BIOS: Technology Means Business

The Pirate Bay is an Internet site that bills itself as the world’s ‘largest BitTorrent tracker’. It also serves as an index for torrent files that it tracks.

One of the world’s most-visited Internet sites, it boasts a unique audience of around 1.2 million visitors per day.

It was started by the Swedish anti-copyright organisation Piratbyrån (‘The Pirate Bureau’) in early 2004, but since October 2004 it has been a separate organisation. The site is currently run by Gottfrid ‘Anakata’ Svartholm and Fredrik ‘TiAMO’ Neij.

As strong opponents of copyrights, they have coined the term, kopimist, from the root kopimi, meaning copy-me. They have also joined together with other kopimist groups such as the Armed Coalition Forces of the Internets (ACFI) to promote the anti-copyright philosophy through various political actions.

The Web site, now located in Stockholm, Sweden, is hosted on Linux servers running a custom HTTPd developed by Svartholm. On 1 June 2005, The Pirate Bay updated its Web site in an effort to reduce bandwidth usage, which was reported to be at 2000 HTTP requests per second on each of the four Web servers, as well as to create a more user friendly interface for the front-end of the Web site.

However, it all went bad on 31 May 2006 when the site’s servers were raided by Swedish police, taking it offline until 3 June, when it came online with new hosting in the Netherlands. Backup servers are planned to be put up both in Belgium and Russia. On 14 June 2006 The Pirate Bay was back in Sweden due to ‘pressure from the Department of Justice [in the Netherlands].’

Upon reopening on 3 June its number of visitors has doubled, the increased popularity attributed to greater exposure through the recent media coverage. This has in turn increased the advertising revenues to the founders Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij. The advertisements now generate about 75,000 USD per month according to speculations by Swedish newspaper SvD.

This is where is gets really funny. On 9 January 2007, The Pirate Bay announced that it was seeking donations in order to buy the Principality of Sealand, to claim a country of its own. It later announced that it would be instead buying its own island, as well as supporting The FreeNation Foundation in its plans to do so.

This short film on the king of peer-to-peer sites gives a great insight into the politics involved with the site’s recent (and unlawful) police ‘investigation’. It's also full of great proverbs, such as ‘Behind every great fortune is an even greater crime’ and ‘When the winds of change come, some people are building shelters and others are building windmills’.

Viva La Revolution...