The Pirate Bay 

(sometimes abbreviated as TPB) is an online index of digital content of

entertainment media and software.[1] Founded in 2003 by Swedish think tank Piratbyrån, The Pirate
Bay allows visitors to search, download, and contribute magnet links and torrent files, which
facilitate peer-to-peer, file sharing among users of the BitTorrent protocol.
The Pirate Bay has sparked controversies and discussion about legal aspects of file
sharing, copyright, and civil liberties and has become a platform for political initiatives against
established intellectual property laws as well as a central figure in an anti-copyright movement.[2] The
website has faced several shutdowns and domain seizures, switching to a series of new web
addresses to continue operating.[3]
In April 2009, the website's founders (Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, and Gottfrid Svartholm) were found
guilty in the Pirate Bay trial in Sweden for assisting in copyright infringement and were sentenced to
serve one year in prison and pay a fine.[4] In some countries, Internet service providers (ISPs) have
been ordered to block access to the website. Subsequently, proxy websites have been providing
access to it.[5][6][7][8][9] Founders Svartholm, Neij, and Sunde were all released by 2015 after serving
shortened sentences.[3]

History[edit]
The Pirate Bay was established in September 2003[10] by the Swedish anti-copyright
organisation Piratbyrån (lit. 'The Piracy Bureau'); it has been run as a separate organisation since
October 2004. The Pirate Bay was first run by Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij, who are known by
their nicknames "anakata" and "TiAMO", respectively. They have both been accused of "assisting in
making copyrighted content available" by the Motion Picture Association of America. On 31 May
2006, the website's servers in Stockholm were raided and taken away by Swedish police, leading to
three days of downtime.[11] The Pirate Bay claims to be a non-profit entity based in the Seychelles;
[12]
 however, this is disputed.[13]
The Pirate Bay has been involved in a number of lawsuits, both as plaintiff and as 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 Swedish kronor (approximately U$4.2 million, £2.8 million sterling, or €3.1 million), after a
trial of nine days. The defendants appealed the verdict and accused the judge of giving in to political
pressure.[14][15] On 26 November 2010, a Swedish appeals court upheld the verdict, decreasing the
original prison terms but increasing the fine to 46 million kronor.[16] On 17 May 2010, because of
an injunction against their bandwidth provider, the site was taken offline.[17] Access to the website
was later restored with a message making fun of the injunction on their front page. On 23 June 2010,
the group Piratbyrån disbanded due to the death of Ibi Kopimi Botani, a prominent member and co-
founder of the group.[18]
The Pirate Bay was hosted for several years by PRQ, a Sweden-based company, owned by creators
of TPB Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij.[19] PRQ is said to provide "highly secure, no-questions-
asked hosting services to its customers".[20] From May 2011, Serious Tubes Networks started
providing network connectivity to The Pirate Bay.[21] In May 2012, as part of Google's newly
inaugurated "Transparency Report", the company reported over 6,000 formal requests to remove
Pirate Bay links from the Google Search index; those requests covered over 80,500 URLs, with the
five copyright holders having the most requests consisting of: Froytal Services LLC, Bang Bros,
Takedown Piracy LLC, Amateur Teen Kingdom, and International Federation of the Phonographic
Industry (IFPI).[22] On 10 August 2013, The Pirate Bay announced the release of PirateBrowser, a
free web browser used to circumvent internet censorship.[23] The site was the most visited torrent
directory on the World Wide Web from 2003 until November 2014, when KickassTorrents had more
visitors according to Alexa.[24] On 8 December 2014, Google removed most of the Google Play apps
from its app store that have "The Pirate Bay" in the title.[25]
On 9 December 2014, The Pirate Bay was raided by the Swedish police, who seized servers,
computers, and other equipment.[26][27][28][29][30] Several other torrent related sites including EZTV, Zoink,
Torrage and the Istole tracker were also shut down in addition to The Pirate Bay's forum
Suprbay.org.[27] On the second day after the raid EZTV was reported to be showing "signs of life" with
uploads to ExtraTorrent and KickassTorrents and supporting proxy sites like eztv-proxy.net via the
main website's backend IP addresses.[31][32] Several copies of The Pirate Bay went online during the
next several days, most notably oldpiratebay.org, created by isoHunt.[33][34]
On 19 May 2015, the .se domain of The Pirate Bay was ordered to be seized following a ruling by a
Swedish court.[35][36] The site reacted by adding six new domains in its place.[37][38] The judgment was
appealed on 26 May 2015.[39] On 12 May 2016, the appeal was dismissed and the Court ruled the
domains be turned over to the Swedish state.[40][41] The site returned to using its original .org domain
in May 2016.[42] In August 2016, the US government shut down KickassTorrents, which resulted in
The Pirate Bay becoming once again the most visited BitTorrent website.[43]