Most of you might know The Pirate Bay or TPB for short as the place where everyone goes to whenever they want to torrent a movie, e-book, game or any other kind of digital item. Even though TPB might be one of the most useful and popular torrent hubs available on the web, it wasn’t always like this. Obviously, the law doesn’t like the services that this online index of digital content of entertainment media and software offers and it tried to take it down since back in 2003 when TPB was founded by the Swedish think thank Piratbyran.
The Origins of The Pirate Bay
As previously mentioned, TPB was developed in Sweden and it launched in 2003. The website was run by a small community and there weren’t that many people who knew about it. The thing that drew people to TPB is the fact that they could contribute magnet links and torrent files via P2P (peer-to-peer). This provided TPB users with anonymity which made them feel safe while downloading free movies, music and all kinds of other software.
As time went on, TPB became more famous and millions of anonymous internet users ventured over to TPB in order to torrent via P2P free movies and music among others. The website’s fame is also what got the founders in trouble because the entertainment media that was being shared and torrented on TPB went against copyright law.
The First Server
A fun fact that we want to mention here is that the first ever TPB website went live in the summer of 2003 and it was hosted din Mexico. The website was hosted on a server that was owned by Anakata (Gottfrid Svartholm). Even though you would expect that a massive website such as TPB would require immense hardware specs, this wasn’t the case for the first version of the website.
The website was moved to Sweden after spending a couple of months in Mexico and it started being hosted on a Pentium III 1GHz laptop that featured 256MB of RAM. This laptop was owned by TiAMO (Fredrik Neij).
Troubles with the Law
We think it’s safe to say that everyone has heard something about TPB or at least read a headline about it during this past couple of years. The reason why we are saying this is because TPB started making headlines back in 2009 when media companies convinced law makers to go after Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm who are the website’s founders.
The three TPB founders were accused of copyright infringement and they lost the case. Their sentence was a rather light one, having to serve one year in prison each and to pay a total fine of $3,620,000. The biggest problem here other than the fact that the three TPB founders were sent to jail is that multiple countries have ordered their ISP (internet service providers) to block access to the website.
There is an old saying, “the internet always finds a way” and this is exactly what happened with TPB. After ISPs had no other option than to ban their subscribers from accessing the torrent hub, proxy websites have started flooding the web. These proxy websites could be used by interested users in order to access TPB.
Currently, there are a total of 29 countries who have banned access to TPB with some of the most notable ones being the UK, Russia, Italy, Germany, Sweden, India and the Netherlands. However, this is never going to stop TPB from offering its services to users.
The First Raid
It didn’t take long for the Swedish developers to figure out that most of their user traffic was not coming from Sweden. People from all over the world were interested in their website and a large majority of them came from the US. This is why it didn’t take long for the first TPB raid to happen. The website was taken down for a total of three days and when it came back the logo was changed to “The Police Bay”.
The Swedish developers wanted to let everyone know what had happened. The interesting thing about the first raid on TPB is the fact that it was not covered by the press, but the Swedish developers still managed to get the news public. Not just that, but the news of TPB resurrecting even though it was taken down by the police brought in even more users.
Still Online
Even though lawmakers have started numerous court cases against TPB and forced ISPs to keep banning all new IPs that TPB used, the website is still online. Not just that, but TPB is one of the most visited websites on the internet and from the looks of it, TPB’s popularity is only to get bigger.
We don’t know if the authorities are ever going to be able to take down TPB, but what we do know is that the website has a reputation for always resurrecting from the ashes, just like a Phoenix does. Therefore, we don’t believe that TPB is going away anytime soon.
However, we still want to warn torrent users to be careful whenever they are downloading files that infringe copyright laws because they might end up facing justice and paying fines if they get caught.
The “Drones” Idea
The last thing that we want to leave you with is the drones idea. As previously mentioned, TPB’s biggest problem was finding a country where to keep itself servers at. This is why rumors started appearing on the web that the founders of the website are seriously considering purchasing drones and flying them in locations where no police has authority. Unfortunately, this plan didn’t come to fruition and we didn’t get to see TPB flying.
