The Pirate Bay is a Swedish website that indexes and tracks BitTorrent (.torrent) files. It bills itself as "the world's largest BitTorrent tracker and is ranked as the 110th most popular website by Alexa Internet. The website is primarily funded with advertisements shown next to torrent listings. Initially established in November 2003 by the Swedish anti-copyrightPiratbyrån (The Piracy Bureau) the website is run as a separate organization since October 2004. The website is run by Gottfrid Svartholm (anakata) and Fredrik Neij (TiAMO), who have both been charged with "assisting in making copyrighted content available" due to their involvement in The Pirate Bay.
On 31 May 2006, the website's servers in Stockholm were raided by Swedish police, causing it to go offline for three days. to the Los Angeles Times, The Pirate Bay is "one of the world's largest facilitators of illegal downloading", and "the most visible member of a burgeoning international anti-copyright-or pro-piracy-movement". On 15 November 2008, The Pirate Bay announced that it had reached over 25 million unique peers(Downloaders). The Pirate Bay has about 3,600,000 registered users(including me).
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) wrote in a press release: "Since filing a criminal complaint in Sweden in November 2004, the film industry has worked vigorously with Swedish and U.S. government officials in Sweden to shut this illegal website down." MPAA CEO Dan Glickman also stated, "Intellectual property theft is a problem for film industries all over the world and we are glad that the local government in Sweden has helped stop The Pirate Bay from continuing to enable rampant copyright theft on the Internet." The MPAA press release set forth its justification for the raid and claimed that there were three arrests; however, the individuals were not actually arrested, only held for questioning. The release also reprinted John G. Malcolm's allegation that The Pirate Bay was making money from the distribution of copyrighted material, a criticism denied by the Pirate Bay.
The Pirate Bay has been involved in a number of lawsuits, both as the plaintiff and as the defendant. On 17 April 2009, Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Carl Lundström were found guilty of assistance to copyright infringement and sentenced to one year in prison and payment of a fine of 30 million SEK (app. 3,620,000 USD), after a trial of nine days. The defendants have appealed against the verdict and the judge was accused of bias. Despite the trial the website remained unaffected until 24 August 2009.
On 30 June 2009 Swedish advertising company Global Gaming Factory X AB announced their intention to buy the site for SEK 60 million(approximately $8,350,500 USD) (30m SEK in cash, 30m SEK in GGF stock). The transaction is planned to take place in September 2009. The Pirate Bay founders stated that the profits from the sale would be placed in an offshore account where it would be used to fund projects pertaining to 'freedom of speech, freedom of information, and the openness of the Internet
On 24 August 2009 a Swedish court ordered the upstream provider Black Internet to block traffic to the site. Black Internet complied. After a brief break of 3 hours, Pirate Bay staff announced that the site had been relocated, but technical difficulties prevented it from going online immediately. although the trackers remained down in some areas a bit longer. The website was only inaccessible from some areas; other areas reported services restored within 3 hours; everyone found the services restored within 24 hours.
