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In an unexpected turn of events, the director of the Pirate Bay documentary TPB-AFK has sent takedown notices to YouTube requesting its removal. The director states that he sees the streaming portal as a radicalizing platform full of hate. The takedowns are not without controversy, however, as TPB-AFK was published under a Creative Commons license. Released in 2013, The Pirate Bay documentary TPB-AFK offers insight into a pivotal moment in Internet history. Created by Simon Klose, the film follows three Pirate Bay founders during their trial in Sweden. True to the nature of the site, it was made widely available online for free. People could still buy copies or support the film directly, but those who didn’t want to spend a dime could grab a copy though torrent sites, including The Pirate Bay, or stream it on YouTube. The Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA) license even allowed fans to share their own copies with others. “You don’t need permission to copy and share my film. But you can’t make money off it,” Klose explained at the time. “By using a Creative Commons license, I am making it legal for the audience to copy and share the film.” 2013: Copies Taken Down by Hollywood Soon after the premiere, hundreds of copies of the documentary started to surface online, resulting in millions of views. While this was good news for the director, it also caused controversy. In the months following the release, several Hollywood studios including HBO, Paramount, Fox and Lionsgate, sent DMCA notices to Google, asking the search giant to remove links to the documentary. In most cases the requests were honored. It wasn’t clear whether the takedowns were sent in error, or if it was a targeted attack on the Pirate Bay documentary. Whatever the case, the unwarranted censorship outraged the director. After the erroneous takedowns were highlighted in the news, Google eventually reached out offering to set the record straight by reinstating the removed links. But not before teaching a valuable lesson about copyright power dynamics. “To me, it’s a depressive lesson that Google rather acts as a private proxy for dinosaur copyright enforcement than helping indie filmmakers experiment with sustainable distribution models,” Klose said in 2013. Takedowns Remove TPB-AFK copies from YouTube With this backstory in mind, it came as a surprise to learn that copies of the TPB-AFK documentary were removed from YouTube recently. This includes the official release posted on the TPBAFK YouTube channel that was embedded across hundreds of websites. “This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Nonami Docs,” YouTube’s message reads. TPB-AFK embed (YouTube link) Nonami Docs isn’t some Hollywood adversary with a Pirate Bay grudge. On the contrary, it’s linked to Simon Klose, who used it to remove copies of his own documentary from YouTube. That also includes uploads by third-parties. Peter, who runs the anarchi.st YouTube channel, is one of the people who was hit by a takedown notice. The channel shares films relating to class struggle without running advertisements on them, in line with TPB-AFK’s Creative Commons license, but was removed nonetheless. “You can imagine my surprise when my channel got a copyright strike because Simon Klose wanted the film removed from YouTube. It is difficult to imagine a more ironic copyright action,” Peter tells us. Anarchi.st Takedown (Swedish) The channel owner confirmed that the notice did indeed come from the TPB-AFK director but opted not to file a counter notice as he could do without the added stress. Nonetheless, he was puzzled by the takedown. And he’s not the only one. Klose Sees YouTube as a Radicalizing Platform Creative Commons licenses are typically considered irrevocable, which makes the takedown all the more questionable. However, it turns out that Klose hasn’t had a change of heart when it comes to copyright, his actions are targeted at YouTube specifically. The director informs us that he did indeed remove the film from YouTube. This is not a copyright issue. He simply doesn’t want TPB-AFK to be present on Google’s streaming platform any longer. “I’ve taken it off YouTube, because I think YouTube has become a radicalizing platform full of hate, and I don’t want my film there anymore. It’s still available on torrent sites,” Klose says. The director didn’t add any further background but pointed us to his latest film, “Hacking Hate“, which discusses in detail how social media platforms and YouTube are used as a tool to proliferate extreme content while profiting from it. While it’s clear that Klose has changed his mind about YouTube rather than copyright, one can question whether copyright takedowns are the right way to enforce this. Especially when people are technically allowed to share the film. The removals could be a good strategy to put a spotlight on the “Hacking Hate” documentary, but since Klose never sought public attention for the removals, his actions seem more intrinsically motivated. It’s not clear how many instances of the documentary were removed from YouTube, but many copies of TPB-AFK are still available on the platform at the time of writing. Whether the uploaders of these copies filed counter-notices or were simply not targeted is unclear. Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of February): 874 RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend

For over a decade, The Pirate Bay has been accepting Bitcoin donations. In dollar terms, this provided a relatively modest but consistent revenue stream. However, if the torrent site had held onto its early Bitcoin, it could have amassed a small fortune, worth $14 million today. The same applies to BitcoinTorrentz, which once charged today's equivalent of $8,000 per gigabyte transferred. It’s been three years since we last checked in on The Pirate Bay’s Bitcoin wallet. While the torrent site may not be raking in the digital dough like it used to, the donations keep trickling in. Back in 2021, we estimated that TPB was receiving around $10 per day in Bitcoin donations. Our latest analysis shows that this figure remains surprisingly consistent. Over the past three years, the site has added approximately 0.196 BTC to its latest donation address. That’s a little over $20,000 now, averaging $15 per day since the last update. This amount isn’t enough to sustain the site, obviously, and the tiny amounts of Ethereum, Litecoin, and Monero donations don’t offer any help on this front. The real spectacle is revealed when we go more than a decade back in time, adding up all donations over the years. Silk Road & BitcoinTorrentz In 2011, Bitcoin was mostly used on the dark web, where “Dread Pirate Roberts” popularized it through Silk Road. This direct payment option outside the traditional banking system also appealed to venues where added privacy was welcome. The torrent download service BitCoinTorrentz.com was the first platform to combine BitTorrent and Bitcoin. The remote download service offered high-speed downloads at the modest price of 0.08 BTC per gigabyte. That was $0.25 at the time, but over $8,000 at today’s rates. BitCoinTorrentz was a niche service. By July 2012, it had 422 registered users, who downloaded a modest number of files. At the time, it wasn’t seen as a spectacular success, but the 16.5 BTC it made in bandwidth fees that month would be a fortune today. The Pirate Bay: Five Bitcoin in a single day With Bitcoin’s spectacular price increase over the years, hindsight is a recurring theme. Paying 10,000 BTC for two pizzas was reasonable at the time, but with today’s price of ~$103,000 per bitcoin, that’s a billion dollar feast. On a different level, earnings from The Pirate Bay’s early donation efforts also look quite spectacular. In April 2013, The Pirate Bay quietly added a Bitcoin address to the site’s footer. This update didn’t come with an announcement or instructions, but those who were familiar with it started sending ‘donations’ right away. The silent donation drive was quite successful. In 24 hours, 73 transactions were transferred into Pirate Bay’s wallet, adding up to a healthy 5.56 BTC. At the time, the exchange rate was roughly $125, so this $700 bonus was more than welcome. $14 million After this initial boom, incoming donations started to slow down but Pirate Bay supporters continued to tip the site in the years that followed. Custos Media Technologies estimated that the torrent site earned a massive 126.64 in Bitcoin donations between 2013 and 2015, and a year later we reported that another 8.21 had been added. From 2017 onwards the Bitcoin price rose quickly, adding a little over one bitcoin in seven years. Of course, the real story is what could have been. If The Pirate Bay had held onto all the Bitcoin it received since 2013, that stash would now be worth around $14 million. However, it’s highly unlikely the team resisted the urge to cash out at some point, or use the funds to pay for expenses. Crypto Mining & Token The Pirate Bay’s crypto experiments were not limited to Bitcoin. In 2017, many of the site’s users complained that their CPU usage increased dramatically when they browsed certain Pirate Bay pages. It was later revealed that the site had implemented a Monero cryptocurrency miner provided by Coinhive. While using user resources isn’t chic, the potential monthly payout of $12,000 was certainly appealing. With this in mind, it’s no surprise that many other pirate sites, mostly the dubious ones, followed suit. The Pirate Bay’s most recent crypto experiment came in 2021, when the site launched its own PirateToken, also known as ‘TPB’. Skeptics suggested that this could be a setup for a ‘rugpull’, but the site indirectly denied this. According to an official statement, the token was launched to unlock new featured in the future. For example, it could be used to donate to uploaders and moderators, as well as unlock VIP content. These plans never came to fruition. Instead, the PirateToken slowly faded into oblivion, with the rest of the ‘dead’ token projects. Apparently, not everything crypto-related turns into a goldmine. Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. 2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of November): 5,298 news posts RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend

The Pirate Bay TV series is the entertainment industry's depiction of the torrent site's turbulent history. The creators don't take sides but mostly focus on the legal battle that only represents part of the story. According to Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde and Piratbyrån's Rasmus Fleischer, living though it all was a completely different experience. The long-awaited Pirate Bay TV series premiered in Sweden on Friday, through official channel and (eventually also) on The Pirate Bay. There’s no doubt that the notorious torrent site has made history, but getting everything down on paper and converting it into a TV-series is no easy task. TorrentFreak has seen the first two episodes. While reviews are not our thing, we requested input from two founding figures, both of whom were featured in the show. This made clear that there is plenty to say. Fiction Let’s begin by stressing that The Pirate Bay series is a work of fiction, inspired by facts. The story of the remarkably deviant and resilient torrent site is well known. Never before, however, has it been told this way; by the entertainment industry. Documenting a historical movement on screen blurs the lines between fact and fiction. It can be tricky to distinguish what really happened from the embellishments introduced under creative license. That’s also the case here. Viewers shouldn’t confuse the series with reality. It is mostly a collection of scenes that never took place; at least not as portrayed. It’s the interpretation of the writers and directors, based on public information and details shared by insiders. The three lead characters, Pirate Bay founders Fredrik, Gottfrid, and Peter, were not involved in the project. This means that important context and details are missing. You can’t really blame the creators for this, but it’s important to keep in mind. Never Happened… Based on the first episodes, the series presents an entertaining version of The Pirate Bay’s origin story. There is plenty of attention for historical details and some props were meticulously recreated, including the legendary Pirate Bay bus. The broader storyline, ultimately ending with the founders’ prison sentences, is well documented too. The creators don’t deviate much there. That said, many scenes, timelines, and events portrayed on TV never took place. For example, there’s a key opening scene where the tracker is officially launched by Piratbyrån’s Rasmus Fleischer at a house party. The event was videotaped and sent to the Swedish anti-piracy bureau, Antipiratbyrån. While the scene is entertaining, it never happened. The same applies to other details. For example, the suggestion that the Pirate Bay’s key figures were hard to find is overblown. There was a publicly posted bank account tied to the donations, for example, and Pirate Bay’s hosting company PRQ was owned by two of the site’s founders. These details are largely irrelevant to the broader public. Overall, they provide a good overview of the site’s origins and the main story arc, leaving room for viewers to draw their own conclusions. For those at the heart of the events, the series is a different story altogether. They see ‘copies’ of themselves playing roles they don’t necessarily identify with. After everything they went through, that can feel like a slap in the face; from the entertainment industry. Peter Sunde: Disappointed Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde, aka Brokep, doesn’t recognize himself in the series. Peter skipped the official advance screener in Stockholm that was organized for key figures but found an unofficial option to watch it before it aired. He wasn’t impressed. “To be honest, I’m very disappointed. Sure it’s fictional, but what does that really mean when they use your name, quote you on things you’ve said, and then portray you completely different?” he tells us. For example, Peter’s character is initially portrayed as somewhat submissive to his boss at Siemens, which he doesn’t recognize at all. In addition, the series doesn’t fully grasp the disorganized nature of Piratbyrån either, he says. What stings the most is that the ‘entertainment industry’ that’s long been The Pirate Bay’s main arch rival, is now commercializing its history. “My biggest concern with the series is that it’s made by people from the same industry that hates The Pirate Bay,” Peter says. “It’s paid for by organizations that have sued or threatened to sue TPB.” Peter doesn’t recognize himself or the other founders in the series, not in attitude or wit. To top it off, ‘his’ Norwegian accent is “awful” too, he says, suggesting that this may have been done on purpose. Peter declined to cooperate with B-Reel Films, the Swedish production company that created the series. While he stands by that decision, he had hoped that the episodes would place more emphasis on the broader impact of the site, instead of the legal drama. “Honestly, I feel it’s like they put the TPB Wikipedia articles and TPB AFK into an LLM and asked the AI to make a script,” Peter concludes. Rasmus Fleischer: Copying History Rasmus Fleischer, one of the founders of Piratbyrån who was closely involved in the Pirate Bay project in the early days, shares some of Peter’s criticism. However, he is more forgiving towards the creators. “One thing I do not recognize in the fictionalized ‘Rasmus Fleischer’ is that he seems unable to open his mouth without going into a principled speech about freedom of speech and the like. “While I do and did prefer freedom to unfreedom, Piratbyrån definitely did not talk much in the language of rights and freedoms,” Rasmus adds. Rasmus chooses not to go into great detail on everything that he believes misses the mark, but he stresses that it was never the goal to piss off Hollywood and its lawyers. He sees it more as an impromptu trolling machine. To him, it almost seemed fictional at the time. “At times, everything already had a quite fictional character. Or so it felt, watching how our own made-up fictions made headlines around the world,” he says, mentioning the “buy Sealand” project as an example. Rasmus has a Ph.D. in history and works at Stockholm University, so he has some experience with how history is told. He recognizes that there’s no uniform history here. To create something understandable, one has to pick a scenario. “To tell the story of The Pirate Bay, based on true events, necessarily means to discard the vast majority of events. Trying to fit it all in would result in a chaotic, non-linear story, hardly understandable for anyone who wasn’t around.” In the series, the creators focused on the legal aspects, instead of the broader societal impact. This is “a bit boring” according to Rasmus. However, he’s not upset or offended by the end result. “I am not offended by the fact that it is ‘the entertainment industry’ telling the story, and I also don’t feel that I have any right to control fictional accounts even if it includes a character bearing my name. “I still like copying. Just let them copy me, let them show what kind of copies they are able to make – and we will show them once again how we copy,” Rasmus adds. Piratbyrån vs. The Pirate Bay If anything, the above shows that, after all these years, The Pirate Bay story still moves people. And indeed, the series is food for thought. Piratbyrån was simply a disorganized group of friends who discovered that they could have a broad impact by destabilizing institutions and rethinking the status quo. These ideas didn’t start at organized meetings, most communication took place on IRC. In 2003, their focus on file-sharing caught on, and The Pirate Bay was ‘just another’ display of defiance. However, the Pirate Bay quickly grew into something much larger than Piratbyrån. Ultimately, Fredrik, Gottfrid and Peter silently accepted the ‘founder’ labels. They came together at the right time, with each assuming their own role, for different reasons. They all excelled in these positions and helped The Pirate Bay thrive. Where other core Piratbyrån members stayed at the sidelines, the trio assumed roles that define their lives up until this day. For other Piratbyrån members, meanwhile, the site is simply a remnant of a somewhat rebellious period of their lives. Today, the Pirate Bay has served its original purpose, but the site keeps running. The founders cut their ties over the years, but someone is still pulling the strings. Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. 2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of October): 4,832 news posts RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend

The Pirate Bay made its debut as a TV series on the Swedish streaming platform SVT Play earlier today. International viewers are left waiting until other services pick it up. In the meantime, some may be tempted to explore unofficial channels for pirated copies of the show. But finding a pirated copy is proving surprisingly difficult. The inception and early years of The Pirate Bay are an intriguing chapter of the Internet’s history. Founded by the Piratbyrån group, The Pirate Bay and its founders embraced the power of the new BitTorrent technology: to copy culture en masse. By doing so, they altered the public discourse, openly taunting the entertainment industries in the process. This chapter didn’t end as planned for the lead characters; Fredrik Neij (TiAMO), Peter Sunde (Brokep), and Gotffrid Svartholm (Anakata), who were eventually sentenced to prison. By then, however, they had sparked a digital and political revolution, the impact of which is still felt today. TV Series The Pirate Bay didn’t just trigger a file-sharing bonanza, it was exemplary for the rapid rise of the web. New technology empowered people whose lives were traditionally dictated by mainstream entertainment and publishing companies. The web created new forms to share news, opinions, knowledge, and media. And few Swedes with keyboards had the power to upset billion-dollar companies. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that this is a good story, perhaps even a movie script? This includes the people at the Swedish production company B-Reel Films, who got the green light to turn it into a TV series a few years ago. The series premiered at the on-demand platform of the Swedish national broadcaster SVT a few hours ago. International deals haven’t been announced, but pirates can generally get access anyway. Pirating ‘The Pirate Bay’ Series Soon after the first two episodes of The Pirate Bay series came out, scene release copies started circulating online. As one would expect. The Scene group OLLONBORRE, which specializes in Swedish content, was the first to pick the show up. Within minutes, the first 1080p WEB-rips were posted on private scene servers and 720p copies followed a few hours later. Interestingly, pirate releases have yet to make their way to The Pirate Bay. We haven’t seen any other copies on other public pirate sites either, which is surprising given the topic of the series. It’s common knowledge that The Scene – a secretive network of release groups – prefers to keep its releases private. Therefore, it wasn’t happy with The Pirate Bay’s public nature and rise to prominence in the early 2003s, which is highlighted in the first episodes of the TV series. However, we expected non-scene release groups would be eager to pick up the show. Apparently that’s not the case, yet. Fact-Based Fiction While the broader international audience must wait for the official release, we can add a disclaimer for viewers. While entertaining and engaging, the series should not be taken as fact. The script is loosely based on The Pirate Bay story and many of the scenes are fiction. New elements were added, timelines have been changed, and the characters are constructed by the show’s writers, which is not necessarily how they came across in real life. The Pirate Bay’s founders didn’t participate in the production, which means that the creators had no other option than to fill in some blanks. In an interview with Drama Quarterly, director Jens Sjögren previously acknowledged that they had to mix facts and fiction to tell the story. He understands that some people won’t like that. “People are going to say a lot of shit about it. ‘It was not exactly like this, blah, blah, blah.’ No, but we really broke our fucking backs to try to just embrace the feeling of really struggling with something you believe in so hard – so much so you would almost be ready to go to prison for it,” Sjögren said. It wasn’t the creators’ main goal to create a literal replay of what happened. Instead, Sjögren said that he tried to capture the spirit of The Pirate Bay founders’ ambitions and goals. Whether this succeeded is up to the viewer, but the series definitely shows the contrasting personalities of Fredrik, Gottfrid, and Peter. They were all in it for different reasons, which may be part of their initial success. — This weekend we will publish a follow-up article, sharing some thoughts on the series with input from Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde and Piratbyrån co-founder Rasmus Fleischer. Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. 2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of October): 4,832 news posts RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend

The Pirate Bay is no longer the leading pirate site on the Internet, but it remains the most censored one. Similar to other search engines, Yandex appears to make it hard to find the notorious torrent site's official domain name in the top results. The motivation is unclear but other more popular pirate sites remain easy to find. The Pirate Bay and search engines are not a happy marriage recently. On the contrary. For example, we previously reported on Google’s decision to remove thepiratebay.org from its search results in countries where ISPs are required to block the site. Searching for The Pirate Bay This type of deindexing is not unique to Google. As highlighted in the past, Bing has effectively wiped all Pirate Bay URLs from its index until only the main homepage was left. That move sunsequently forced DuckDuckGo and other Microsoft-powered search engines to do the same. Today, there are still some more exotic search engines that are capable of finding Pirate Bay links easily, including non-infringing ones. However, Russia’s Yandex can be scrapped from that list. Founded in 1997, Yandex is one of the oldest search engines on the web. The service is used around the world but is particularly popular in Russia where it has a majority market share. It’s known that Russia requires search engines, including foreign ones, to remove results linked to pirate sites. This also applies to Yandex, but these measures don’t typically expand globally. Today, it’s not hard to find most popular pirate sites on Yandex internationally. This applies to YTS, Fmoviesz, Aniwave, and even the Russian torrent site Rutor. For some reason, however, The Pirate Bay’s official domain appears to have vanished. The Pirate Bay Vanished A basic search for “The Pirate Bay” brings up plenty of results but these link to proxies, the Wikipedia page, and other related entries. In the locations we searched from, however, thepiratebay.org is nowhere to be found. Finding the official domain isn’t rocket science as it’s mentioned on the Wikipedia page that’s linked in the information panel on the right. However, a ‘site: search’, that typically lists all pages from a specified domain name, returns no results at all in our tests. Interestingly, the same site-specific command does return plenty of links for other pirate sites, so The Pirate Bay appears to be in a league of its own. Update: After finishing this article the site: search started to show some results for thepiratebay.org again in our tests. It’s still not featured in any of the top results for “The Pirate Bay“. It’s possible that Yandex changed something and the outcome may also depend on people’s location, so results may vary. Why Yandex has taken this decision is unknown. We requested a comment from the company, hoping to get an explanation, but that inquiry remains unanswered. At this point, The Pirate Bay probably no longer cares about yet another ‘blocking’ effort. The site’s traffic has been hurt by similar measures over the past years, but plenty of loyal users still manage to find their way to it. — Note: For those who are wondering; China’s top search engine Baidu can no longer find Thepiratebay.org either. Source

While the majority of The Pirate Bay's users download recent content, some older torrents still manage to survive. An episode of the Swedish TV series "High Chaparral" celebrated its twentieth anniversary recently. Other older torrents, including a copy of the documentary "Revolution OS", also remain active after two decades. When The Pirate Bay first came online, in the second half of 2003, the ‘internet’ looked nothing like it does today. A Harvard student had yet to start writing the first lines of code on a new idea, called “TheFacebook”. YouTube wasn’t around yet either, and the same was true for the smartphones that dominate people’s lives today. At the time, all popular entertainment was consumed offline. People interested in watching a movie could use the Internet to buy a DVD at one of the early webshops, or sign up with Netflix, which shipped discs through the mail. However, on-demand access was simply not a thing. At least, not legally. Things were changing though. Napster had made it clear that the Internet had the potential to offer music to the masses, albeit illegally. And with BitTorrent technology, The Pirate Bay expanded this ‘free library’ to various other media types, including TV shows and movies. Pirate Bay’s Oldest Torrent Today, more than two decades have passed and most of the files shared on The Pirate Bay in the early years are no longer available. BitTorrent requires at least one person to share a full file copy, which is hard to keep up for decades. Surprisingly, however, several torrents have managed to stand the test of time and remain available today. A few days ago the site’s longest surviving torrent turned 20 years old. While a few candidates have shown up over the years, we believe that an episode of “High Chaparral” has the honor of being the oldest Pirate Bay torrent that’s still active today. The file was originally uploaded on March 25, 2004, and several people continue to share it today. The screenshot above only lists one seeder but according to information passed on by OpenTrackr.org, there are four seeders with a full copy. This is quite a remarkable achievement, especially since people complained about a lack of seeders shortly after it was uploaded. Cult Status Over the years, the “High Chaparral” torrent achieved cult status among a small group of people who likely keep sharing it, simply because it’s the oldest surviving torrent. This became evident in the Pirate Bay comment section several years ago, when TPB still had comments. “Well, i guess since this is a part of TPB history i’ll add it to my Raspberry Pi torrent server to seed forever,” zak0403 wrote. Revolution OS & The Fanimatrix Record or not, other old torrents on The Pirate Bay also continue to thrive. On March 31, 2004, someone uploaded a pirated copy of the documentary “Revolution OS” to the site which is alive and kicking today. “Revolution OS” covers the history of Linux, GNU, and the free software movement, which was a good fit for the early Pirate Bay crowd. Eleven years ago, we spoke to director J.T.S. Moore, who wasn’t pleased that people were pirating the documentary but was nevertheless glad to see it hadn’t lost its appeal. Fast-forward to the present day and Revolution OS still has plenty of interest, with more than 30 people actively seeding the torrent. While these torrents are quite old, they’re not the oldest active torrents available on the Internet. That honor goes to “The Fanimatrix”, which was created in September 2003 and, after being previously resurrected, continues to be available today with more than 100 people seeding. Ten years ago, we were surprised to see that any of the mentioned torrents were still active. By now, however, we wouldn’t be shocked to see these torrents survive for decades. Whether The Pirate Bay will still be around then is another question. Source

In dozens of countries around the world, The Pirate Bay and other deviant sites are blocked by ISPs. The underlying court orders and other legal mechanisms are intended to make it harder for people to access pirate sites. To help with this, Google removed thepiratebay.org from its search results in regions where it's already blocked. This ban apparently applies to Google's 'knowledge panels,' from which the site's problematic URL is carefully stripped. Two years ago, Google started delisting the URLs of several popular pirate sites from its search results. This decision didn’t impact all users. Instead, Google voluntarily decided to remove URLs in countries where the sites are blocked by local Internet providers, typically following a court order. In the Netherlands, for example, The Pirate Bay and many of its mirrors and proxies were delisted by Google in response to a notice sent by local anti-piracy group BREIN. Google took similar action in the UK, , and other countries, once it was notified by rightsholders. Knowledge Panels These interventions don’t stop at simply removing the domains from the search index. Initially, we noticed that the so-called “knowledge panels” for the blocked pirate sites were gone too. Apparently, these were also considered problematic. The image below shows the panel currently shown in countries where The Pirate Bay isn’t blocked. Aside from some basic details, this includes a direct and uncensored link to The Pirate Bay’s homepage. US Google Search Results Showing this knowledge panel in blocked regions wouldn’t make much sense after Google carefully stripped all thepiratebay.org URLs from its search results. In this context, removing the panel entirely seems a logical decision. URL Disappears However, when doing some recent searches, we noticed The Pirate Bay’s knowledge panel reappearing in blocked regions such as the UK and the Netherlands. As can be seen below, the official site doesn’t appear anywhere in search results, which has been the case for some time. Here, the link to thepiratebay.org has now been stripped from the knowledge panel, something we hadn’t seen before. Dutch Google Search Results Whether these interventions will do much to stop people from finding The Pirate Bay is doubtful. Wikipedia remains one of the top search results and the online encyclopedia continues to list the site’s official URL, at least for now. Bard Refuses to Provide The Pirate Bay’s URL To check how consistent Google is across its services, we also tried Bard, the company’s AI chatbot. That didn’t get us very far, however, with the AI pointing out that The Pirate Bay facilitates ‘illegal’ activity. “Please note that The Pirate Bay is a website that facilitates the sharing of copyrighted material, which is illegal in many jurisdictions. As such, I cannot provide you with direct links to the website or instructions on how to find it. “I would encourage you to seek out legal and ethical ways to acquire the content you are looking for,” Bard notes. When we phrased the question differently, asking Bard how one can access The Pirate Bay, it offered more concrete suggestions on how to find blocked websites (even though we didn’t mention ‘blocking’). One piece of advice was to use a search engine; this works indeed, unless it’s Google. “One way to find blocked websites is to use a search engine. There are many different search engines available, so you will need to do some research to find one that is right for you. It is important to choose a search engine that is reputable and has a good track record of privacy and security. “Another way to find blocked websites is to use a social media site. Many social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, have groups and forums that are dedicated to sharing blocked websites,” Bard added. Bard has Options Source

The Pirate Bay celebrates its 20th anniversary today. Founded in 2003 by a collective of hackers and activists, the small Swedish BitTorrent tracker grew to become a global icon for online piracy. The rebellious torrent site has a turbulent history and clashed with law enforcement authorities on multiple occasions. Despite these setbacks, it remains online today. During the summer of 2003, Swedish pro-culture organization Piratbyrån was making a name for itself; sharing news and educating people on how they could share media online. What the group’s members didn’t realize at the time, is that the plans they made would create a ripple effect that still has an impact decades later. Like many other people mesmerized by the unbridled ability to share files over the Internet, the new BitTorrent protocol caught Piratbyrån’s eye. From one thing came another, and Piratbyrån decided to start their own tracker. A Swedish Torrent Tracker When this idea was first brought up isn’t clear, not even to the site’s founders, but at the end of 2003 The Pirate Bay was presented to the public. “We have opened a BitTorrent tracker – The Pirate Bay. From there, you can download and share games, movies, discs, TV shows and more,” the short announcement reads, translated from Swedish. A New Torrent Tracker One of the group’s unwritten goals was to offer a counterweight to the propaganda being spread by local anti-piracy outfit Antipiratbyrån. The pro-culture group saw sharing as something positive instead, and a file-sharing website would surely bring this point across. The Pirate Bay first came online in Mexico where Gottfrid Svartholm, aka Anakata, hosted the site on a server owned by the company he was working for at the time. After a few months, the site moved to Sweden where it was hosted on a Pentium III 1GHz laptop with 256MB RAM. This one machine, which belonged to Fredrik Neij, aka TiAMO, kept the site online and included a fully operational tracker. This early setup was quite primitive, as shown here, and some of the hardware was later put on display at the Computer Museum in Linköping. The Pirate Bay server Piratbyrån initially planned to create the first public file-sharing network in Sweden but, in the years that followed, the site grew out to become a global file-sharing icon. While The Pirate Bay team was proud of this success, it was not without consequences. Initially, various takedown messages from copyright holders were met with mocking responses, but the legal pressure became a heavy burden. Behind the scenes, the US Government applied pressure on Sweden, urging the country do something about the taunting pirate site. At the same time, the site’s founders noticed that they were being shadowed by private investigators, who smelled blood. The Raid The pressure eventually reached its first peak when The Pirate Bay’s infrastructure was raided. May 31, 2006, less than three years after The Pirate Bay was founded, 65 Swedish police officers entered a datacenter in Stockholm. The policemen had instructions to shut down the Pirate Bay’s servers, and that’s exactly what they did. Footage from The Pirate Bay raid For most pirate sites the road would end there, but The Pirate Bay was no ordinary site, and it wasn’t planning to cave in just yet. Shortly before the raid began, Gottfrid noticed some unusual activity. He warned Fredrik who, as a precaution, decided to make a backup. This turned out to be a pivotal moment in the site’s history. Because of this backup, Fredrik and the rest of the Pirate Bay team managed to resurrect the site within three days. Instead of hiding in the shadows, Pirate Bay’s spokesperson Peter Sunde, aka Brokep, told the world that The Pirate Bay wasn’t going anywhere. This swift and defiant comeback turned the site’s founders into heroes for many. The site made headline news around the world and in Stockholm, people were waving pirate flags in the streets, a sentiment that benefited the newly founded Pirate Party as well. The Turning Point There was also a major downside, however. The raid was the start of a criminal investigation, which led to a spectacular trial, and prison sentences for several of the site’s founders. Pirate Bay supporters at the first day in Court http://torrentfreak.com/images/pirate-flags1.jpg This became another turning point. Many of the early Piratbyrån members cut their ties with the site. Gottfrid, Fredrik and Peter also left the ship, which was handed over to a more anonymous group ostensibly located in the Seychelles. The outspokenness of the early years eventually gave way to the silent treatment. While the site’s moderators are easy to reach nowadays, the people (Winston) who pull the strings at the top remain behind the scenes at all times. This was made quite obvious when the site disappeared for weeks following another raid at a Stockholm datacenter in 2014. At the time, even the site’s staffers had no idea what was going on. The Pirate Bay eventually recovered from this second raid too, but by then something had clearly changed. The torrent site now seems content with just being there. Over the years the site simplified its setup by removing the tracker, introducing magnet links, and further decentralizing its setup. The ability to comment was also sacrificed at some point, and user registrations were closed for years, although there’s some progress on that front now. The Mods and Admins Today’s manual user registrations are processed by a dedicated moderator team, which also ensures that the site remains free of spam and malware. This team of volunteers is separate from the site’s ‘operator’ and many have been in that role for over a decade. Earlier today, Pirate Bay admin Spud17 posted a message in the Pirate Bay forum to celebrate the 20th anniversary. “Most of the current TPB Crew have been here for well over 10 years, many for much, much longer, and we’re proud to be associated with the world’s most iconic torrent site,” she notes. “We volunteer our time freely to help keep the site clean, nuking the fakes and malware to kingdom come, and help edit/move/delete torrents as and when uploaders request help in the forum’s Account Issues subforum.” Crypto Miner and Token After two decades, TPB still manages to make headlines on occasion. For example, when yet another country orders Internet providers to block the site, or when it suddenly decides to ‘deploy’ its users to mine cryptocurrency. The last major project was announced in 2021 when The Pirate Bay released its very own ‘crypto’ token out of the blue. There was no official whitepaper for these PirateTokens, but the torrent site envisioned the ‘coin’ being used to access VIP content or donate to uploaders. These plans never came to fruition and the token price soon entered a freefall. After a few months, the official token announcement disappeared from the site as well, leaving token holders with worthless digital memorabilia. The Pirate Bay itself isn’t going anywhere it seems. The events listed above are really just a fraction of events spanning 20 extraordinary years. The question now is whether the site will survive until its 25th anniversary. — Note: The 20-year anniversary logo was created by theSEMAR. Source

To combat spam and scammers, The Pirate Bay closed its doors to new members in May 2019. This temporary measure stayed in place much longer than expected but, starting this week, the notorious torrent site has reopened registrations. There's one crucial caveat; prospective members must be manually approved by the site's moderators. When The Pirate Bay launched nearly 20 years ago, its main goal was to become a bastion of free and uncensored information. The site categorically rejects takedown requests from copyright holders and allows anyone to upload almost anything. Since its early days, The Pirate Bay has always been free to use and open to the public at large. Those who wanted to share files only had to register an account, which was easy enough. Registrations Closed to Stop Spam The last sentence is in the past tense, as user registrations were effectively disabled four years ago. The last ‘new’ user was added to the torrent site on May 22, 2019, and, after that, there were no signs that registrations would reopen anytime soon. The TPB team initially said that registrations had been closed to stop floods of malware torrents. This type of abuse was a major problem for the site’s moderators who asked the main operator to temporarily disable registrations. The plan was to address the problem by putting a limit on the number of torrents users could upload in a given timeframe. That would prevent hundreds of spam torrents from being uploaded at once, so TPB could accept new users again and continue business as usual. This temporary fix stayed in place for four years but this week, registrations were opened once again. The recent closure of ‘rival’ torrent site RARBG played a major role in this development. RARBG’s demise took out a major supplier of new torrents. There are currently only a few public torrent sites where users can register, so the TPB moderators were concerned that a generation of potential uploaders would be lost. Manually Approved Registrations The team shared their concerns with TPB operator “Winston” who came up with a solution that was officially deployed a few hours ago. New Pirate Bay registrations are not completely automated. TPB administrator Spud17 informs TorrentFreak that new users must apply for an account at the official SuprBay forums, where moderators will manually create accounts using a new tool. This hands-on approach will help to prevent scammers and spammers from flooding the site. Users will be able to register directly in future but all accounts will still have to be approved before they are activated. “For those who have waited years to upload, they now have the chance to get an account,” Spud17 says, pointing to the SuprBay thread. “Whether they want to upload niche stuff every now and again, or be one of the next big scene uploaders – all are welcome. Except for the nitwits who flood the site with crap, but we’ll just nuke their arses.” Limited # Uploads The Pirate Bay has shown signs of deterioration in recent years. In addition to closed registrations, the comment sections under each torrent have been disabled for years and are not expected to come back anytime soon. Whether new users will trigger an inflow of more content has yet to be seen. New accounts are limited to 50 uploads per day but those who plan to be more active than that can request an exception. “Should anyone have designs on becoming a prolific scene uploader, you can request the limit be lifted once your account is established,” Spud17 writes. After years of legal trouble, it appears that The Pirate Bay has entered calmer waters. There haven’t been any prolonged outages like we have seen in the past. That said, the site will always remain a top target for law enforcement and rightsholders, so a sudden storm is not unthinkable. Source

Most people use search engines to answer any questions they may have. Interestingly, Microsoft's Bing reverses this role too, questioning users on all sorts of topics; what their favorite torrent client is, what type of movies they stream on the pirate site Fmovies, or how they manage to keep themselves safe while using The Pirate Bay. The success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT inspired Microsoft to add more AI features to its Bing search engine. The idea is that this will allow users to receive more elaborate answers compared to an ordinary list of links. Whether this strategy will pay off has yet to be seen, but in our tests, something else stood out. People are not the only ones asking questions. Bing itself is quite interested to hear what its users think too. Bing’s Pirate Bay Poll As expected, a regular keyword search for “Pirate Bay” returns a lot of information about the site. In addition to the correct URL, which was previously absent, Bing also lists an intriguing poll. Specifically, it wants to know how people effectively protect themselves while using The Pirate Bay. Poll is in the bottom right corner Bing provides its users with four options to choose from, including the use of a VPN, a proxy, the Tor browser, or a dedicated IP address. Depending on one’s definition of ‘safe’ a VPN is the most obvious answer, which is also reflected in the results. This poll has little to do with ChatGPT of course but it is possible that Bing somehow uses the results to improve its general search functionality. Or perhaps these questions are generated by AI? As a small experiment, we decided to ask Bing the same question it asked us (What is the most effective way to protect yourself while using The Pirate Bay?). And indeed, a VPN does up as the answer in a massive font. Torrent Clients, Fmovies, RARBG, and The Dark Web User polls aren’t exclusive to The Pirate Bay. There are several other file-sharing and piracy-related topics where other polls appear. When we type BitTorrent, for example, we’re asked about our favorite torrent client. The options are rather limited but with 57%, uTorrent is the clear winner, followed by qBitTorrent with nearly a quarter of the votes. When we search for Fmovies, one of the most popular pirate streaming sites, Bing suddenly wants to know what movie genres we watch most often on the site. Here, ‘action’ is the public’s favorite with nearly half of the votes. Meanwhile, RARBG’s demise has yet to be reflected in Bing’s data. The search engine mentions a copycat site as the top result and still asks whether people think that a VPN is necessary to access RARBG. Finally, there’s also a poll about the dark web, but perhaps it’s best if we don’t mention that explicitly. Bing Asks Users How They Protect Themselves On The Pirate Bay

The six-part "The Pirate Bay" series will start filming this fall, a year later than expected. The production is in the hands of B-Reel Films, a renowned studio with offices in Sweden and L.A., and the 'rights' for the project are already being sold globally. The Pirate Bay's founders won't see a penny and inform us that they are not in any way involved. Two years ago, reports began to surface about a new six-part TV-series on The Pirate Bay’s turbulent history. The project was initially scheduled to start last year but after an apparent delay, filming is now expected to begin this fall. Pirate Bay TV Series The inception and early years of The Pirate Bay are definitely a worthy subject for a series. While most pirate sites hid in the shadows, Pirate Bay’s founders were public figures, who openly taunted the entertainment industries. Speaking with Variety, head-writer Piotr Marciniak explains that his screenplay is based on a wealth of archive material as well as interviews with the site’s founders. “It’s a classic rise and fall story, a tragedy about flying too close to the sun, but also a timeless story of a generational conflict,” Marcimiak said. The people involved in the “The Pirate Bay” series are clearly looking forward to getting the project running. The production is in the hands of B-Reel Films, working for the Swedish broadcaster SVT, while the American distribution company Dynamic Television scooped up worldwide rights. Selling The Pirate Bay ‘Rights’ Indeed, the rights to The Pirate Bay series are actively traded. The same will likely happen to pirated copies of the episodes when they’re illicitly posted to The Pirate Bay, but it’s unclear whether the rightsholders have plans to crack down on unauthorized sharing. It’s nonetheless interesting to read that the story about a site that rebelled against the exploitation of copyrights, is being copyrighted and sold off. Would The Pirate Bay founders approve of that? Are they even involved? The Pirate Bay series aims to tell the history of the notorious pirate site and co-founders Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde, and Gottfrid Svartholm, but none appear to be actively involved. Founders Deny Involvement TorrentFreak spoke with both Sunde and Neij, who both confirm they were not interviewed for the upcoming series, even though it aims to document an important and hectic part of their lives. “Nope, they didn’t interview me for the TV series,” Fredrik says. “Also. I’m not sure who they bought the rights from… They didn’t pay me at least.” “And I know Anakata would have had nothing to do with it,” Fredrik adds, referring to co-founder Gottfrid, who prefers to live his life away from the public spotlight in recent years. Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde previously said that he was flattered by the idea of a Pirate Bay series, adding that it’s also a bit nerve-wracking. This week, however, Sunde confirmed that he is in no way involved either. Pirate Bay’s co-founder actually discussed the TV project idea with the show’s writer Piotr Marciniak a few years ago but declined to sell his story. Instead, he was, and still is, working on a potentially competing project. Later on, Sunde also met with the series’ director and someone from the production company B-Reel Films, who told him that they had no one from the Pirate Bay team who wanted to cooperate. That didn’t convince him to change his mind, however. F*ck Off As mentioned earlier, the Variety piece mentions that the upcoming Pirate Bay series draws from key interviews with Sunde and Svartholm. However, the Pirate Bay co-founder says that he wasn’t interviewed for the series. “I have not given any deep interview, and when I met with them they said that Gottfrid had told them to fuck off. Which sounds more true to his character..,” Peter Sunde tells us. We also reached out to B-Reel Films to hear their side of the story, but the company didn’t immediately reply. However, based on the comments from Sunde and Neij it is safe to conclude that they are not in any way involved. Of course, the rightsholders of The Pirate Bay TV series are free to send some of the revenues to the founders of the site, who ultimately paid for their ideals with their freedom. Sunde doesn’t expect to get paid anytime soon, however. “Movie studios moved to Hollywood since they didn’t want to pay for stories. They were the original pirates,” Sunde says. “It’s been ironic to see them going after pirates in court for years and even more ironic to see them pirate the pirate story. Hoping it will turn out nice so I can pirate a copy of it. Maybe I’ll get sued for downloading the story about us.” TPB Founders Are Not Involved in the “The Pirate Bay” TV Series

Anti-piracy coalition ACE continues its crackdown on pirate sites with a series of new DMCA subpoenas. The targets of the latest wave include The Pirate Bay. ACE hopes that Cloudflare can help to identify the operators of the notorious torrent site. Whether this quest will result in any actionable information is unknown. The Pirate Bay has been around for nearly two decades, which is quite an achievement considering the immense legal pressure it has faced over the years. Swedish police tried to shut the site down, twice, raiding dozens of servers. This ultimate goal failed but local authorities did prosecute the site’s three co-founders, who all served time in prison for their involvement. The notorious torrent site stood tall in the midst of this turmoil and continues to operate from thepiratebay.org until this day. While it is no longer the largest piracy site online, anti-piracy forces haven’t forgotten about it. Pirate Bay Targeted in New Subpoena Wave This week, we spotted yet another attempt to uncover the current operators. Through the Motion Picture Association, the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) requested a DMCA subpoena at the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. These subpoenas are not uncommon and are typically directed at third-party intermediaries, Cloudflare in this case. The Pirate Bay is a Cloudflare customer and through the court, ACE requests all useful information the California company has on its illustrious client. “The subpoena requires that you provide information concerning the individuals offering infringing material described in the attached notice,” ACE informs Cloudflare. “[Y]ou are required to disclose […] information sufficient to identify the infringers. This would include the individuals’ names, physical addresses, IP addresses, telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, payment information, account updates and account history.” These DMCA subpoenas don’t require any judicial oversight. In most cases, they are swiftly signed off by a court clerk. The legal paperwork is then sent to Cloudflare, which typically replies with all relevant information it has on file. Actionable Intel? Whether this will result in any useful information for ACE is hard to tell. The Pirate Bay knows all too well that these subpoenas exist so likely anticipated this request. After all, ACE targeted the site with a similar request three years ago. In addition to The Pirate Bay, ACE subpoenas target a variety of other domain names as well. These include thesoap2day.com, cuevana2.biz, seriesflix.is, and more than a dozen others. The domain tor.cat appears to be an odd entry, as that’s merely a redirect to a .onion domain on the dark web. The .onion domain belongs to DonTorrent, which previously taunted ACE by listing the anti-piracy coalition’s boss Jan Van Voorn as the site’s owner. Van Voorn and his team hope that their new subpoena requests will help to pinpoint the owners of the listed sites. While results are not guaranteed, this strategy has proven to be effective in the past, at least in some cases. “Disclosure requests have been a very effective way for ACE to expand its investigations,” Van Voorn previously told us. “Through these processes we target all relevant intermediaries that have customer information that can help us identify the operator of a pirate site or service, including hosting providers, payment processors, advertising networks, etcetera.” Fabricated Data The information in Cloudflare’s administration isn’t always useful. Many operators of pirate sites and services use fabricated or inaccurate details to sign up, but ACE says that it often gets something useful out of it. “While the information obtained does not always instantly identify the individual running a pirate operation, there are almost always leads we can follow that either give us investigative insights or that help confirm prior suspicions.” Even if the information turns out to be useless for direct enforcement purposes, it can still prove helpful. After all, it can help ACE to argue that online intermediaries should have stricter Know Your Business Customer (KYBC) requirements. — Copies of the subpoena requests filed this week are available here (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). A full list of all the mentioned domain names is available below. – thesoap2day.com – tor.cat – thepiratebay.org – cuevana2.biz – cuevana3.ai – cuevana3.mu – compucalitv.com – seriesflix.is – filmisub.com – filmi7.com – fmoviesfree.to – topflix.fm – filmeshdtorrent.com – photocall.tv – multicanais.vc – megacamais.com – furiaflix.net – moviehdapkdownload.com – download.teatvapkdownload.com – tv.tvzon.tv ACE Wants Cloudflare to ‘Expose’ The Pirate Bay’s Operators

The Pirate Bay’s Crypto ‘Pirate Token’ Slowly Fades Away The Pirate Bay surprised friend and foe last month by promoting its own cryptocurrency, the Pirate Token. The timing and execution of the launch were far from perfect and, thus far, interest has been underwhelming. The token's market cap has been decimated and all references to the coin have disappeared from the official site. It’s no secret that The Pirate Bay is into cryptocurrencies. The site started accepting Bitcoin donations in 2013 and later added Litecoin and Monero. The Pirate Bay was also the first large website to start mining cryptocurrency by using the computing resources of its visitors. This was a controversial move, but one that was followed by many other sites. It nonetheless came as a surprise when the torrent site started promoting a “Pirate Token” out of the blue last month. While we predicted this type of move years ago, the release wasn’t initially backed by any information. Mysterious Token Launch The only hint was an image that linked people to Pancakeswap, a decentralized exchange where people can trade cryptocurrencies from user-generated liquidity pools. This includes Pirate Tokens, but what these tokens were for wasn’t immediately clear. Even TPB staffers were left in the dark, noting that the site’s operator has “a history of jumping on questionable fads.” Only after the news started circulating in the press did more information become available. The Pirate Bay added a “token” page to the site where it explained that it was a “soft launch”. In the future, the token could possibly be used to donate to moderators and uploaders, or access VIP content in the future. At that point, the Pirate Token had a market cap of nearly a billion dollars, which adds up to a lot of donations. However, the person behind the coin still held over 99.9% in their possession. That position remains unchanged today. Underwhelming Looking at the activity over the past month, we have to conclude that the interest in the Pirate Token is rather underwhelming. Not just that, interest is also fading, just like the price. When we first mentioned the project, one coin was selling for nearly $10. Today, this has dropped 80%, with the price currently sitting at $2. The broader crypto crash certainly hasn’t helped here, but looking at the number of transactions, there simply isn’t much activity. At the time of writing there are 487 Pirate Token holders, which is fewer than a month ago. The number of transactions per day has tanked as well. There were hundreds of daily transfers earlier but that has now dropped to an average of one per day. Token Page is Gone Most telling, perhaps, is that the “token” page that was linked on The Pirate Bay homepage has now disappeared (archived copy). There is no longer any reference to the token on the site, as if it no longer exists. The coin’s market cap is still a sizable $200 million at the time of writing but, needless to say, its future is quite uncertain. Hoping to find out more, we reached out to the official contact address for the Pirate Token weeks ago. That email remains unanswered. It is certainly possible that the coin will make a revival in the future, but we wouldn’t bet on it. The Pirate Bay’s Crypto ‘Pirate Token’ Slowly Fades Away

The Pirate Bay continues to receive a steady stream of Bitcoin donations. Over the past year, these added up to roughly $10 per day, which isn't a life-changing amount. However, if the site had kept all bitcoins received over the years, it would now be sitting on a pile of more than $6 million in Bitcoin. In 2013, several popular torrent sites added the option to donate via Bitcoin. The Pirate Bay was one of the first to jump on board and within a day the site’s users had donated a total of 5.5 bitcoins. At the time one bitcoin was worth $125. This means that the site earned roughly $700 in 24 hours, which looked promising. At today’s exchange rate we can even call it spectacular, but more on that later. While Pirate Bay users quickly embraced Bitcoin, copyright holders were rather concerned. The RIAA even informed the U.S. Trade Representative about this looming threat that could make it harder to crack down on pirate sites. “In April 2013, the site started accepting donations from the public by Bitcoin, a digital currency, which operates using peer-to-peer technology,” the RIAA wrote, adding that “there are no central authority or banks involved which makes it very difficult to seize or trace Bitcoin funds.” As time went by, the TPB donation rate started to drop off from its early highs. In the years that followed the daily average hovered around $10 worth of bitcoin per day. The torrent site also added Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash, but those didn’t really move the needle. Earlier this month, the Bitcoin Cash option was swapped for Ethereum. In addition, The Pirate Bay added a new Bitcoin address to its homepage, which prompted us to take a look at the current donation rate. After reviewing dozens of transactions that came in over the past year, we found that the total amount in donations was roughly 0.07 BTC. This, once again, is the equivalent of roughly $10 per day. The average donation amount per day is nowhere near the hundreds of dollars that came in on the first day. However, Bitcoin has become much more valuable over time. The $125 from 2013 has grown to more than $50,000 at the time of writing. This means that if The Pirate Bay has HODLed all the donations, it’s sitting on a massive pile of cryptocurrency today. Between 2013 and 2015, Custos Media Technologies estimated that the torrent site earned a massive 126.64 in Bitcoin donations, and a year later we reported that another 8.21 had been added. From 2017 onwards the Bitcoin price rose quickly and roughly one whole coin came in since. Based on this quick calculation, which isn’t exhaustive or perfect, we can conclude that The Pirate Bay has earned about 135 in Bitcoin donations over the years. If the people behind the site have kept all these coins, which is highly unlikely, this would now be worth $6.8 million. That would translate to more than $2,000 per day over the past 8 years. The 5.56 BTC in donations that came in on the first day back in 2013 is worth more than $278,000 today. If anything, this hypothetic windfall shows how well Bitcoin’s value has grown over the years. The same can’t be said for The Pirate Bay’s own TPB coin launched earlier this year, which has significantly gone down in value since. — *The calculations above are based on transactions to TPB’s public Bitcoin wallets. There is no way to verify that these all come from outsiders. The Pirate Bay Earned Millions in Bitcoin Donations (If it HODLed)

ThePirateBay.com has been listed for sale this week. The domain was bought at an auction last year after The Pirate Bay team accidentally let it expire. The buyer initially planned to turn it into a legal download portal but that never got off the ground. They're now willing to let it go for $38,000, but interested parties can rent it too. The Pirate Bay is arguably the best-known pirate site on the web. The iconic pirate ship logo is notorious around the world and more than 18 years after it first appeared online, the site still attracts millions of visitors. Pirate Bay Domains Expired During most of its history, the site has operated from ThePirateBay.org domain. However, the official TPB-team also owned ThePirateBay.com and PirateBay.org. The past tense refers to the fact that ‘someone’ didn’t renew these domains last year. The domains were never actively used but they clearly have value. They were picked up by Dropcatch.com – a service that specializes in securing ‘lapsed’ domains – and were subsequently put up for auction. PirateBay.org sold for $50,000 and ThePiratebay.com brought in a healthy $35,150. This is a lot of money for a domain name and many people wondered what the motivation of the anonymous buyers was. Soon after PirateBay.org was sold it started promoting the ‘Torrent Man’ movie. This appeared to be a link-building stunt after which the domain was redirected to a Pirate Bay proxy service. ThePirateBay.com followed a different path. After it was bought at auction it was parked at Sedo and monetized through an advertising feed. This isn’t uncommon for domains that have a reasonable amount of type-in traffic. ThePirateBay.com is For Sale This week, however, PirateBay.com was listed for sale again. The seller is asking $38,000, which is slightly more than what was paid last year. TorrentFreak managed to track down the seller who agreed to comment on the record, provided he remains anonymous. We were interested in the decision to sell the domain but also wanted to know why he paid tens of thousands of dollars for it last year. The decision, perhaps unexpectedly, was profit-driven. The seller – let’s call him Antonio – never planned to enter the piracy business. He merely picked it up for the traffic. “I knew it would receive a very large volume of type-in traffic from people mistakenly typing thepiratebay.com instead of thepiratebay.org,” Antonio tells us. Legal Download Site Since the ‘Pirate Bay’ audience is generally interested in downloading things, Antonio hoped to turn it into a legal download site. That would bring in more revenue than a standard advertising feed. However, Antonio never managed to get that off the ground. And since others may have a better use for it, he decided to put it up for sale again. “I had big plans to develop a legal download site similar to softonic.com or download.cnet.com, but due to other commitments/projects, I’ve not had the time. Although it earns pretty well being parked at Sedo, I think parking it is a waste for such a valuable domain, so I decided to list it for sale.” Antonio didn’t mention how much revenue the domain brought in over the past year. However, it seems unlikely that it made thousands of dollars a month, or else it wouldn’t be listed for sale. Interestingly, people who are interested in ThePirateBay.com don’t have to buy it outright. If they don’t have that cash on hand, renting is an option as well for ‘just’ $7,000 per month. ThePirateBay.com Goes Up For Sale, But Renting is an Option Too

The Pirate Bay has moved to a new onion domain as the old one will cease to be supported by the official Tor client in a few weeks. The new v3 domain is more secure and the TPB-team encourages users to make the switch. Bookmarking the domain may be wise as well, as v3 onion domains have 56 characters. When The Pirate Bay first came online during the summer of 2003, its main point of access was thepiratebay.org. Since then the site has burnt through more than a dozen domains, trying to evade seizures or other legal threats. The torrent site eventually returned to the .org domain which remains the official home today. While there are hundreds of Pirate Bay proxies online, none of these are operated by the TPB-team. Pirate Bay’s .Onion The only official backup address for The Pirate Bay is its .onion domain. This is accessible over the Tor network, which is often referred to as the ‘dark web’. The Pirate Bay has had an onion domain for years but in recent weeks, many visitors have started to receive warnings. The Pirate Bay has been using an old v2 .onion domain which is less secure. The latest version of the Tor browser started warning visitors to these domains last month and later this year they will stop resolving in the stable release of the official Tor client. The switchover to the more secure v3 .onion domains has been in the works since 2015. The Pirate Bay is relatively late to the party, but it eventually made the change a few days ago. “With the tor project V2 Onion Services Deprecation many visitors are getting warnings visiting the Pirate Bay v2 onion address,” TPB admin Moe notes, encouraging visitors to update their bookmarks for the new v3 address. Bookmark Required A bookmark will come in handy indeed, as v3 onion addresses are expanded to 56 characters which makes them pretty hard to memorize. The first nine letters of TPB’s new onion domain are not really a challenge, but what follows is pretty random. piratebayo3klnzokct3wt5yyxb2vpebbuyjl7m623iaxmqhsd52coid.onion Accessibility is Key Some people may find it odd that The Pirate Bay didn’t support the more secure v3 earlier. However, there wasn’t much urgency for the torrent site, which doesn’t really use the .onion domain for its cryptographic advantages. The main advantage for The Pirate Bay is that a .onion domain can’t be seized or blocked by outsiders unless the site’s infrastructure is compromised. This makes it possible to easily circumvent site blocking measures. There is not really much of a privacy advantage for people who use Pirate Bay’s .onion domain to download torrents. While ISPs may not be able to see what pages they visit, their residential IP address is still publicly broadcasted when files are downloading through a torrent client. The Pirate Bay Switches to a Brand New V3 Onion Domain

The Pirate Bay Remains Resilient, 15 Years After The Raid Fifteen years ago today The Pirate Bay was raided by dozens of Swedish police officers. The entertainment industries hoped that this would permanently shut down the site, but that was not the case. Instead, the police action inadvertently helped to create one of the most resilient and iconic websites on the Internet. There are a handful of traditions we have at TorrentFreak, and remembering the first raid on The Pirate Bay is one of them. Not only was it the first major story we covered, it also had a significant impact on how the piracy ecosystem evolved over the years. It also changed the lives of the site’s co-founders, who were eventually convicted. While a lot has changed over the years, The Pirate Bay is still around and there are no signs that this will change anytime soon. What many people may not realize, however, is that without a few essential keystrokes in the site’s early years, the site would be a distant memory today. This is what happened. May 31, 2006, less than three years after The Pirate Bay was founded, 65 Swedish police officers entered a datacenter in Stockholm. The Swedish police had instructions to shut down the Pirate Bay’s servers as part of a criminal probe, following pressure from the US Government. As the police were about to enter the datacenter, Pirate Bay co-founders Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij knew that something wasn’t quite right. In the months prior, both men noticed they were being tailed by private investigators, but this time their servers were the target. At around 10:00 in the morning, Gottfrid told Fredrik that there were police officers at their office. He asked his colleague to get down to the co-location facility and get rid of the ‘incriminating evidence’ although none of it – whatever it was – was related to The Pirate Bay. A Crucial Backup As Fredrik was leaving, he suddenly realized that the problems might be linked to their torrent tracker. Just in case, he decided to make a full backup of the site. When he later arrived at the co-location facility, those concerns turned out to be justified. There were dozens of police officers floating around taking away dozens of servers, most of which belonged to clients unrelated to The Pirate Bay. Footage from The Pirate Bay raid In the days that followed, it became clear that Fredrik’s decision to create a backup of the site was probably the most pivotal moment in the site’s history. Because of this backup, Fredrik and the rest of the Pirate Bay team managed to resurrect the site within three days. “The Police Bay” Of course, the entire situation was handled with the mockery TPB had become known for. Unimpressed, the site’s operators renamed the site “The Police Bay”, complete with a new logo shooting cannonballs at Hollywood. A few days later this logo was replaced by a Phoenix, a reference to the site rising from its digital ashes. Logos after the raid Instead of shutting it down, the raid propelled The Pirate Bay into the mainstream press, not least due to its swift resurrection. The publicity also triggered a huge traffic spike for TPB, exactly the opposite effect Hollywood had hoped for. The US Pushed Sweden Although the raid and the subsequent criminal investigation were carried out in Sweden, the US Government played a major role behind the scenes. For many years the scale of that involvement was unknown. However, information obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request in 2017 helped to fill in some blanks. The trail started with a cable sent from the US Embassy in Sweden to Washington in November 2005, roughly six months before the Pirate Bay raid. The Embassy wrote that Hollywood’s MPA met with US Ambassador Bivins and, separately, with the Swedish State Secretary of Justice. The Pirate Bay was one of the top agenda items. “The MPA is particularly concerned about PirateBay, the world‘s largest Torrent file-sharing tracker. According to the MPA and based on Embassy’s follow-up discussions, the Justice Ministry is very interested in a constructive dialogue with the US. on these concerns,” the cable read. From the US Embassy Cable The Embassy explained that Hollywood would like Sweden to take action against a big player such as The Pirate Bay. “We have yet to see a ‘big fish’ tried – something the MPA badly wants to see, particularly in light of the fact that Sweden hosts the largest Bit Torrent file-sharing tracker in the world, ‘Pirate-Bay’, which openly flaunts IPR,” the cable writer commented. Fast forward half a year and indeed, 65 police officers were ready to take The Pirate Bay’s servers offline. While there is no written evidence that the US officials were actively involved in planning the investigation or raid, indirectly they played a major role. TPB Takedown Award This is also backed up by further evidence. In a cable sent in April 2007, the Embassy nominated one of its employees, whose name is redacted, for the State Department’s Foreign Service National (FSN) of the year award. Again, The Pirate Bay case was cited. “REDACTED skillful outreach directly led to a bold decision by Swedish law enforcement authorities to raid Pirate Bay and shut it down. This was recognized as a major achievement in Washington in furthering U.S. efforts to combat Internet piracy worldwide.” We don’t know if the employee in question received his or her award. In hindsight, however, the raid did very little to deter piracy. The Aftermath The swift and deviant comeback turned the site’s founders into heroes for many. The site made headline news around the world and in Stockholm, people were waving pirate flags in the streets, a sentiment that benefited the newly founded Pirate Party as well. The raid eventually resulted in negative consequences for the site’s founders. It was the start of a criminal investigation, which led to a trial, and prison sentences for several of the site’s key players. This became another turning point. Many of the people who were involved from the early days decided to cut their ties with the site, which was handed over to a more anonymous group. The outspokenness of the early years is gone today and it’s a mystery who currently pulls the strings. What we do know is that The Pirate Bay is still seen as a piracy icon by many. And the current operator will probably do everything he can to keep the site online, just like on May 31, 2006. Source

This November, The Pirate Bay will make its debut as a TV series on Swedish public television. The dramatized version of the site's history will be a trip down memory lane for those who followed the site closely over the years. This includes the 'classic' responses to legal threats, one of which features prominently in a just-launched teaser. The inception and early years of The Pirate Bay are an intriguing chapter of the Internet’s history. While most pirate site operators hid in the shadows, Pirate Bay’s founders were public figures who openly taunted the entertainment industries. This chapter didn’t end as planned for Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde, and Gotffrid Svartholm, who were eventually sentenced to prison. By then, however, they had already sparked a digital and political revolution, the impact of which is still felt today. Some have argued that without the meteoric rise of the notorious torrent site, the entertainment industries would not have embraced services such as Netflix and Spotify so easily. Pirate Bay TV Series A few years ago, news broke that The Pirate Bay story was being turned into a TV series. Written by Piotr Marciniak and directed by Jens Sjögren, who also made the “I am Zlatan” documentary, production was in the hands of B-Reel Films, working for the Swedish broadcaster SVT. American distribution company Dynamic Television scooped up worldwide rights. As far as we know, international deals have not yet been announced. The Swedish premiere on November 8 is coming closer, however, and a few days ago SVT released an official teaser. TPB Teaser .embed-container { position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden; max-width: 100%; } .embed-container iframe, .embed-container object, .embed-container embed { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; } The founders of The Pirate Bay – Anakata, Brokep and Tiamo – are played by Arvid Swedrup, Simon Greger Carlsson and Willjam Lempling. The teaser doesn’t give away much, but it’s interesting that one of The Pirate Bay’s infamous responses to legal threats features prominently. The teaser quotes from Anakata’s response to a letter from DreamWorks, written twenty years ago. The movie company sent a DMCA takedown notice requesting the removal of a torrent for the film Shrek 2, but the reply was not what they had hoped for. “As you may or may not be aware, Sweden is not a state in the United States of America. Sweden is a country in northern Europe. Unless you figured it out by now, US law does not apply here,” Anakata wrote. “It is the opinion of us and our lawyers that you are ……. morons, and that you should please go sodomize yourself with retractable batons.” Anakata’s response to DreamWorks TPB Founders Not Involved The response was public information and made it into the series. Whether there will be any new revelations has yet to be seen, however, as none of the site’s founders were actively involved in production. Instead, the producers used interviews with other people involved, plus the vast amount of public information available on the Internet. That includes the infamous responses to legal threats. Time will tell how the producers and director have decided to tell this story. Production took place in Stockholm, Sweden, but also ventured to other countries, including Chile and Thailand, where Fredrik Neij was arrested and paraded in front of the press in 2014. Pirating The Pirate Bay? One interesting side story is the fact that the “rights” to the Pirate Bay series are now being ‘sold’. As mentioned earlier, Dynamic Television has the global distribution rights but they have yet to announce any international deals. For now, it seems that ‘pirate’ releases may beat the official channels in quite a few countries, as unauthorized copies of the series are likely to surface on The Pirate Bay this fall; if only to make a point. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to the makers and rightsholders, of course. We don’t expect many complaints either. After all, The Pirate Bay’s notorious track record is why these rightsholders are generating revenue today. And to bring things full-circle, they’re not sharing any of the money. Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every single day for many years. 2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of July): 3,313 news posts