The Pirate Bay facts for kids
The Pirate Bay logo
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Type of site
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Torrent index, magnet links provider |
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| Available in | 35 languages available, primarily English and Swedish |
| Created by |
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| Revenue | Advertisements, donations, merchandise, cryptocurrency mining |
| Registration | Optional, free |
| Launched | 15 September 2003 |
| Current status | Online |
| Written in | HTML, JavaScript, and PHP |
The Pirate Bay (often called TPB) is a website that helps people find and share digital files like movies, music, games, and software. It was started in 2003 by a Swedish group called Piratbyrån. The Pirate Bay lets visitors search for and download special links called "magnet links" and "torrent files." These links help users share files directly with each other using a system called BitTorrent.
The Pirate Bay has caused many discussions about sharing files online, copyright rules, and civil liberties. It has become a well-known site for people who want to change laws about intellectual property. The website has faced many shutdowns and had its web addresses taken away. However, it keeps finding new ways to stay online.
In April 2009, the people who started the website—Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde, and Gottfrid Svartholm—were found responsible in a Swedish court case. They were accused of helping people share copyrighted content. They were given prison sentences and had to pay a large fine. In some countries, internet companies have been told to block access to The Pirate Bay. Because of this, other websites called "proxy sites" have been created to help people still reach it. All the founders were released from prison by 2015.
Contents
How The Pirate Bay Started
The Pirate Bay began on September 15, 2003. It was created by a Swedish group that was against strict copyright rules, called Piratbyrån. By October 2004, The Pirate Bay became its own separate organization.
At first, Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm ran the site, with Peter Sunde as the spokesperson. These founders were known by their online names: "TiAMO," "anakata," and "brokep." They were accused of helping others share copyrighted material.
On May 31, 2006, the website's servers in Stockholm, Sweden, were taken by the Swedish police. This caused the site to be offline for three days. The Pirate Bay says it is a non-profit group based in Seychelles, but some people disagree with this.
Legal Challenges and Appeals
The Pirate Bay has been involved in many court cases. On April 17, 2009, the founders and Carl Lundström were found responsible for helping with copyright rule breaking. They were sentenced to prison and had to pay a fine of about US$4.2 million. The people accused said the judge was influenced by politics and appealed the decision.
On November 26, 2010, a Swedish appeals court agreed with the earlier decision. They made the prison sentences shorter but increased the fine to about US$6.5 million. On May 17, 2010, the site was taken offline because of a court order against its internet provider. The website later came back online with a funny message about the order.
On June 23, 2010, the Piratbyrån group stopped working together. This happened after a key member and co-founder, Ibi Kopimi Botani, passed away.
Hosting and Website Changes
For several years, The Pirate Bay was hosted by PRQ, a company in Sweden owned by Neij and Svartholm. This company was known for offering very secure hosting services. Later, in May 2011, Serious Tubes Networks started providing internet connection for The Pirate Bay.
In May 2012, Google's "Transparency Report" showed that Google had received over 6,000 requests to remove Pirate Bay links from its search results. These requests covered more than 80,500 web addresses. On August 10, 2013, The Pirate Bay launched PirateBrowser, a free web browser designed to help people get around internet blocks.
The Pirate Bay was the most visited torrent site from 2003 until November 2014. Then, another site called KickassTorrents became more popular. In December 2014, Google removed most apps with "The Pirate Bay" in their name from its app store.
Police Raids and Comebacks
On December 9, 2014, Swedish police raided The Pirate Bay again. They took servers, computers, and other equipment. This caused the website to go offline. Other torrent-related sites were also shut down at the same time.
After the raid, several copies of The Pirate Bay appeared online. One notable copy was oldpiratebay.org, created by isoHunt. On May 19, 2015, a Swedish court ordered that The Pirate Bay's .se web address be taken away. In response, the site added six new web addresses. The site eventually returned to using its original .org address in May 2016. In August 2016, KickassTorrents was shut down by the US government. This made The Pirate Bay the most visited BitTorrent website again.
How The Website Works
The Pirate Bay lets users search for "magnet links." These links help BitTorrent programs start downloading files from other users. In the past, The Pirate Bay also offered "BitTorrent files" (torrents). These small files contained information needed to download data from other users.
The torrents are organized into categories like "Audio," "Video," "Applications," "Games," and "Other." Users can sign up for free with an email address. Registered users can upload their own torrents and leave comments. A study in 2013 found that 44% of new uploads were TV shows and movies, and 9% were audio files. In May 2019, new user sign-ups were stopped because of problems with malware being uploaded.
The website has a "browse" feature. This lets users see what is available in big categories like Audio, Video, and Games. There are also smaller categories like Audio books and Comics. Since January 2012, there's even a "Physibles" category for objects you can print with a 3D printer. You can sort the content by name, how many people are sharing it, or when it was added.
The group Piratbyrån once described The Pirate Bay as a long-running art project. The front page of The Pirate Bay usually showed a drawing of a pirate ship. On its sails, it had the logo from an old campaign: "Home Taping Is Killing Music." This was a funny way to show their views on copyright.
Technical Details
The Pirate Bay's servers used to run a special web server program called Hypercube. Later, the website switched to other programs like Lighttpd and PHP for its main pages. It uses MySQL for its database and Sphinx for its search systems.
In December 2007, The Pirate Bay started using Opentracker for its BitTorrent tracking. This allowed for faster communication between servers. Opentracker is free software. In June 2008, The Pirate Bay announced that its servers would use SSL encryption. This was a response to a new wiretapping law in Sweden.
On November 17, 2009, The Pirate Bay stopped offering its main tracker service. They said that centralized trackers were no longer needed. This is because new technologies like DHT and magnet links allow users to find each other and content without a central tracker.
On February 20, 2012, The Pirate Bay announced that it would no longer offer torrent files. Instead, it would only offer magnet links. The site said this would be cheaper for them and make it harder for their "enemies" to stop them. Torrent files shared by fewer than ten people would still be available, to help older software work.
How The Pirate Bay Gets Money
Early Money and Donations
In April 2007, it was confirmed that The Pirate Bay had received money from a businessman named Carl Lundström. This caused some discussion because Lundström was known for supporting certain political groups. A spokesperson for Piratbyrån said that without Lundström's help, The Pirate Bay might not have started. Most of the money went towards buying servers and internet connection.
From 2004 to 2006, The Pirate Bay had a "Donate" link. It listed ways to donate and said the money only supported the tracker. Donors sometimes got benefits like no ads. After 2006, the link was removed. In 2006, a politician named Petter Nilsson donated 35,000 Swedish kronor (about US$4,925) to The Pirate Bay. They used this money to buy new servers.
In 2007, the site started a fund to try and buy Sealand, a small platform with a special status. In 2009, the founders who were found responsible in court asked users to stop donating money for their fines, because they refused to pay them. In 2013, The Pirate Bay started showing its Bitcoin and Litecoin addresses for donations on its front page.
Selling Merchandise and Advertising
The site has a link to an online store that sells items related to The Pirate Bay. This store was first noticed in 2006.
Since 2006, the website has also made money from advertisements on its search results pages. Some reports in 2006 suggested that ads brought in about US$84,000 per month. Police investigations in 2006 estimated that The Pirate Bay made about US$169,000 per year from ads. In the 2009 court case, the prosecution thought ads paid over US$1.4 million a year. However, the site's lawyers said the 2006 income was closer to US$102,000.
In 2008, the IFPI (a music industry group) claimed that the website was very profitable. The website disagreed, saying, "It's not free to operate a Web Site on this scale." They also said that if they were making a lot of money, the founders wouldn't be working late. Peter Sunde argued that the high costs for internet bandwidth, power, and computer hardware meant the site might even be losing money. In the 2009 trial, the defense estimated the site's yearly costs to be about US$110,000.
Sometimes, advertisers appeared on the site by accident. In 2007, an ad agency placed Wal-Mart ads for The Simpsons DVDs next to search results for downloads of the show. In 2012, ads for Canada's Department of Finance appeared on search results but were quickly removed.
Cryptocurrency Mining
In 2017, The Pirate Bay added special code to its website. This code used visitors' computers to "mine" a digital currency called Monero. At first, visitors were not told about this. After people complained, the site operators said it was a test to see if it could replace advertisements. The mining code appeared and disappeared from the website several times in 2018.
Other Projects by The Pirate Bay
The team behind The Pirate Bay has worked on several other websites and software projects. In 2007, they launched BayImg, a website for sharing images. In July, after the death of director Ingmar Bergman, they launched BergmanBits.com, which listed torrents for his films. This site was online until mid-2008.
In August, The Pirate Bay relaunched the BitTorrent website Suprnova.org. This site was meant to do the same things as The Pirate Bay but with different trackers. However, the site didn't do well and was returned to its original owner in August 2010. Suprbay.org was also started in August as the official forum for ThePirateBay.org. Users could ask for torrents to be re-shared or report bad files.
In 2008, Baywords was launched. This was a free blogging service where users could write about anything, as long as it followed Swedish laws. In December, The Pirate Bay brought back ShareReactor as a site that combined eD2k and BitTorrent files. The same month, they released Vio, a tool to convert video files for mobile phones like iPhones and Android devices.
In 2009, Pastebay, a service for sharing notes, became public. The Video Bay, a video streaming site, was announced in June as a "YouTube Killer." It was meant to let users watch videos in web browsers that supported HTML 5. However, The Video Bay was never finished and became unavailable.
On April 18, 2011, The Pirate Bay temporarily changed its name to "Research Bay." This was for a project with researchers from Lund University who were studying P2P users. In January 2012, the site announced The Promo Bay. This project would show "doodles" by chosen musicians and artists on the site's front page. The Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho was promoted, offering his books for free download. By November, 10,000 artists had reportedly signed up.
Buying Things and Digital Money
In January 2007, when the small nation of Sealand was for sale, The Pirate Bay tried to buy it. However, Sealand did not want to be involved with The Pirate Bay. A new plan was made to buy an island instead, but this never happened, even though the website raised US$25,000 for it.
In October 2007, The Pirate Bay got the internet address ifpi.com. This address used to belong to the IFPI, an organization that fights against piracy. The Pirate Bay renamed the website "The International Federation of Pirates Interests." However, the IFPI complained, and The Pirate Bay was ordered to give the domain name back.
On May 12, 2021, The Pirate Bay launched Pirate Token. This is a type of digital money meant to help support its community and develop tools for the website.
Website Problems and Outages
May 2006 Server Raid
On May 31, 2006, police raided The Pirate Bay and took its servers. This was ordered by a Swedish judge because of claims of copyright violations. Police shut down the website and took all servers from its internet provider, PRQ. Three people—Neij, Svartholm, and Mikael Viborg—were questioned but later released. All servers in the room were taken, even those not related to The Pirate Bay.
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) said they had worked with Swedish and US officials to shut down the "illegal website." The MPAA claimed there were three arrests, but the people were only questioned. They also said The Pirate Bay was making money from copyrighted material, which The Pirate Bay denied.
After the raid, The Pirate Bay showed a message confirming the police action. On June 2, 2006, The Pirate Bay was back online. Its logo showed a pirate ship firing cannons at the Hollywood Sign. The Pirate Bay now has servers in Belgium and Russia in case of future raids. The site claims to have grown from 1 million to over 5 million active users since the raid.
In 2009, Sweden's largest technology museum, the Swedish National Museum of Science and Technology, got one of the seized servers. They displayed it as something with great symbolic value.
The Pirate Bay Court Case
The Pirate Bay trial was a court case in Sweden against four people accused of helping others break copyright laws using The Pirate Bay site. The criminal charges were supported by a group of copyright holders, including the IFPI. They also asked for money for damages.
Swedish prosecutors filed charges on January 31, 2008, against the founders and Carl Lundström. The prosecutor said the four worked together to run and develop the site, helping people break copyright laws. About 34 cases of copyright breaking were listed, involving music, movies, and games. The copyright holders asked for about US$13 million in damages. The case was decided by a judge and three appointed lay judges. The lead judge was a member of the Swedish Copyright Association, but he said this was not a conflict of interest.
The trial started on February 16, 2009, in Stockholm. The hearings ended on March 3, 2009. The decision was announced on April 17, 2009: Neij, Sunde, Svartholm, and Lundström were all found responsible. They were sentenced to one year in prison and had to pay a fine of about US$3.5 million. All of them appealed the decision.
The appeal trial ended on October 15, 2010. The decision was announced on November 26. The appeals court shortened the prison sentences for three of the people. Neij's sentence was 10 months, Sunde's was eight, and Lundström's was four. However, the fine was increased to about US$6.5 million.
On February 1, 2012, the highest court in Sweden refused to hear another appeal. This led the site to change its main web address to thepiratebay.se from thepiratebay.org. This move was meant to prevent the site from being affected by US laws. On April 9, 2013, the site changed its address again to thepiratebay.gl, under Greenland's web addresses. This was in case Swedish authorities tried to take its .se address. But this change didn't last long, as the site returned to the .se address on April 12, 2013. This happened after a Danish court ruled the site was breaking copyright laws.
All the founders were released from prison by 2015 after serving their sentences.
Website Connectivity Problems
In May 2007, The Pirate Bay was attacked by hackers. They copied the user database, which had over 1.5 million users. The Pirate Bay told its users that the data was not valuable and that passwords and emails were hidden.
On April 27, 2009, The Pirate Bay website had problems with its internet connection. Many people thought this was a forced outage by a Swedish anti-piracy group. The site was still available using IPv6 at the time.
On August 24, 2009, one of The Pirate Bay's internet providers was ordered by a Swedish court to stop serving the website. This was due to a lawsuit from several entertainment companies. This caused the site to be down for 3 hours. The site was fully working again for everyone within 24 hours.
On October 6, 2009, another internet provider blocked all Pirate Bay traffic, causing an outage for most users. The same day, the site was reportedly back online using an address from CyberBunker in the Netherlands.
CyberBunker received a court order on May 17, 2010, briefly taking the site offline. Later that day, the Swedish Pirate Party helped restore the hosting. A former spokesperson said it would now be very hard to stop the site, as it would be seen as political censorship.
On July 8, 2010, a group of hackers from Argentina got into The Pirate Bay's administration system. They could delete torrents and see users' IP addresses and emails. The Pirate Bay was taken offline for upgrades.
On May 16, 2012, The Pirate Bay faced a major attack that made the site hard to reach for about 24 hours. The Pirate Bay said it didn't know who was behind the attack but had "suspicions."
On May 5, 2015, The Pirate Bay went offline for several hours. This seemed to be because of a problem with its security certificate.
December 2014 Raid and Aftermath
On December 9, 2014, police in Stockholm raided the company's offices. They took servers and other computers. This caused the website to go offline. The raid happened because of a complaint from a Swedish anti-piracy group called Rights Alliance. The Pirate Bay was one of many file-sharing websites that went down. One person from the team was arrested.
After the shutdown, other torrent sites saw a small increase in visitors. However, the shutdown didn't greatly change the overall level of online piracy. In response to the raid, a group of hackers claiming to be part of Anonymous reportedly leaked email login details of Swedish government officials. A founder, Peter Sunde, said he was happy to see the website shut down. He believed his successors had not improved the site and criticized the increased use of advertisements.
IsoHunt later copied much of The Pirate Bay's old database. They made it available through oldpiratebay.org, which was a searchable list of old Pirate Bay torrents. IsoHunt also released a tool called The Open Bay. This tool allowed users to create their own versions of The Pirate Bay website. This tool led to about 372 mirror sites (copies of the website).
Since December 17, 2014, The Pirate Bay's Facebook page has been unavailable. On December 22, 2014, a website came back online at thepiratebay.se. It showed a clock counting the time the site had been offline and a waving pirate flag. For a while, TPB was hosted in Moldova. The Pirate Bay then started using services from CloudFlare, a company that helps websites stay online. On January 1, 2015, the website showed a countdown to February 1, 2015. The website returned with a large phoenix logo on January 31, 2015.
Recent Website Errors
Starting in October 2018, The Pirate Bay website became hard to reach in some parts of the world. It showed an "Error 522" message. Because of this, direct visits to the website dropped by more than 32% in October. The problem was not due to internet providers blocking the site or issues with the web address. The exact cause was not known. However, the site's Tor domain (a special hidden version) and proxy sites were not affected.
The Error 522 problem happened again in early March 2020. The site's administrators could not say when it would be fixed. After one month, the site started working again after its web address records were updated.
Images for kids
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The Pirate Bay homepage in 2004
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Political cartoon criticising the entertainment industry on the main page of TPB
- Comparison of BitTorrent sites
- Copyleft
- Criticism of copyright
- Home Taping Is Killing Music
- Internet freedom
- IPredator
- Njalla
- Pirate Party
- Sci-Hub – network of pirated research papers, "Sci-Hub can instantly provide access to more than two-thirds of all scholarly articles"
- Steal This Film
