For the past decade, if you wanted to download copyrighted material and didn’t want to pay for it, it’s likely you turned to The Pirate Bay . Up until a police raid took it offline last week , it was the most popular place to grab Sunday’s episode of The Newsroom or Gone Girl months before the Blu-ray hits stores. You didn’t have to log in to some arcane message board or know someone to get an invite — the anonymous file-sharing site was open to everybody and made piracy as simple as a Google search. That’s what scared Hollywood. The movie industry claimed that in 2006 alone , piracy cost it some $6.1 billion dollars. Naturally, it went after the biggest target to exact its revenge: the Sweden-based Pirate Bay. Given Sweden’s lax laws regarding copyrighted materials, Hollywood had to enlist the United States government for help cracking down on the site. The US threatened that unless something was done to take the site offline, it’d impose trade sanctions against Sweden by way of The World Trade Organization. That led to Swedish police raiding the outfit in 2006 , confiscating enough servers and computer equipment to fill three trucks and making two arrests. Three days later, the site was back up and running and more popular than ever before thanks to a swell of mainstream media coverage. WHAT IS IT? The Pirate Bay was the 97th most-visited website on the entire internet in 2008, according to Alexa data. During the 2009 trial that saw cofounders Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde and Gottfrid Svartholm charged with $3.6 million in fines, along with time behind bars for aiding in copyright infringement, it was reported that The Pirate Bay had some 22 million users — roughly the population of Texas. We tried finding more recent information, but the official blog is offline too, and, even then, the outfit keeps current usage statistics incredibly close to its chest. The best we could come by was a graph showing an uptick in usage , sans any actual numbers to go with the jagged, but rising, horizontal line. Because the site had to change domains a number of times before this last raid, in part to insulate itself from copyright laws , it’s hard to gauge just how popular The Pirate Bay was before last week’s shutdown. More information will likely surface in the coming weeks, as this latest raid is part of an ongoing investigation as well. TBP AFK: The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard is a documentary chronicling the 2009 court case against The Pirate Bay’s founders HOW IT WORKED Instead of hosting the copyrighted material itself, The Pirate Bay maintained a database of the tracker files needed for users to download the “torrents” — not the actual copyrighted content. Because you need a separate piece of software to actually use the torrent file and illegally download the content, The Pirate Bay saying it personally doesn’t break copyright law is technically accurate. Let’s back up a moment: for the uninitiated, a torrent file is basically a set of instructions that tells your computer how to reassemble a large file from the relatively small pieces it downloads from however many hosts are sharing it at a given moment. It’s faster than a 1:1 transfer because, unlike how Napster worked, no one user’s bandwidth supports the entire transfer. Well, that and everyone is only providing a minuscule portion of what you’re downloading. It’s “distributed” file sharing, and it subsequently distributes the blame when those files being shared are pirated material. For example: Let’s say that you wanted to watch the season finale of True Detective the night it aired, but HBO Go’s servers broke and you couldn’t. If you’re impatient, the simple solution is hitting The Pirate Bay, searching for “true detective episode eight” and grabbing the torrent file with the most “seeders” (people hosting the file). Depending on a few factors, you could have had an HD version of the hour-long show in roughly 15 minutes or less. It was incredibly fast and easy enough for just about anyone to do, which made it especially dangerous. THE SHUTDOWN The raid from eight years ago took The Pirate Bay offline briefly and forced the site to change its operations a bit. As a result, it moved to cloud-hosting in two separate countries running several virtual machine setups. In an interview with TorrentFreak , an unnamed Pirate Bay representative ( Neij, Sunde and Svartholm sold the site to a possible shell company in 2006) boasted that the move made the site raid-proof and that there wouldn’t be any servers to take, only a transit router — one of the pieces of equipment used to hide the location of the cloud provider. “If the police decide to raid us again there are no servers to take, just a transit router. If they follow the trail to the next country and find the load balancer, there is just a disk-less server there. In case they find out where the cloud provider is, all they can get are encrypted disk-images, ” The Pirate Bay says. “They have to be quick about it too, if the servers have been out of communication with the load balancer for 8 hours they automatically shut down. When the servers are booted up, access is only granted to those who have the encryption password, ” they add. Last Tuesday morning , Swedish police raided a Stockholm-area server room and left with “several” servers and computers, with official counts unavailable. This took not only The Pirate Bay down, but also related sites bayimg.com, pastebay.net and The Pirate Bay’s message board, suprbay.org. A handful of other torrent sites went down at the same time, with the Rights Alliance — a Swedish anti-piracy group — claiming that it made the complaint resulting in the Stockholm County Police’s raid. Mirror (and impostor) sites have sprung up in the meantime, but for now The Pirate Bay proper remains offline. It’s hard to say whether that’s a result of the website’s raid-countermeasures or police success. In an interview with TorrentFreak that posted recently, one of The Pirate Bay’s associates said they weren’t surprised by the shut-down, and that it’s something that goes with the territory. “We couldn’t care less, really, ” Mr. 10100100000 said. “We have however taken this opportunity to give ourselves a break. How long are we supposed to keep going? To what end? We were a bit curious to see how the public would react. Will we reboot? We don’t know yet. But if and when we do, it’ll be with a bang.” The Pirate Bay’s closure does have one unexpected supporter , though: co-founder Peter Sunde. He took to his blog last week lamenting what the site had become, chastising its reliance on ads for porn and Viagra, while relying on old and buggy code. Sund wrote that the technology wasn’t being taken further and the site had essentially lost its soul while the new owners clamored after cash, going so far as charging admission for The Pirate Bay’s tenth birthday party. “The party had a set line-up with artists, scenes and so on, instead of just asking the people coming to bring the content. Everything went against the ideals that I worked for during my time as part of TPB, ” Sunde said. Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde WHAT IT MEANS That all depends on who you ask. Variety reports that the day before the shutdown almost 102 million IP addresses were downloading torrented movies and TV shows. That dropped to 95 million on December 9th, but by last Friday pirate traffic was back up to just over 100 million IP addresses performing peer-to-peer downloads. A decrease? Sure, but nothing all that dramatic; this is a direct result of the hydra-like nature of piracy outfits in general. More or less, a series of shutdowns led to The Pirate Bay’s rise to prominence anyway. Napster got shut down and Limewire quickly took its place. Limewire was replaced by uTorrent, and uTorrent is the current go-to for torrenting. Perhaps, though, the anti-piracy measures we’ve seen are working. After all, Google has said that it gets over a million Digital Millenium Copyright Act take-down requests per day . A recent PC Pro report notes that US BitTorrent traffic had dropped by 20 percent over the course of six months last year. What’s more, it says that unique visitors to The Pirate Bay dropped dramatically between 2012 and 2013, from five million to 900, 000 by last year’s end. This can likely be attributed to how easy it’s become as of late to access content legally. It’s no mistake that Netflix offered UK customers episodes of Breaking Bad ‘s final season the day after they aired in the US. Or, that it’s pushing to stream movies the same day they arrive in theaters. Same goes for Hulu Plus’ entire business model of streaming shows the day after they air. Sure, you’re going to have a minority of folks who’ll pirate anything and everything as their own means of anarchy, but for the most part, by offering an all-around better legal experience (not having to worry about downloading a virus; better video quality) most people aren’t going to bother pirating in the first place. Much like it did with the music industry, piracy has forced the Hollywood to examine why we were circumventing their protocols in the first place and adjust as such. [Image credits: Shutterstock (lead), AFP/Getty Images (Peter Sunde)] Filed under: Cellphones , Internet , Software Comments

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The Pirate Bay shutdown: the whole story (so far)