The Pirate Bay, A Year After The Verdict

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The Pirate Bay, A Year After The Verdict
April 17, 2010

" Exactly one year ago The Pirate Bay Four were sentenced to a year in prison, and on top of that each ordered to pay $905,000 in damages. The entertainment industries hoped that the ruling would set an example, but today The Pirate Bay is larger than ever before.

Millions of BitTorrent users all around the world followed the Pirate Bay trial with great interest last year. Many had hoped that the court would decide that operating a BitTorrent tracker was no offense and that the defendants would walk free.

The ten day trial started off with a small victory for the accused. On the second day the prosecutor announced that half of the charges against the four defendants had been dropped. The prosecutor couldn’t prove that the .torrent files that were submitted as evidence actually used The Pirate Bay’s tracker and therefore had to drop all charges of ‘assisting copyright infringement’.

What remained was the claim that the Pirate Bay folks were ‘assisting in making copyright content available’. In the days that followed the defendants’ lawyers nullified the ‘assisting’ part by arguing that there was no link between the accused and users who download copyrighted material. The prosecution, on the other hand, argued the opposite and brought in screenshots of websites and torrent files as evidence.

On April 17th 2009, the verdict was announced and Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundstrom were found guilty of ‘assisting in making copyright content available’. The court sentenced each of the defendants to one year in prison and a fine of $905,000.

Immediately after the verdict the defendants announced they would appeal. In the weeks that followed the news came out that the judge who delivered the verdict had ties to several pro-copyright organizations. Following this news the defendants’ lawyers decided to file for a retrial, but this request was denied.

While awaiting the appeal that is currently scheduled to take place during the summer of 2010, The Pirate Bay continued to operate. Despite efforts from the entertainment industry to shut it down the site is now bigger than ever before. At the time of writing The Pirate Bay has 4,349,457 signed up members, growing by 105 members during the time taken to write this article.

This doesn’t mean that nothing has changed though. In the months following the verdict there were plans for the site to be sold to a gaming company who wanted to transform it into a BitTorrent-powered media store. The takeover plans dominated the news for months but the deal eventually went bust in the fall of last year.

Around the same time, two of the founders of The Pirate Bay were told by the court that they could no longer be involved in the daily operations of the site. This didn’t change much either because the two had already said that they were no longer involved in its operation. All this time, The Pirate Bay continued to serve torrents to the public.

Last November, The Pirate Bay decided to close down its tracker. According to The Pirate Bay team, BitTorrent has evolved up to a point where trackers are no longer needed. “We’re talking to the other torrent admins on doing magnet links,” a Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak at the time, adding that they might even stop serving torrents in the future.

Since November, The Pirate Bay has continued without a tracker, with its website gaining more and more users month after month. This relative calm is expected to last for a few more months until the appeal trial starts. When that happens, The Pirate Bay will have close to 5 million registered users, which is 4 million more than when the legal troubles began. "

:source: Source: The Pirate Bay, A Year After The Verdict:view: Homepage: TorrentFreak

Why dont they understand, its impossible.
They would have to jail and fine the entire population in order to stop piracy. :P

Welcome to the Internet generation, And well done The pirate bay, I'm not a member myself as I wouldn't know where to start with this whole tracker lark, Keep on fighting the greedy bully boys of the film/music Industry and best of all the powers that be.
Look at what happened with napster,1 day they were the bad boys on the block,then the next day they are a legit business, I doubt we will see TPB going that way but stranger things have happened.

well somewhere i have read torrent constitute more than 50% of internet traffic with this huge amount of invovlement the law can control the torrent world.

LONG LIVE PIRATE BAY.

Well, largely it's their fault. They addict the public to movies, media nonsense, TV shows, etc. and they expect us to pay for it all. Like we can. In today's economy, I don't think so.

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Originally Posted by unknown1_

Well, largely it's their fault. They addict the public to movies, media nonsense, TV shows, etc. and they expect us to pay for it all. Like we can. In today's economy, I don't think so.

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I really, really like RedBull. Does that mean I can steal it when I can't afford it? I pirate everything I can, but a reason like that is pretty unlikely to be accepted.

If the movie companies spent all the money they have poured into trying to stop pirating, into trying to adapt to the "internet generation" instead, I think they would have earned much more money by now. Just imagine all the money they could save on production for example? If people could buy it for half the price online, instead of going to the store and buy a disc, I think they would increase their sales, and at the same time cut the costs of making millions of blueray/dvd discs.

Watching pirated movies and listening to pirated music has actually lead me to spend more money then i would have if it weren't for bitTorrent's.

What i mean by that is I would have never known my favorite band had a special t-shirt that came with the CD if I bought it. I would have never known that the movie i watched had a sequel that was coming out soon. If anything BitTorrenting is doing them some good. it's not all bad: like that try to make it out to be! "the big bad pirate bay wohohoho stealin' all our muziks and muney greed greed greed greed greed"

I think it's amazing they're still around, actually. Thanks guys for flying the jolly roger!

Good for the "The Pirate Bay," but I wouldn't DL anything from that site. It's asking for trouble when downloading from a site that is public, let alone the biggest in the world. I stick with SSL trackers so I can sleep at night.

Long Live The Pirate Bay! FOR4EVA!

R.I.P. PirateBay
It has now been shut down. What a shame...

Edit: And as soon as I post this it comes back up...for how long? Who knows...?

Have you considered the possibility their server went down for a small while rather than being shut down? :P

:lol:

Anon does have a point. Make sure that you always research before claiming something. ;)

Yeah, I did. Have you considered learning how to read? Notice, I edited my reply, not even 5 minutes after posting it. And it will most likely be shut down for good in the near future...

@Slickerey
How exactly would you go about researching that, smart guy?

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Originally Posted by Relentless904

Yeah, I did. Have you considered learning how to read? Notice, I edited my reply, not even 5 minutes after posting it. And it will most likely be shut down for good in the near future...

@Slickerey
How exactly would you go about researching that, smart guy?

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:slap:

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Originally Posted by Relentless904

it comes back up...for how long? Who knows...?

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Oh, so these were rhetoric questions. :unsure:

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Originally Posted by Pikachu

Why dont they understand, its impossible.
They would have to jail and fine the entire population in order to stop piracy. :P

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Agreed. Why they don't get that every time a website is shutdown, another just comes up in its place. It's like when Napster disappeared... Limewire, Kazaa... they all took its place. If PirateBay dies, there's plenty of other sites for those 5 million people to migrate to.

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Originally Posted by mindlock

Good for the "The Pirate Bay," but I wouldn't DL anything from that site. It's asking for trouble when downloading from a site that is public, let alone the biggest in the world. I stick with SSL trackers so I can sleep at night.

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Normal leechers won't get in trouble. It is unclear whether or not it is illegal in the first place, and even if it is illegal, the chance for you to get caught is too small. Besides that, the people who try to prevent piracy know themselves that it is no use to slowly try and catch every individual. This is not what they are trying.