The Pirate Bay

Thanks to Richard Metzger & Dangerousminds.net for the following...

http://newteevee.com/2009/07/19/the-pirate-bay-distributing-the-worlds-entertainment-for-3000-a-month/

Written by Janko Roettgers
Sunday, July 19, 2009
The Pirate Bay: Distributing the World’s Entertainment for $3,000 a Month

Much has been written in recent weeks about the future of The Pirate Bay, as well as about BitTorrent piracy in general. The sale of the site spooked some, while others are hoping to transform the new Pirate Bay into a legitimate, multimillion-dollar business. One aspect that has been largely overlooked is that the current Pirate Bay, due to the nature of P2P, is actually a relatively small and cost-efficient operation. The site’s trackers facilitate countless downloads of Hollywood blockbusters and music albums, but according to an insider, running these trackers could cost as little as $3,000 per month.

The implications of a number like that are huge. Not only does it mean that anyone with a medium-sized checkbook could replicate The Pirate Bay’s infrastructure in a heartbeat, but it also casts shadows over the hopes of anyone thinking about selling digital content online. Music fans were not longer willing to pay $20 for audio CDs once they noticed that blank CDs only cost a dime. How are they going to feel about download stores knowing that running the world’s biggest download service is that dirt cheap?

Earlier this week, when I was researching my story about federated tracker networks I had the chance to talk to some insiders close to The Pirate Bay as well as some folks working on newer projects aimed at picking up where it is leaving off. During one of these conversations, a person with inside knowledge of The Pirate Bay’s infrastructure estimated the total monthly costs of running the site’s trackers to be around $3,000. Compare that with recent reports that put YouTube’s bandwidth costs anywhere between $130,000 and a million dollar per day, and you’ll understand why I haven’t been able to get that number out of my head. : $3,000. What a steal. Literally.

Of course, that number doesn’t actually reflect all the costs associated with running The Pirate Bay in its current form. The site itself clocks more than a billion page views per month, according to statements from the prospective new owners, which should amount to a whole lot of additional bandwidth. The complete Pirate Bay set-up consists of a little more than 30 servers, of which less than a third are dedicated to tracking torrents.

Still, the impact of The Pirate Bay’s trackers are enormous. It tracks up to 2 million torrents and connects around 20 millions peers at any given time. Researchers estimate that 50 percent of the world’s publicly available torrents are tracked through The Pirate Bay. So how can just a massive system be so cheap?

The answer lies in the way the BitTorrent protocol work. Tracker servers never actually touch the files that are exchanged between users, and don’t compile huge lists of file names to query, either. Instead, these machines just collect the hash value of each torrent tracked. Users’ clients then query a tracker with these hash values, asking them for the IP addresses of others sharing the file associated with a particular hash value. So the whole message flow between client and server consists of just a few bytes, even if the files exchanged are massive Blu-ray videos.

I finished Chris Anderson’s new book “Free” this week, and I couldn’t help but think about The Pirate Bay’s $3,000 tracker while I was reading his theory of how the ever-decreasing costs of processing power, bandwidth and storage inevitably bring down the prices of digital goods as well. In the book, Anderson writes:

“In a competitive market, price falls to the marginal cost. The Internet is the most competitive market the world has ever seen, and the marginal costs of the technologies on which it runs – processing, bandwidth and storage – get closer and closer to zero every year. Free becomes not just an option but an inevitability.”

Of course, content owners would rightfully argue that the cost of producing a Hollywood movie or a TV show is not zero. But that’s beside the point. If all it takes to distribute Hollywood’s entire creative output online is $3,000 a month, then there’s always gonna be someone who will offer this stuff for free — and you’d better find a really good way to compete with that.

Pirate Bay Sells Out to Global Gaming Factory

http://www.quintessentialpublications.com/tracyrtwyman/?p=991

Pirate Bay Sells Out to Global Gaming Factory
By Tracy R Twyman

From Switched.com:

The Pirate Bay has been bought out by European Internet café company Global Gaming Factory and will be adopting a pay model in the near future. When faced with the legal wrath of the entertainment industry, the popular torrent-sharing site once adopted a devil-may-care attitude and brushed off lawsuits like they were nothing. Not anymore — it seems that the pirates are selling out. No word on what the pay model will be, but this reeks of Napster 2.0.

And from EndGadget.com:

It’s true, The Pirate Bay has agreed to being purchased by Global Gaming Factory (owner of a network of Internet cafes and gaming centers) for 60 million Swedish Krona or roughly $7.8 million. According to a press release, “GGF intends to launch new business models that allow compensation to the content providers and copyright owners.” In a post on TPB’s blog, the rogue file sharing site says that the project has been in the works for many years and should help evolve the site while trying to stay the same.

The search engine on piratebay.org is presently “overloaded.”

Victory Over The Pirate Bay Will Be Short-Lived

http://www.pcworld.com/article/163366/hollywoods_victory_over_the_pirate_bay_will_be_shortlived.html

Hollywood's Victory Over The Pirate Bay Will Be Short-Lived
Daniel Ionescu, PC World
Apr 18, 2009

From Sweden to London to Hollywood, protectors of copyrights are celebrating the conviction of the four men behind the world's most popular torrent tracker The Pirate Bay. The four convicted men behind The Pirate Bay -- Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde, and Carl Lundstrom -- say they can't and won't pay the $3.6 million in damages and promised the site will continue running. So much for Hollywood's sweet victory and happy ending.

Hollywood may have won a battle, but the war against piracy is far from over. Unauthorized file-sharing will continue (and likely intensify), if not through The Pirate Bay, then through dozens of other near-identical swashbuckling Web sites.

Of course, The Pirate Bay's case is nothing new. Eight years ago Napster was shut down after getting sued. It tried a few legal business models, but never managed to even get close to the popularity it had when it was operating illegally. The shutdown of Napster turned its creator, Shawn Fanning, and Napster into a into heroes and martyrs, inspiring others to develop new ways to pirate music.The Pirate Bay site itself is still up and running while the case is appealed.

What Hollywood needs to remember is that sites like The Pirate Bay are like weeds. When you try to kill one, they grow back even stronger. In this case, The Pirate Bay already moved most of its servers to the Netherlands, a change that could keep the site running even if The Pirate Bay loses its appeal.

The bad news for copyright-holders is there is obviously a market demand for this type of content distribution model. And while the entertainment industry seeks compensation via lawsuits, other similar services (which I do not endorse) such as Mininova, Demonoid and Torrentbox to name a few, will continue to thrive. That is, of course, until they get sued into oblivion as well. And then there are always new technologies on the horizon. Hollywood might want to start looking at a budding new peer-to-peer tool called OneSwarm that aims to let file-swappers preserve their privacy by cloaking their IP address.

The Pirate Bay verdict: guilty, with jail time

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/04/the-pirate-bay-verdict-guilty-with-jail-time.ars

The Pirate Bay verdict: guilty, with jail time
A Swedish district court has ended The Pirate Bay's "spectrial" with a guilty verdict. The defendants split a 30 million kronor fine and will each spend a year in jail, though one already says he would rather burn all the money he owns than pay up.
By Nate Anderson
April 17, 2009

The Pirate Bay "spectrial" has ended in a guilty verdict, prison sentences for the defendants, and a shared 30 million kronor ($3.5 million) fine. According to the Swedish district court, the operators of the site were guilty of assisting copyright infringement even though The Pirate Bay hosted none of the files in question and even though other search engines like Google also provide direct access to illegal .torrent files.

These two points formed the basis of The Pirate Bay's defense, but the court found them ultimately unpersuasive in its 107 page verdict. "By providing a site with, as the district court found, sophisticated search functions, easy upload and storage, and a website linked to the tracker," the defendants were guilty of assistant copyright infringement, the court said.

In an Internet press conference this morning, defendant Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi compared the whole trial to (of all things) The Karate Kid, a movie in which the good guy is roughed up by bullies, goes through a long training process, learns to "wax on, wax off," encounters his bully again in the final round of a karate tournament, and kicks him in the face with his "crane technique." Kolmisoppi sees parallels. In the end, he insists, "we'll kick their ass."

This might seem a strange position coming from someone facing a year in prison, but The Pirate Bay defendants say that this is only the first round in a lengthy process. An appeal will be filed, and the spirited rhetoric will continue. (Speaking of paying the fine, Sunde said that he "would rather burn everything I own and not even give them the dust from the burning" than pay up, even if he had the money to do so.)

The 30 million kronor judgment is reduced from the 117 million kronor fine initially sought by content owners, but it remains a significant sum. The prosecutor insisted throughout the case that the three Pirate Bay admins had grown fat on ad revenues, though the men always denied that the site was anything more than a hobby in which most of the money went to pay hosting and equipment bills.

Fourth defendant Carl Lundström, an heir to the Wasabröd cracker fortune and alleged supporter of right-wing political groups, appears to be good for the money, though his interest in The Pirate Bay was more tangential—he used his telecom company to help the site with hosting and Internet access.

International music trade group IFPI was suitably thrilled by today's news. CEO John Kennedy, who appeared as a witness during the trial, said that the case "was about defending the rights of creators, confirming the illegality of the service and creating a fair environment for legal music services that respect the rights of the creative community. Today’s verdict is the right outcome on all three counts."

The verdict itself was leaked yesterday, with the defendants first learning their fate from a journalist. "Really, it's a bit LOL," Kolmisoppi wrote on Twitter. "It used to be only movies, now even verdicts are out before the official release."

It was a fitting end to this spectacle of a trial, which opened with The Pirate Bay driving a city bus up from Belgrade to Stockholm, saw the prosecutor dismiss half the charges on the first day, and featured the astonishing claim that 80 percent of the material on the site was legal.

Despite schooling Big Content on public relations throughout the trial, the defendants could not prevail in court. In comments today, Kolmisoppi argues that the whole trial was political in nature, even going so far as to call the district court a "dice court" because its verdicts are so random.

No word yet on the ultimate fate of The Pirate Bay, which at the moment remains active.

How The Pirate Bay sailed into infamy

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7893223.stm

How The Pirate Bay sailed into infamy
By Flora Graham
BBC News
Monday, 16 February 2009

The Pirate Bay was launched in 2003 and has established itself as the world's most high-profile file-sharing site. But its founders are now on trial for copyright violation and face imprisonment, if found guilty.

The Pirate Bay team aren't shy about what they are doing - they are pirates, and proud of it. Their logo shows a galleon under full sail, with a cassette tape topping a skull and crossbones in a nod to the Jolly Roger.

It is an accurate characterisation, according to Swedish prosecutors, who have put three of the website's creators and one of its sponsors on trial on charges of contributing to copyright infringement.

But the defendants claim to be more Robin Hood than Blackbeard, freeing creative content from the shackles of copyright.

"There is not a cause closer to my heart," one of the founders told Wired. "This is my crusade."

The Pirate Bay website hosts BitTorrent tracker files, and claims to be the world's largest: in February 2009, it reported 22 million simultaneous users.

BitTorrent connects people so that they can share files over the internet. But users need a "tracker" link to find what they're looking for - like the index card in a library catalogue. The Pirate Bay provides a directory of these trackers, essentially becoming a library of catalogues.

It doesn't store the books, or files, itself, just the information on where to find them.

This distinction is what Pirate Bay claims will protect them under Swedish law.

"The tracker provides the user only with .torrent files which contain no copyrighted data. The actual copyrighted material is to be found on the individual machines of our users, not on our servers," says the site.

The Pirate Bay's enormous success has enraged copyright protection groups like the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). And the site's cheeky bravado rubs salt in the wounds. For example, it posts all of the cease-and-desist letters that it receives, including its sarcastic replies.

"Please don't sue us right now, our lawyer is passed out in an alley," says a reply to videogame giant Electronic Arts.

History

The site was founded by the Swedish file-sharing advocacy group Piratbyran ("The Piracy Bureau") in 2003, but has been run independently since 2004.

As other file-sharing websites were felled by threats and lawsuits from industry heavyweights like the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the Pirate Bay held its ground.

Confident that Sweden's lax copyright laws meant that they were on the right side of the rules, the site continued to defy legal threats that caused other torrent sites, such as Isohunt, to remove links to infringing torrents upon request.

As one of the few high-profile survivors, its piece of the file trading pie grew. The site's antagonistic attitude and tangles with copyright holders and rights organisations increased its profile, and the site now claims to be among the top 100 websites in the world.

The Pirate Bay's fame became too much for Swedish authorities, and in March 2006 the site's offices were raided by police investigating allegations of copyright violations.

Truckloads of file server computers were seized, the site was closed, and three people were held for questioning, including two of the defendants in the court case, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Fredrik Neij.

Authorities denied that the raid was prompted by urging from the MPA, the international arm of the MPAA, but the Swedish media revealed that the MPA had met with the justice ministry in the months before the raid.

The Pirate Bay offers links to TV, films and music

The Pirate Bay's site administrators scrambled to get the site back up and running, and with help from volunteers around the world, it was restored within three days.

Since the raid, the Pirate Bay has set up a network of servers so that shutting down any one site will only cause the site to go down for minutes. Since then, site administrators have challenged all comers to try to shut them down.

"I really want the pleasure of it being down three minutes, then up again," Frederik Neij told Wired.

With Sweden's waters becoming less pirate-friendly, the Pirate Bay looked for warmer climes. In January 2007, it reportedly tried to buy Sealand, a platform in the North Sea off the Suffolk coast, which claims national sovereignty. After that fell through, the Bay raised money to buy an island, but the plan was never realised.

Some media companies have apparently decided to take matters into their own hands rather than wait for the slow pace of the Swedish courts.

In September 2007, hackers leaked six months of internal e-mails from anti-piracy company Media Defender, which revealed that the company was discussing hiring hackers to attack the Pirate Bay's servers.

It was the Pirate Bay's turn to go to the courts, and it filed charges against the Swedish arms of Media Defender clients such as Twentieth Century Fox, EMI and Paramount. The charges were not pursued, which also led to protests after the police investigator, Jim Keyzer, took a job for Warner Brothers, a member of the MPAA. Mr Keyzer is scheduled to be a witness in the Pirate Bay trial.

But the Pirate Bay's Robin Hood reputation was sullied in July 2007 when a reporter, posing as a potential advertiser on the site, estimated that the site was earning up to £55,000 per month that was being channelled into a front company in Switzerland.

Mr Neij has denied that his team was getting rich from operating the Pirate Bay. "I wish I earned that," he told Vanity Fair. "Do I look like I have, like, $2m?"

Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, another defendant, pointed out that they lost $60,000 worth of equipment in the raids. "It's not free to operate a website on this scale," he said.

Strongest challenge

With the Pirate Bay facing its strongest challenge yet, its administrators have not stopped rattling their cutlasses.

Mr Warg, in a webcast on Sunday, said: "What are they going to do about it? They have already failed to take down the site once. Let them fail again.

"It has a life without us."

Mark Mulligan, a digital media analyst at Forrester Research, agreed that even if the Pirate Bay was brought down by the case, the file-sharing genie could not be put back in the bottle.

"The industry knows this. But they also know that they need to go through the motions, particularly with the big players. If they don't, that essentially green lights file sharing."

He points to previous industry victories against companies like Napster, which shut down the network but didn't reduce the market.

"After every victory, file-sharing has got bigger. I see no reason why the same won't happen this time."