OK The Pirate Bay
The Pirate Bay
The Pirate Bay, promoted as the nations largest and most resilient BitTorrent website is the largest torrent website currently on the web. The domain was founded in 2003 by the Swedish think tank Piratbyran and allows users to search, download, and contribute torrent files. These torrent files create peer-to-peer file sharing using the BitTorrent algorithm. Due to the nature of the files shared, the website has fallen under many ethical and legal concerns that even led some countries to censor the website altogether. Despite the problems and issues with copyright and piracy, the website is still fully alive and active today.
History
The Pirate Bay was initially founded in September of 2003 by Swedish anti-copyright Piratbyran, otherwise known as ""The Piracy Bureau."" It is a web portal that functions on the BitTorrent network, allowing for users to download copyrighted content free of charge. The founders of the site are Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij. The Pirate Bay hit the mainstream in 2006 after the website was shutdown for three days due to raid of Stockholm Data Center. After coming back online the website attracted more users than ever and was watched even closer by law enforcement. In 2012 The Pirate Bay moved to magnet links and stopped offering torrent files for larger torrents. This allowed the website to be able to be run with proxies. Since The Pirate Bay is censored in some nations the proxies allowed IP addresses to be masked and thus brought in millions of new users.
Legal Issues
As a result of the ability to download copyrighted content, the website has been at the center of many legal and regulatory actions. Various nations have went as far as censoring the website all together. Netherlands placed orders on Dutch Internet service providers requiring them to block access to the Pirate Bay entirely(citiation). In the US, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) bills were passed to help stop internet piracy. Under SOPA, it was made a criminal offence to be caught streaming copyrighted content, and as a result of its implications was widely opposed by many of the internet's biggest players, including Wikipedia and Google. Due to this, the bill was postponed until a wider agreement on it's consequences could be agreed upon. These bills were created in support of those concerned about the affect of internet piracy on the US economy.
