The Pirate Bay: Here to Stay? http://www.wired.com/news/technology/1,70358-0.html
By Ann Harrison 02:00 AM Mar, 13, 2006 EST Last month, the Motion Picture Association of America announced one of its boldest sorties yet against online piracy: a barrage of seven federal lawsuits against some of the highest-profile BitTorrent sites, Usenet hosts and peer-to-peer services. Among the targets: isoHunt, TorrentSpy and eDonkey. But, as always, one prominent site is missing from the movie industry's announcement (.pdf), and it happens to be the simplest and best-known source of traded movies -- along with pirated video games, music, software, audio books, television broadcasts and nearly any other form of media imaginable. The site is called The Pirate Bay, and it's operated by a crew of intrepid Swedes who revel in tormenting the content industries. "All of us who run the TPB are against the copyright laws and want them to change," said "Brokep," a Pirate Bay operator. "We see it as our duty to spread culture and media. Technology is just a means to doing that." A quick look at The Pirate Bay's lineup suggests which side is winning the piracy wars. Among the site's most popular downloads are recent Oscar nominees and winners like Closer and Brokeback Mountain, Steven Spielberg's Munich, the latest Harry Potter film and even stinkers like Underworld: Evolution and The Pink Panther. Downloading doesn't require users to register or install spyware -- if one has a BitTorrent client installed, anything listed is just a click away. To international observers, The Pirate Bay's defiant immunity from copyright lawyers is somewhat baffling. But in Sweden, the site is more than just an electronic speak-easy: It's the flagship of a national file-sharing movement that's generating an intense national debate, and has even spawned a pro-piracy political party making a credible bid for seats in the Swedish parliament. Founded in 2003 by a loosely knit crew of file-sharing advocates called Piratbyrån, or Pirate Bureau, The Pirate Bay began life as a Swedish-language site occupying a second tier among popular torrent trackers. Then the MPAA's groundbreaking 2004 crackdown on torrent hubs changed everything. As famous sites like SuprNova and LokiTorrent went under, their users crowded onto the surviving hubs like pelicans on a reef. When the storm passed, The Pirate Bay remained. According to "Anakata," one of the site's operators, subsequent MPAA lawsuits have continued to drive more users to The Pirate Bay, which today boasts 1 million unique visitors a day. The Pirate Bay's legal adviser, law student Mikael Viborg, said the site receives 1,000 to 2,000 HTTP requests per second on each of its four servers. That's bad news for the content industries, which have fired off letter after menacing letter to the site, only to see their threats posted on The Pirate Bay, together with mocking replies. Viborg said that no one has successfully indicted The Pirate Bay or sued its operators in Swedish courts. Attorneys for DreamWorks and Warner Bros., two companies among those that have issued take-down demands to the site, did not return calls for comment. Viborg credits The Pirate Bay's seeming immunity to the basic structure of the BitTorrent protocol. The site's Stockholm-based servers provide only torrent files, which by themselves contain no copyright data -- merely pointers to sources of the content. That makes The Pirate Bay's activities perfectly legal under Swedish statutory and case law, Viborg claims. "Until the law is changed so that it is clear that the trackers are illegal, or until the Swedish Supreme Court rules that current Swedish copyright law actually outlaws trackers, we'll continue our activities. Relentlessly," wrote Viborg in an e-mail. MPAA spokeswoman Kori Bernards insists The Pirate Bay violates copyright laws around the world. "Copyright laws are being enforced and upheld in countries all over the world and when you facilitate the illegal file swapping of millions of people around the world, you are subject to those laws," said Bernards. "The torrent and torrent tracker is something that points people to various files that make up a copyright that is protected under the law." That legal claim is untested in the United States, according to Fred von Lohmann, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In Sweden, the legality of the trackers is a topic of considered debate. Next: Behind the Bay, an embedded culture of copying. Magnus Martensson, a legal adviser for the Swedish branch of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, or IFPI, insists that The Pirate Bay does infringe on Sweden's copyright law, or at least qualifies as contributory infringement. "Pirate Bay has been on our radar screen for a couple of years and it is a great concern for our member record companies that we take some action," said Martensson. "The activity carried out by The Pirate Bay is damaging the record labels' business." But that argument isn't finding the most fertile ground among Sweden's wired citizenry. According to Martensson, polls indicate that more than 10 percent of Sweden's 9 million people participated in file sharing in the last quarter of 2005. He said file sharing is widespread in Sweden because almost every household owns a computer and can get a cheap 100-Mbps broadband fiber connection from their ISP for 70 euros a month. "My guess is that Sweden is one of the worst places in the world when it comes to illegal sharing," said Martensson. Until recently, downloading copyright material for personal use wasn't even illegal in the country. Bowing to international pressure, the Swedish government finally changed that last July, implementing the EU Copyright Directive, which outlaws the copying, distribution, uploading and downloading of copyright material without the copyright holder's permission. A month before the law went into effect, The Pirate Bay -- now officially independent of Piratbyrån -- registered its opinion of the measure by launching an improved version of the site. Among other enhancements, the website now supports 25 languages, and offers a breakdown of the top 100 torrents, selectable by content category. "The relaunch of the site was at first needed for withstanding the huge amount of traffic, but we decided to launch it when we did to make a political statement as well," said Brokep. While The Pirate Bay is raising the Jolly Roger, the group that founded it is embracing grass-roots activism and political legitimacy. Piratbyrån today has 57,000 registered members committed to its belief that file trading is a means of sharing culture and making new art. So influential is Piratbyrån that Sweden's leading anti-piracy organization defines itself by its opposition to the group. The MPAA-funded Svenska Antipiratbyrån uses its own software to keep logs and track IP address of suspected file sharers. Together with other copyright organizations, it has sent more than 400,000 letters to Swedish ISPs protesting their users' alleged file-sharing activities. "We don't want to stop the exchange of culture, we are just saying that the creators have to be paid," said Henrik Pontén, an attorney for Antipiratbyrån. "It is the copyright laws that pay for new games and movies." Last spring, Antipiratbyrån's tactics inspired some 4,000 Swedes to complain through e-mail to the Swedish Data Inspection Board that the group's IP tracking violated data-privacy laws. The board granted Antipiratbyrån a temporary exemption to continue the practice. Pontén said a final decision about whether an IP address is private data is still pending. Antipiratbyrån said it helped provide evidence against two Swedes who were recently fined $2,000 for trading copyright files, in a case that made national news in Sweden. According to Viborg, the only proof in the case was screen dumps submitted by Antipiratbyrån, which he said could be easily manipulated. Pontén said the courts looked at the evidence in the case and found that the screen dumps hadn't been tampered with, adding that Antipiratbyrån had no motivation to do so. Piratbyrån protested the screen-dump convictions by creating The Evidence Machine -- software that lets users produce fake evidence of file sharing against anyone by inserting an IP address and file name. Next: Vote Pirate! Antipiratbyrån set off another firestorm when it convinced local police to raid Swedish ISP Bahnhof last year and confiscate four servers containing 23 terabytes of copyright material. A group called The Angry Young Hackers retaliated by hacking the Antipiratbyrån website and mail system, unearthing e-mails, log files and chat messages suggesting that Bahnhof had been infiltrated by anti-piracy operatives. "Swedes were just laughing and shaking their heads," said Bahnhof founder Oscar Swartz. Charges were dropped when Bahnhof accused Antipiratbyrån of uploading the files itself. "It has in many ways been obvious to the public that the anti-piracy lobby is also operating in their own, very doubtful, legal gray zone," said Piratbyrån member Rasmus Fleischer. "They are dependent on the existence of police officers willing to give priority to the hunting of file sharers over real criminality." Pontén denied that Antipiratbyrån broke any laws. He said the group's aim in the investigation was to stop a pirate group from uploading material to the Bahnhof server. "The Pirate Bay is at the bottom of the piracy world," said Pontén. "We haven't focused so much on them because if you can stop the sources of piracy, the copyrighted material won't come to The Pirate Bay." According to Pontén, some hard-core pirates resent The Pirate Bay and have offered to help Antipiratbyrån because they want to keep the movies within their own small group. Moreover, Pontén is convinced that Sweden itself is on the verge of a sea change that will capsize sites like The Pirate Bay. "I think it is more and more accepted in Sweden that we have copyright laws on the internet and in the real world," he said. Antipiratbyrån's efforts to halt file sharing have prompted Sweden's outspoken pirates to run for office as the Pirate Party. Party spokesman Mika Sjöman said pirates are alarmed by both the IP tracking and Sweden's newly expanded surveillance and wiretapping laws. "People are getting scared," said Sjöman. "The two issues are really connected because copyright organizations are telling the government you have to invade the right to privacy if you want to defend copyright. That's really destructive for democracy because when you make lists of people that will be the end of privacy." It may sound like a joke, but Sjöman said the Pirate Party has 1,500 members, and has gathered enough signatures to participate in the Swedish general election in September. He said the government estimates that there are 1.2 million file sharers over the age of 18 in Sweden, and the Pirate Party needs only four percent, 225,000 votes, to get seats in the country's parliament. According to Sjöman, the success of The Pirate Bay illustrates just how embedded file sharing has become in Swedish culture. "File sharing is the library of today and they want to take that away from us and make us start paying for every single thing that we go to the model library to get," said Sjöman. "People have gotten used to that library and if they take the applications away from us they will take away the basic tools that people think are normal." If elected, the Pirate Party promises to strengthen Swedish privacy protections, weaken copyright laws, abolish the EU Data Retention Directive and roll back government surveillance legislation, said Sjöman. The party plans to hold its first convention in April, aboard a pirate ship. "We are the new movement for this century," said Sjöman. "We have these views that copyright is hurting the economy and our right to be citizens and express yourself and get information." Notwithstanding the debate in Sweden, Bernards said the MPAA still believes that those who use and operate The Pirate Bay are simply thieves. "Like any other business, we aim to protect our product, and aiming at some of the larger offenders like The Pirate Bay is a goal," said Bernards. "We will continue to pursue cutting off the head of piracy and at the same time educating people about the consequences of piracy and getting involved." "We're also into educating people about the consequences of piracy," Pirate Bay operator Brokep shot back in an e-mail. "We're teaching them how to do it." _______________________________________________ Infowarrior mailing list Infowarrior@attrition.org https://attrition.org/mailman/listinfo/infowarrior
