Most people are not familiar with the name of The Pirate Bay, let alone what happened to them. This is a web page developed on September 15, 2003 by Swedish think tank named Piratbyran who defended free sharing of information. Fredrik Neij, and Gottifrid Svartholm were The Pirate Bay architects.
This think tank started its journey with the launching of The Pirate Bay and BitTorrent protocol that still serve as a search engine like Google, Yahoo etc to share information. Pirate Bay allows users to search, download and contribute torrent files and magnet links, facilitating peer-to-peer sharing among BitTorrent protocols.
Disadvantages of The Pirate Bay
Though The Pirate Bay is a great platform for sharing information and downloading movies and videos, certain drawbacks of the webpage are too serious to overlook. The major drawback of The Pirate Bay as well as its BitTorrent protocol lies in its creators’ philosophy of believing that users exchange all types of files. It became a trend to download movies and web series through UTorrent. However, only a few people know that they can share files via this platform.
The most interesting fact about The Pirate Bay is that the page was banned. Even the main internet providers were obliged to block access to the page. Despite such restrictions. The website successfully managed to get around digital and technological censorship, blocking and hacking and continued their operations until The Pirate Bay masterminds were sued and convicted of copyright infringement.
What Happened to The Pirate Bay’s Founders?
The Pirate Bay landed into controversies, heated discussion and even court cases after many sections started expressing their concerns about the legal aspects of civil liberties, file sharing and copyrights. Furthermore, it became a political platform against intellectual property laws and also a pioneer in the anti-copyright movement. The website suffered domain seizures and shutdowns several times, and ultimately made a switch to a series of new web addresses to remain operational.
Fredrik Neij, and Gottifrid Svartholm (Two Pirate Bay Developers) and Peter Sunde (collaborator) landed in trouble on the charge of Swedish copyright infringement. They were sued by the main film companies, leading to the Pirate Bay trial in Sweden. They were found guilty and sentenced to one-year imprisonment as well as a financial penalty of 3.5 million (for each). The trio got implicated in many trials.
Internet Service Providers or ISPs in some countries have received orders to block access to this website. Afterwards, proxy websites have been giving access to it. They were released in 2015 after completing their sentences.
Does The Pirates Bay Still Exist?
The Pirate Bay website exists and remains functional. However, its founders have declared that they don’t run or manage the page any longer.
In 2015, The Pirate Bay creators claimed that they severed their connection to the web page. The revelation was made in episode 92 of Darkned’s The Pirate Bay podcast.where the host asked Peter Sand about the MAN behind The Pirate Bay and he replied, “Have you seen Space Odyssey? Do you remember Hal 9000?” Then he hinted that “He was the actual guy behind all these.”
Peter even went on telling the host that an AI (Artificial Intelligence) tool was used to manage the said web page. If his words are true, it was the first AI that arrived much earlier than what was released in 2022. It was kind of a harbinger on the horizon of artificial intelligence.
Cryptocurrency
On May 12, 2021, The Pirate Bay introduced a BEP-20 token in the form of Pirate Token in order to support its community and develop tools for the webpage.
