to respond.

Althin further said that The Pirate Bay is not engaging in criminal activity, and even if the court decides otherwise, his client should be acquitted because he was acting merely as a spokesperson. Sunde appeared in the press many times as a representative of the site, but was never responsible for the financing, programming or other daily operations.

Finally, Althin noted that the plaintiffs have not suffered any financial damage that can be attributed to The Pirate Bay, contrary to what the prosecution has claimed today and yesterday.

That concluded the second day. Thus far the trial is mostly a repeat of the District Court hearings. Everything seems to be going smoothly and the hearing may conclude sooner than expected. The trial continues on Friday.

Source: The Pirate Bay Appeal Day 2: Lost Sales

Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundstrom all made their way to the Court, but Gottfrid Svartholm couldn’t travel to Stockholm from his home in Cambodia due to medical reasons, his lawyer said. Gottfrid’s mother says she will go to Cambodia to support him.

Svartholm’s absence caused some confusion at the hearing. His lawyer opted that the case should continue without his client present, while the entertainment industry representatives argued that the earlier District Court verdict should be made permanent.

After asking for some input from Bengt Lindell, Professor of Procedural Law at Uppsala University, the Appeal continued with the three defendants who were present. The Court further decided that the Pirate Bay co-founder Svartholm has to hand over a medical report before October 7.

The Appeal Court then continued with the hearing and announced that, in line with the District Court, it does not wish to seek a ruling from the European Court.

Fredrik Neij’s lawyer began by demanding that his client be acquitted and that the damages awarded against him be reduced. Peter Althin representing Peter Sunde also requested acquittal for his client, with no damages to pay. Per E Samuelson, counsel for Carl Lundstrom, asked for the same.

Following an explanation of the BitTorrent technology behind the case and how it works in connection with The Pirate Bay, there was discussion surrounding The Pirate Bay’s history.

The site started very small and was run by Gottfrid and Fredrik. In 2004 they had contact with an Israeli company who provided contacts to Carl Lundström, who at the time was president of telecoms company, Rix Telecom.

Prosecutor Håkan Roswall said that when Neij came into contact with Lundstrom the understanding was that the purpose of The Pirate Bay was to allow people to share files. He added that in January 2005 there were discussions to carry out an international launch of the site, an aim which would require more hardware. Rix are said to have provided hardware in the first days of January and more at later dates.

Roswall said that it was decided that a company would be established around The Pirate Bay, with Lundström owning 40% and Gottfrid and Fredrik owning the remaining 60%.

The prosecutor stated that in 2005, Lundström received information about changes in Swedish copyright law that could render The Pirate Bay illegal. He then allegedly contacted his lawyer and was told that the site would become illegal on 1st July that year.

It’s claimed that Lundström contacted Gottfrid and Fredrik and suggested the site’s servers be moved abroad. Options in Russia and Argentina were considered but not taken up. Roswall also said it was of interest that Lundström had made enquiries around that time in respect of setting up a company in Argentina.

Roswall claimed that in 2006, hosting company PRQ signed contracts with Rix Telecom – before this event The Pirate Bay hadn’t paid anything to Rix. The finances of TPB improved and eventually it partnered with an Israeli company to assist with advertising. He says that Carl Lundstrom, Gottfrid and Fredrik received revenue from these ads.

The prosecutor went on to discuss how the investigation was carried out into the site and how the plaintiffs collected evidence. This progressed to how the police handled the raids against the site in 2006 and how they carried out tests with the confiscated computers. Police said they counted 64 different ads on the site at the time.

The appeal continued in the afternoon with prosecutor Roswall explaining how The Pirate Bay works. A lengthy educational video was shown to the court, explaining how users can find and download files through the site. After some issues with the sound in the courtroom the audience was told not to use 3G connections.

Rosswal then went on presenting evidence against the defendants. Among other things he pointed to a ‘usage policy’ where The Pirate Bay stated that only mislabeled torrent files would be removed, not ones that are allegedly infringing copyrights. A transcript of the policy further said that copyright holders who send take-down notices risk to be mocked.

During the rest of the afternoon the prosecutor cited emails which he claims prove that Peter Sunde was in fact involved in operating the site, and emails that supposedly show that The Pirate Bay was generating a healthy revenue stream though their ads.

Rosswal presented a partnership agreement between Gottfrid Svartholm, Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij and an Israeli businessman who were dealing with the ads, and discussed several email conversations about advertising. He further discussed worries from the fourth defendant Carl Lundström, who hinted at shutting the site down after pressure from the local Anti-Piracy Bureau.

More news tomorrow, when the prosecution will go over the evidence against Fredrik Neij.

If all goes to plan the trial should be completed by 15th October.

Source: The Pirate Bay Appeal Starts, Minus One Defendant

That didn’t happen.

On April 17th 2009, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundstrom were found guilty of ‘assisting in making copyright content available’. The Court sentenced the four to one year in prison and a fine of $905,000 each. Within days, this verdict was appealed by the defendants.

The Pirate Bay, meanwhile, continued to operate as if nothing had happened and the “Pirate Bay Four” picked up their lives and continued to work on non-Pirate Bay projects. In the background, however, both the defense and prosecution teams were preparing for the appeal which will start tomorrow.

During the initial trial there was a flood of media attention, ignited by some of the defendants themselves who dubbed it the ‘Spectrial.’ On The Pirate Bay website a trial blog was started and The Pirate Bay’s founding group Piratbyrån organized a joint press conference at the Museum of Technology in Stockholm one day before it started.

The first day of the trial was a true spectacle, as predicted and called for. Dozens of Pirate Bay supporters gathered around the Court waving skull-and-crossbone flags as both parties entered the court house. Free candy was handed out to passers by in the streets, and online the hash tag #spectrial was the most searched term on Twitter.

Those expecting a similar show around the appeal will be disappointed. There’s nothing but silence coming out of the defendant’s camp. Piratbyrån, the group that coordinated most events surrounding the trial last year, has been disbanded, and no rallies or support gatherings have been announced thus far.

Content-wise there won’t be much news either. There are 8 trial days scheduled between September 28 and October 15 and most of these hearings will be based on recordings from last year’s proceedings. Even though some of the defendants would have preferred to have their say in the appeal, this was denied by the Appeal Court.

“I was denied [to talk] even though I demanded to talk. It’s pretty crazy and totally incomprehensible,” former Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde said.

There is no doubt that the appeal will be less ‘provoking’ than the initial trial, but we will nonetheless follow all developments closely on TorrentFreak. After all, this is a landmark case involving three of the key figures to which BitTorrent owes much of its popularity. The story is far from over yet, and it has to be told.

Source: The Pirate Bay Appeal Starts Tomorrow

Sunde discussed in detail how they responded to threats from copyright holders, mockings that can be read in detail in the Pirate Bay’s legal section.

Aside from responses to takedown notices, The Pirate Bay crew has pulled off other ludicrous pranks, such as scooping the domain of IFPI to found the International Federation of Pirate Interests.

There is of course also a downside to all the hilarity as Hollywood and the music industry, helped by the US Government, managed to convince Swedish authorities to raid the site’s servers back in 2006. The raid eventually led to a criminal trial where Sunde and three others were sentenced to a year in prison, a verdict that will be appealed later this year.

For those who haven’t seen Sunde’s previous public performances, the talk gives a good overview of what motivated a group of friends to maintain a file-sharing platform that has become a major threat to the entertainment industry.

Towards the end of the talk Sunde, who is no longer associated with the site, gives his thoughts on the future of the BitTorrent giant. Here, he reiterates what he has said before. The Pirate Bay has served its purpose, and it’s time for something new to take its place.

“The Pirate Bay should die, really. Nobody works on The Pirate Bay, it’s just there and it works all the time. And it’s still growing,” Sunde said. “If you see the site, nothing has happened in five years and still more and more users are using it, which is bad.”

“We need some form of new technology. So, that’s kind of the future for The Pirate Bay, hopefully dying, and being replaced with something better of course, because the Pirate Bay really sucks,” he adds.

It is hard to disagree with Sunde here. Although The Pirate Bay has played a major role in popularizing BitTorrent, the site itself has brought few innovations recently, aside from installing pop-under ads maybe.

The fact that it’s still the largest torrent site shows how strong the brand is, but in its current form it is hard to imagine that the site will still be as big as it is now in a few years. Whether another torrent site takes over, or even a new technology, an era is about to end.

Source: “The Pirate Bay Really Sucks,” Says Co-Founder

By the end of 2004, a year after the site launched, the tracker was already tracking a million peers and more than 60,000 torrent files. Around the same time the founders also became aware that it wasn’t just Scandinavians showing an interest in their site. Because of increasing worldwide popularity, The Pirate Bay team completely redesigned the site, which became available in several languages from then on.

This change was much appreciated by the site’s non-Swedish speaking users, but hated by anti-piracy outfits. They saw the tracker as a serious threat, and in response launched a dozen lawsuits to have it removed from the Internet. Today, while nearing the end of the decade, The Pirate Bay has changed its homepage back to its 2003 look, Swedish only.

Despite all the legal trouble, the buyout soap and the decision to close the tracker, The Pirate Bay website is still around at the end of the decade. According to the Pirate Bay team, they are not yet ready to give up or throw in the towel.

“We believe that we have changed something. Not just us, but all of us. The Pirate Bay has always been something extra. We didn’t just wanna run another tracker. We wanted it to mean something. And you our users have helped us with that. The history of the bay is still being written, it’s way too early for a conclusion,” The Pirate Bay team writes.

“2010 has no room for boring debates about old worn out values that old rotting industries try to shove down your throats. 2010 will be the year of the hydra. Let thousands of new exciting projects emerge,” they add.

The past has indeed shown that with every setback the Hydra grows stronger. More new sites and trackers will emerge in the new year while old favorites fade in the background.

Source: The Pirate Bay Goes Retro With 2003 Layout

Despite this unfavorable verdict the site remains online, as it adapts to become a torrent portal that is less likely to be shut down.

In yet another attempt to close the site, two of the site’s founders were ordered by the Stockholm District Court to stop operating the site in October, facing fines of $71,000 each if they choose not to comply.

The two founders, Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij, both decided to appeal the verdict, and the Appeal Court has now announced that it will take on the case.

Gottfrid argued that the district court lacks the technical skills that are required, “…which is devastating to a case which is so technically complicated.” Fredrik further said that both he and Gottfrid have been living outside Sweden for a long time, adding that The Pirate Bay is no longer hosted in Sweden either.

Aside from the technical difficulties, the legal authorities may also find that it is pretty much impossible to prove that the two are actually working on the site, which is required to impose the fines. The Appeal Court will review these and other issues in the upcoming appeal.

Source: Pirate Bay Founders Granted Appeal Against Operating Ban

However, despite the fact that the site is set to be sold later this week, the Pirate Bay team worked around the clock to serve their users in these final hours.

A mere three hours after it went offline the site reappeared from a different location, but because of technical issues at the new ISP a full comeback took almost a day. The site is back online and the tracker is expected to follow soon.

The Pirate Bay team has always anticipated an unwanted disconnection of the site. After their servers were raided in 2006 several measures were taken to ensure that the site could simply come back online from a new location in a few hours, and this is the first time that this backup plan had been executed.

With its reemergence the people behind the site hope to show the authorities and the entertainment industry that the war is not over just yet. Perhaps it’s only the beginning of a battle on a different front. The future will tell.

A few minutes ago, the Pirate Bay team released the following statement, adapted from Churchill’s famous “We Shall Fight On the Beaches” speech. Make of it what you will.

We have, ourselves, full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once more able to defend our Internets, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone.

Even though large parts of Internets and many old and famous trackers have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Ifpi and all the odious apparatus of MPAA rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the ef-nets and darknets, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Internets, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the baywords.org, we shall fight on the /. and on the digg, we shall fight in the courts; we shall never surrender, and if, which I do not for a moment believe, the Internets or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the Anon Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in Cerf’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.

Signed;

The Pirate Bay Crew – Now until needed.

Update: Users of the anti-virus program Avast report that TPB has been blacklisted as a malicious site after the site returned.

Source: The Pirate Bay Returns With Guns Blazing

To investigate these accusations of bias, the appeal court appointed a judge, Ulrika Ihrfelt. Her task is to decide whether or not Norström’s verdict could have been biased since this issue must be resolved before they will look into the appeal request. If it’s determined that Norström was indeed biased, the case will be resubmitted to the district court for retrial, meaning that an appeal is not needed at this stage.

However, soon after the appointment of Ulrika Ihrfelt, it became known that she too had been a member of the same pro-copyright organizations as the ‘biased’ judge. The appointment was criticized by several judicial analysts who said she wasn’t fit either. Judicial praxis dictates that the court must not only be unbiased, but also be BELIEVED to be unbiased, which is clearly not the case here.

As a consequence and in order to avoid more negative press, the appeal court sent out a press release today in which they announce that Ihrfelt has been taken off the case. She has been replaced by three new judges from a separate division of the court.

In the press release, the appeal court writes: “The reasons for this is that the question of whether the original judge was biased needs to be tried by other judges other than those that later may have been given the case. Furthermore, because of the content of the claim of bias, it has been deemed proper that the question should be answered by a division that is not specialized in copyright.”

“None of the three judges are or have been members of the [pro-copyright] organizations in question,” the appeal court announced. But is this really the case?

With a simple Google search Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde has already discovered that one of the replacements, Anders Eka, is connected to the The Stockholm Center for Commercial law, together with movie industry lawyers Monique Wasted and Peter Danowsky who represented the music industry in the Pirate Bay trial.

Nevertheless, the appeal court does not intent to replace the new judge(s). “The group Anders Eka is member of has no connection to copyright issues and the interests that are present in the case. I cannot see how this specific connection could lead to that Anders Eka isn’t suitable to try the question of bias,” Fredrik Wersäll, the president of the appeal court said.

The court will not look at the appeal case before the question of Norström’s bias is settled. The bias issue will be given priority and should be settled “in a few weeks at the maximum”, according to the appeal court president.

With all the commotion and judicial incompetence displayed after the Pirate Bay trial it seems almost unthinkable that a retrial won’t be granted. It is therefore no surprise that the entertainment industries try to get some cash off the defendants before it’s too late.

Source: Biased Pirate Bay Judge Judged by More Biased Judges

According to the recently updated RIPE database entry, the Pirate Bay is now listed as a customer of Danowsky & Partner law firm (who represented IFPI), Maqs Law Firm (representing the MPAA) and the Swedish anti-piracy bureau. All three were involved in the recent trial, which led some to believe that they somehow gained control over the site. This is nonsense of course.

So why is this info in there, some might wonder. One explanation might be that during the Pirate Bay trial the prosecution used (incorrect) data from the RIPE database claiming that this was the absolute truth. The Pirate Bay team probably put the lawyers’ info in there themselves to show that this is not the case. Indeed, there is no doubt that they will have a hard time selling this ‘truth’ to the public now, with their own names being featured in the recent entry.

One of the other advantages of the new RIPE WHOIS is that the Pirate Bay team doesn’t have to deal with any of the takedown requests anymore, as it states that all abuse email should be directed to the earlier mentioned law firms. Aye, that will teach those landlubbers.

Update: The Pirate Bay is down at the moment due to technical problems, they will be back soon.

Source: Pirate Bay IP Addresses Assigned to Prosecution Lawyers

Today, in the Russian capital Moscow, there will be a street party thrown by fanatical Muscovite BitTorrent fans. The event will be held in Pushkin Square and is symbolical of their support for The Pirate Bay Four, who will discover the court’s decision from their copyright infringement trial tomorrow.

There will of course be entertainment at the event, including a live performance from independent musicians Simon and Shlimmer. Open Wi-Fi will also be provided at the party which means that no one has to miss out on the latest torrent releases.

In Russia all public demonstrations have to be approved by the government. Until recently the local authorities had refrained from issuing a permit, but luckily the event eventually got the green light.

The organizers of ‘The Street Pirate Party’ are confident that the final verdict in the trial will demonstrate the relevance of justice not only to The Pirate Bay, but also file-sharing as a whole. “The trial of the Pirate Bay is an excellent example of how ugly, stupid companies motivated only by their greed and inertia, want to prevent people sharing music, movies, or anything, on a purely altruistic basis,” they said in a statement.

For those who are planning to join in and attend the event, please feel free to send us some pictures.

“Support The Pirate Bay and its wooden prosthetic legs,” say the organizers, “take your own three cornered hat, parrot and don’t forget your eyepatch. Say Y ‘aarrrr!!!”

Source: Pirate Bay Supporters Throw Street Party in Moscow

Peter Sunde, co-founder of The Pirate Bay told TorrentFreak that they are seriously considering suing the IFPI for unfair competition. “They have had a monopoly on distribution and we’re breaking that monopoly, and in turn they sue people that allow access to our distribution method,” he said.

Meanwhile, all other BitTorrent sites are still accessible in Denmark, and thus far the IFPI hasn’t announced it will go after any of them. This, together with the fact that there are several tricks to get around the block, make their legal strategy look like a personal vendetta against The Pirate Bay instead of an effective measure against piracy.

Before The Pirate Bay takes action against the IFPI, they will first await the outcome of the Supreme Court appeal that the three ISPs – DC, Telia and Telenor – announced earlier this week. If the appeal is unsuccessful, and when they find the perfect lawyer to represent them, The Pirate Bay will sue IFPI.

The IFPI seems to be looking forward to yet another confrontation. “Peter Sunde is welcome to sue us,” Jesper Bay, the head of the Danish IFPI told Comon.dk in a response to the news. Ironically, one of the websites explaining how to get around the Danish blockade carries Jesper Bay’s name.

For now, the Pirate Bay team has another court case to focus on. In two weeks their trial in Sweden kicks off, where the IFPI will also be one of their opponents. To be continued.

Update: Initially we reported that all Danish ISPs have to block the Pirate Bay. This is not the case. The latest court decision is a preliminary injunction against DMT. This means that it is only binding against ISPs owned by DMT (thanks Ole).

Source: The Pirate Bay Plans to Sue IFPI

“We just upgraded the trackers from 12 old boxes to 8 new ones that handle the same load, but now only at 20% CPU usage, so we can grow a bit more,” Pirate Bay co-founder TiAMO told TorrentFreak. “Having some spare power in the servers has allowed us to collect some fun stats,” he added, pointing us to a map showing where all the connections to the Pirate Bay tracker come from.

Interestingly, according to the geo-IP data, the map reveals that 33% of all connections come from China – around 7 million peers. This is an impressive statistic by itself, but even more interesting when you consider that the Pirate Bay website is actually blocked in China. The tracker seems to be popular elsewhere in Asia also, with 5.9% of connections coming from Taiwan and 4.2% from Japan at the time of writing.

We further see that the United States comes in second with 8%, and Sweden – the home of the Pirate Bay – is responsible for little over 1% (250,000 peers) of the tracker connections. Since Sweden has a population of approximately 9 million people, this is actually quite an accomplishment. These statistics are of course just a snapshot. They are updated frequently and vary depending on the time of the day.

This relatively simple map is just the beginning, TiAMO told us. In the near future more statistics will be added, such as the type of BitTorrent clients people use, and the average download and upload speeds per region. Some raw data will also be made available to the public, but not without guaranteeing the anonymity of the tracker’s users of course.

Source: The Pirate Bay Maps Out its Tracker Connections

Peter Sunde (Brokep), one of the co-founders together with TiAMO and Anakata, later said that their initial goal was to build a Scandinavian BitTorrent community. “At this time there was one big torrent site, which was called Suprnova, but they mainly had international content. We and Piratbyrån wanted more Swedish and Scandinavian content. So we started a big library, and that is The Pirate Bay.”

When the site launched exactly remains a mystery though, as we read on The Pirate Bay blog. “The official birth date of the site is not 100% sure. We’ve been discussing it back and forth the past week and decided that screw it, you don’t need to know which day. We’ll celebrate anyhow!”

The hardware setup was really primitive initially. When the site launched it was hosted in Mexico, where Anakata hosted the site on a server owned by the company he was working for at the time. The site moved to Sweden later, where Fredrik hosted the tracker on his laptop for a while, But, as the site grew, it had to move on to a more powerful setup.

The Pirate Bay soon became one of the largest BitTorrent trackers on the Internet. By the end of 2004, a year after the site launched, the tracker was already tracking a million peers and over 60.000 torrent files. Around the same time, the founders also noticed that not only Scandinavians were interested in their site. In fact, 80% of their users case from other parts of the world. Because of increasing worldwide popularity, The Pirate Bay team completely redesigned the site, which became available in several languages from then on.

Due to these changes, The Pirate Bay grew even faster, and the number of peers tracked by the site grew to 2,500,000 in 2005. Its popularity didn’t go by unnoticed in Hollywood either. Copyright holders started to send out takedown notices, which were often mocked by the site’s founders. Eventually, however, The Pirate Bay got raided, following pressure from Hollywood and the USA.

The raid brought the site into mainstream press, not in the least because it came back online within three days. All this publicity consequently resulted in a huge traffic spike, sorting quite the opposite effect of what Hollywood had hoped for. In the years that followed, ISPs in other countries including Denmark and Italy were forced to ban the site, again it only increased The Pirate Bay’s popularity.

Last week the tracker reached another milestone, as it broke the 25 million peers mark. This effectively means that at any given point in time, more than 25 million people actively trade files thought the Pirate Bay tracker. Not worried by the upcoming court case in 2009, the ship sails on, larger than ever before. That is certainly something to celebrate.

Source: The Pirate Bay Celebrates 5th Anniversary

In the years to come, The Pirate Bay established itself as the largest BitTorrent tracker on the Internet. Recently, the number of peers that use the tracker at any given point in time grew larger than the entire population of Scandinavia. In fact, over the past 12 months, the number of peers more than tripled, to 25 million.

At the time of publication, The Pirate Bay tracks 25.064.271 peers, divided over close to 1.856.243 torrent files. Quite an accomplishment when you consider that it is not even 2 months ago since they the 15 million mark. Coincidentally, the server that tracks the statistics crashed due to a hard drive failure, right around the time they reached the new milestone.

We asked Peter Sunde, co-founder of the site, how this huge surge can be explained, and whether the traffic to the site is also increasing. “I think it’s because of the new updates to the software and recent additions in hardware,” Peter told TorrentFreak. “We’re putting up new trackers all the time to cope with the traffic increase. And yes, the traffic to the site is also increasing. New visitor records every week.”

In an attempt to make their “torrent tracking” record official, The Pirate Bay applied for an entry in the Guinness book of world records last week. A record that they will probably break themselves every weekend. It is estimated that The Pirate Bay tracks 50% of all public torrents, which means that they are responsible for a significant part of the total Internet traffic.

“It’s just weird,” says Peter in response to these mind boggling statistics. “It’s cool to do something that big, but it’s scary that it’s so few people managing that of a big system. PLEASE, people, start more trackers! Put them out there, have open systems! We need the diversity.”

It might indeed be a good idea to spread the load a bit. There are plenty of private trackers, but good and reliable open trackers remain scarce. Meanwhile, The Pirate Bay will continue to update their hardware, and tweak their software, while working on side-projects such as the recently updated email service Slopsbox.

Hollywood will probably not be too happy when they hear that the Swedish deviant has broken yet another record, but Peter and the other Pirate Bay founders couldn’t care less what they think. Peter has a message for them though: “Stop hating the future. Be smart and come over from the dark side.”

Source: The Pirate Bay Sees Traffic and Peers Surge

One of the reasons it was possible for the site to handle this record number of peers are the constant improvements on the software and hardware side. New servers are added regularly, budget permitting, and UDP trackers were added to all the torrents on the site, which are less resource consuming than TCP trackers.

Pirate Bay co founder Peter Sunde, who just returned from his trip to Malaysia, told TorrentFreak that they previously had a limit on the amount of peers they could track, but that this has increased with all the recent changes. “I wish we had lots and lots of money so we could just buy like 10 servers and another gigabit,” he mused.

At the current growth rate, The Pirate Bay may be tracking over 25 million peers by the end of the year. Peter himself is aiming for 24 million peers by Christmas eve. The Pirate Bay is not the only BitTorrent site that has been growing, other torrent sites isoHunt and Mininova are breaking visitor records every week.

The only downside to this news is, that The Pirate Bay is one of the few sites that operates a (public) tracker. With 50% of all BitTorrent users relying on a single tracker, things can get quite ugly when it goes down. The Pirate Bay encourages others to start their own tracker, using Opentracker for example. The more heads the Hydra has, the better.

Source: The Pirate Bay Tops 20 Million Peers

Of course, the Pirate Bay team didn’t agree, and responded in true Pirate Bay style. “We’re quite used to fascist countries not allowing freedom of speech. A lot of smaller nations that have dictators decide to block our site since we can help spread information that could be harmful to the dictators,” Sunde wrote in a blog entry.

The BitTorrent tracker was not going down without a fight, and later announced that it would appeal the decision in court, which they won. The block was lifted and ISPs could again grant their users access to the most frequently used BitTorrent tracker on the Internet.

The Court of Bergamo decided that this block was unlawful, and earlier this week they explained why. According to the court statement (Italian), no criminal court is allowed to issue an order to ISPs to block traffic to a foreign website, based on alleged copyright infringement. Italian law implements an European Directive, 2000/31 CE, which this means that this ruling should be valid in other European countries as well.

“Under Italian law, this is possible only for child porn and for unauthorized gambling, but there is no such provision for copyright infringement,” Pirate Bay’s lawyers Giovanni Battista Gallus and Francesco Micozzi explained to TorrentFreak.

“We have to make sure that no legislative bill promoting such filtering provisions will be passed in the future. At the European level, many authorities pointed out the need to find a balance between the enforcement of alleged copyright infringements, users’ rights, and privacy issues.”

In hindsight, the block only helped the Pirate Bay to grow even further. The case generated a lot of free promotion, and the number of visitors from Italy increased by 5 percent. Not exactly the outcome IFPI had hoped for.

Source: Court Deems Pirate Bay Block to be Illegal

Italy is taking a stand against BitTorrent sites, so it seems. Two weeks ago, the largest Italian torrent site, Columbo-BT, was shut down by the same prosecutor who is responsible for the Pirate Bay block. IFPI, the infamous anti-piracy organization assisted the prosecutor, and it wouldn’t be a surprise if they assisted in this case as well, considering their history with The Pirate Bay.

In a response to the news, Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunder told TorrentFreak that they have already implemented countermeasures to make sure all Italians will be able to access their site. “We’re working on setting up a really annoying system for them to filter,” he said. “Some of the ISPs decided to nullroute – so we changed IP so it works for them now some other decided to block the domain name so we added labaia.org, which means “the bay” in Italian.”

As usual, the popular BitTorrent tracker is not going down without a fight, and The Pirate Bay team is determined to keep the site accessible to all Italians. They will also contact the prosecutor, and they invite Italian lawyers who know how to counter this legally, to contact them.

“We’re quite used to fascist countries not allowing freedom of speech. A lot of smaller nations that have dictators decide to block our site since we can help spread information that could be harmful to the dictators,” Sunde wrote in a blog entry.

This is not the first time that ISPs were forced to block access to The Pirate Bay. In February, a Danish court ordered the ISP “Tele2″ to block its customers from accessing the site. The decision, which is currently under appeal, once again heated the debate on ISPs Internet filtering.

This Danish court case was initiated by the IFPI, that later tried to use the “landmark decision” to force Swedish ISPs to do the same, but failed. In fact, it seems that filtering traffic to The Pirate Bay is actually illegal according to European law, and it is highly doubtful that the block in Italy is lawful.

Sunde has his suspicions about the reason for the block, he told us: “It’s quite funny that the country Italy is run by the biggest media mogul of them all. we’re his competitors.” Whether or not Berlusconi was personally involved, blocking The Pirate Bay is doomed to fail, and will only strengthen the popularity of the site in Italy.

developing story… updates soon.

Source: The Pirate Bay Blocked in Italy

So, let’s see how well Google does, and how their traffic estimation and ranking compares to actual traffic data and Alexa’s ranking respectively.

One of the interesting features of Google’s site comparison is that it gives an estimation of the daily traffic when you’re logged in on a Google account. The data used for the traffic statistics comes from Google analytics, consumer panels, and other third-party market research.

The traffic data seem to be quite accurate, for some sites at least. The daily (absolute) unique visitors for Mininova, for example, is estimated to be slightly above 2 million a day, which matches with real traffic stats we got from the Mininova team.

As we look at the graph below we can clearly see that Mininova is in the lead judging by the number of visitors, followed by The Pirate Bay. isoHunt and Torrentz compete for the third place. After these four sites there is a huge gap to other BitTorrent sites such as BTjunkie, TorrentReactor and TorrentPortal.

It is interesting to see how many similarities there are between Google’s ranking, and the daily reach according to Alexa.

The regional differences in popularity of the sites are also worth mentioning. The Pirate Bay, for example, is more popular than Mininova in the US, and especially in Sweden. Torrentz, on the other hand, does really well in India, while isoHunt has a relatively large fanbase in Japan.

Overall it seems that BitTorrent sites are still growing, especially The Pirate Bay, since they nearly doubled their traffic in a year. This is pretty much in line with the growth in the number of peers on The Pirate Bay trackers, which went from 5 to well over 10 million in the last 12 months.

Source: Top Torrent Sites Ranked by Google

Before the law was passed, The Pirate Bay crew spoke out against it, and now they are upping the ante. In an initial response they went out putting “wanted posters” up, of politicians who voted in favor of the law. Their next move is to ask international ISPs to block traffic to Sweden, according to Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde.

“Together with other people that work against this law we’ve talked about asking international ISPs to block traffic to Sweden,” Peter writes on his blog. “Yes, that’s right! We want Sweden to be banned from the Internet. The ISPs need to block Sweden in order to protect their own customers integrity since everything they do on Swedish ISPs networks will be logged and searched.”

That is not all though. In addition to these lobbying efforts The Pirate bay will also add SSL encryption to their site, and they will inform their users on how to protect their privacy. For Swedes they already have a VPN solution up and running, which they will open up to international users in the near future.

“We’re going to help out in any way we can with fighting the law,” Peter writes. “This week we’re going to add SSL to The Pirate Bay. We’re also going to help out making a website about easy encryption – both for your harddrives and your net traffic.”

It’s good to see that The Pirate Bay team will not give up their privacy as easy as some of the politicians. “Trust me, this war is not lost,” Peter told TorrentFreak. “We will win. We have many aces up our sleeves and we’re gonna use them. No worries.”

Source: The Pirate Bay Pledges ISPs to Block Sweden

At the time, the Swedish police confiscated 180 servers, most of which had nothing to do with The Pirate Bay. Last December the investigation finally came to an end, resulting in 4,000 pages of legal paperwork. Prosecutor HÃ¥kan Roswall later announced that four individuals involved with The Pirate Bay are being charged with “assisting copyright infringement” of 4 software applications, 9 films and 22 music tracks.

After the raid, it became clear that the US had threatened to put Sweden on WTO’s black list if they refused to deal with the Pirate Bay problem. Even the MPAA was involved, as John Malcolm, Executive Vice President of the MPAA wrote a letter to Sweden’s State Secretary in which he stated, “It is certainly not in Sweden’s best interests to earn a reputation among other nations and trading partners as a place where utter lawlessness with respect to intellectual property rights is tolerated.”

The users of the site don’t have to worry that the site will be taken offline though, no matter what the court decides. “In case we lose the pending trial (yeah right) there will still not be any changes to the site. The Pirate Bay will keep operating just as always. We’ve been here for years and we will be here many more,” Sunde said earlier.

In a blog post, The Pirate Bay team now suggests to make May 31st a day of celebration for pirates: “Let today be the pirates independence day! Today we celebrate the victories we’ve had and the victories that will come. Today we celebrate that we’re united in our efforts. Keep on seeding!”

Happy Pirates independence day!

Source: The Pirate Bay: Two Years After the Raid

Of all BitTorrent sites, Mininova is currently in the lead, ranked 52thnd according to Alexa’s new and improved statistics. The Piratebay comes second, before isoHunt, Torrentz.com and btjunkie. It is estimated that The Pirate Bay has close to 25 million unique visitors per month.

It is not only the web traffic that got a traffic boost, the number of people using the Pirate Bay tracker has quadrupled compared to the population in December 2006, and is now at 12 million. The number of torrents has grown from 600,000 to 1,200,000 in the same period.

Hollywood is doing all it can to force The Pirate Bay offline, but it seems that the site only grows more and more, perhaps because of the extra publicity generated by anti-piracy activities. We saw a similar pattern two years ago, when the Pirate Bay nearly doubled their traffic after the raid by the Swedish police.

The expansion of The Pirate Bay and other BitTorrent sites shows that BitTorrent’s popularity continues to grow, and there is no sign that this will stop anytime soon.

Source: The Pirate Bay Enters List of 100 Most Popular Webites

Not only was the police star witness against the Pirate Bay previously employed by one of the plaintiffs, Warner Bros., but it was revealed that after this work he would return to his job as a police officer. Highly suspect to say the least, but not unusual in this case – the IFPI’s expert witness used to work for them too.

Various media and anti-piracy agencies all want a large piece of the Pirate Bay crew and between them are demanding millions of dollars in compensation, a point that is contested by Brokep: “In fact, they owe us a shitload of money. All the time we’ve spent on being called criminals and hunted down by private investigators and getting our stuff stolen by them – it’s gonna be expensive for them.”

Brokep says their initial target is police officer and IT forensics expert Jim Keyzer, who they clearly see as corrupt:

“We reported the police officer yesterday. For a lot of different reasons, at least three criminal complaints were filed. But you know what? It’s illegal to bribe the police as well. So more people have been reported to the police.”

The Pirate Bay crew say that when the case is over, they will demand compensation for all the time and money they have invested in this “media circus”.

Brokep is clearly in defiant mood: “So who’s the fucking criminals really? Hey Hollywood assholes – Be afraid. Very afraid. The law is coming to serve justice.”

Source: The Pirate Bay File Police Bribery Complaints