If you're like me, and like to keep an eye on any big cases concerning the internet, you might have heard about these guys. Gottfrid Svartholm (anakata), Fredrik Neij (TiAMO) and Peter Sunde (brokep), all swedes, are some of the most famous people on the internet, and I'm including moot of 4chan fame in that calculation.
The Pirate Bay is easily the largest BitTorrent tracker on the internet, and they claim to take up alot of the percentage of total internet traffic on a global basis. Here's an excerpt from a press conference on february 15th:
Well.. about half of the BT traffic is coordinate through TPB, and it is extreme amounts. About 80% of the worlds Internet traffic is expected to be BT traffic, and about half of it is tracked by TPB. That should be roughly just about 40% of all Internet traffic in the world is somewhat depending on TPB.
Q. How much data are we talking about here?
I cant even begin to estimate it, we have no figures of that.. It’s, It’s a lot. More than I can store at home.
Last weekend TPB was down during a couple of hours and we can see graphs of this.. that about 108 Tb of data was missing from the Swedish Internet. That’s quite a lot during 5 hours.
As you can see, they're big business, and has managed to build quite an impressive empire online.
I'm also sure that alot of you have read articles about The Pirate Bay, and very few of them are very positive. They have been sued multiple times, only for them to shrug the charges off and get back on their feet. In 2006, the american and swedish government forced the police into raiding the Pirate Bay, taking their servers down. This resulted in a 3-day downtime, and a boom in popularity for the already huge tracker. And now they have managed to get their asses to court once again, this time being charged with various charges ranging from breaking the copyright laws to outright piracy and theft, and they revealed the prosecution claim for damages of 117 million kronor ($14.3 million) in claims for compensation and damages.
While these three guys are in court, the internet is abuzz of activity. Hackers, gamers, online communties and casual surfers... a huge amount of people show their support as these three guys are charged with ridiculous claims, which most believe will blow over and be forgotten in a couple of months anyway. I'm guilty of downloading movies myself, and I'm a big fan of the Pirate Bay and the work they do. They want the internet to stay free, and for information shared on the internet to stay both anonymous and free of charge, and the big guns don't seem to like that very much.
You can read more about what's happening in the links below:
Blog Pirate
Wikipedia's article about the trial
The King Kong defence
So, what do you guys think? Is the internet censorship good as it is? Do you think the Pirate Bay is guilty of these charges, or is this yet another stupid attempt from the big companies to gain free PR and a chance to cut off a HUGE and important piece of the piracy community?
Personally, I'm confident they will win this trial. I think the Pirate Bay works for bettering the internet, and they are heroes to geeks all over the world. The record labels and movie studios etc... well, I don't think they're losing as much as they claim, and to charge a few regular swedish guys with charges over 170 million kronor is completely moronic, and I'm positive that they will be back on track quickly, without anything changed. They'll keep trolling the companies, as they know they're not doing anything wrong, and if they're not breaking the law there's no reason for a trial.
Discuss!