The Pirate Bay is probably the best BitTorrent tracker today. The site has developed somewhat of a cult following and is noted for
being the best place to share torrent files.
It also has posted all of
its legal threats on the site. They have responded to several of these
legal letters, which are quite humorous. For example, in a legal letter
from SEGA, they replied with a request to send more letters because
they are running out of toilet paper. The Pirate Bay is supposedly
legal because it is hosted in Sweden and it does not violate Swedish
copyright law. However, on May 31, 2006, The Pirate Bay was raided by
Swedish police. At that time, it was located in Stockholm. It was
offline for only three days. It came back online with new hosting in
the Netherlands, and ever since the raid, The Pirate Bay has made sure
that if raided again, they will be back up in hours.
After reopening,
its traffic doubled, and the site greatly increased in popularity. It
is estimated that the current founders of The Pirate Bay, Gottfrid
Svartholm and Fredrik Neij, earn about $75,000 per month from
advertising revenues. Many believe that the raid of the servers was
motivated by the Motion Picture Association of America. Although the
MPAA claims it was a success, the site was back up within three days.
In regards to pressure from the United States, there is a theory that a
letter from the MPAA to the Swedish State Secretary motivated the raid.
This is commonly known as ministerstyre and is considered a crime in
Sweden. As stated before, The Pirate Bay has a strong cult following.
There was a protest by 500-600 people in Stockholm just 3 days after
the raid. As a result of the raid, the documentary Steal This Film was
created.
The Pirate Bay continues to serve millions of torrents per
day. The Pirate Bay is the 300th most popular website on the internet,
according to Alexa.com. Every day, new material is being distributed
via The Pirate Bay. This will most likely continue for the years to
come, and in the meantime, they'll probably continue to ridicule all
legal threats sent to them.
The Pirate Bay is very unique; it is unlike
many other torrent trackers. Basically anything can be found via The
Pirate Bay, and the Motion Picture Association of America is still
fighting to get it shut down. A recent prosecutor has stated that he
will be trying to take down the site, but the Swedish legal system
seems to be fully behind The Pirate Bay.
In May of 2007, The Pirate
Bay's database was hacked and the information of millions of users was
taken. However, The Pirate Bay claims that this information was all
encrypted and will be of no use to the hackers. The hackers are still
unknown.
Ryan Hansen is an avid BitTorrent user and advocate. He hopes you'll check out more
BitTorrent optimization tips and become another avid user.
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