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Over the years many Bittorent sites have been shut – caused by pressure from the entertainment industry to any authorities who would listen. Pirates Bay is probably the most resilient of them all and it seems that whenever they get shut down, they just pop up again a short time later with a different host.
Cyber Bunker who have their servers in a former nuclear bunker in the Netherlands cut them off after a German court injunction. Plantiffs included Disney Enterprises, Twentieth Century Fox and Universal City Studios. Cyber Bunker are not letting the matter rest and are filing a counter claim but this will take some time. This left Pirates Bay in limbo for a few days … well that was until The Swedish Pirate Party offered them bandwidth in a rather daring move.
The Pirate Party leader Rick Falk Vinge spoke to the Inquirer and said “providing bandwidth to a search engine and homepage is completely legal”. He then went on to say that on Tuesday morning the two organisations agreed that the party would provide the bandwidth.
The original founders of Pirates Bay haven't had an easy life, they were sentenced to a year in jail and fined, however, once again, that ruling is also under appeal.
In a defiant move, Pirates Bay are hosting an image on their front page basically taunting the authorities – a cat with a rather comical slogan under it.
If you suck at net speak, the rough translation is “I am in your Skynet (terminator reference to intelligent self aware computer systems), laughing at your futile efforts to control our internet”. Its a ‘virtual finger' at the authorities.
KitGuru says: Has the cat got the cream? We wonder for how long …
Are Pirates Bay within their rights to offer a search engine to content deemed as illegal? Or do you feel that they should be shut down for good? Discuss in our forums or just leave a quick comment below.
OMG that image is so funny – brilliant ! I don’t see how authorities have a right to stop a site which isn’t actually hosting anything illegal, just pointing to how to get it.
It is a grey area really, most people know its dodgy, but the law as far as I know states that if you aren’t hosting the illegal material its not illegal. Its not quite that simple which is why its turning into a year after year cycle of debating. It will only be a matter of time before they shut really.
They have no right to try and shut them down. its the people downloading who are at fault, not them for linking to files.
I get sick of rules and stipulations. I appreciate its not right to steal content from people who ‘ own it’ but the governments would shut down everything they could. there needs to be lines drawn in the sand somewhere.
Anyone who downloads illegal files should be locked up. These people know exactly what they are doing and there should be stiffer penalities. I am a filmmaker and it disgusts me how rips of blurays are available online sometimes before its on retail!
The Pirate Bay is not only search engine.
It is a coordinator.
I don’t know if torrent file by itself can be lega or illegal,
But coordinating peers, passing them realtime information of temporary IP’s – is not search engine at all.
If TPB used Gnutella, G2 or some other serverless p2p then one could say it just search engine, searchign someone’s homepages. But BT tracker is more than that.