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The Pirate Bay Turns 15 Years Old

posted by takyon on Monday August 13 2018, @06:04PM   Printer-friendly
from the people-want-to-be-free dept.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

The Pirate Bay Turns 15 Years Old

Founded in 2003 by a group of hackers and activists, The Pirate Bay aimed to bring file-sharing to the masses. In the fifteen years that followed, the site transformed from a small community to Hollywood's resilient arch-rival, serving millions of users. And that's not the only thing that changed. Todayish, The Pirate Bay turns 15 years old, which is quite an achievement considering the immense legal pressure it has faced over the years.

While the exact launch date is a bit of a mystery, even to the site's founders, August 10 was previously chosen as its anniversary. What we do know is that the site was brought online in 2003 by now-disbanded pro-culture organization Piratbyrån, which is Swedish for Bureau of Piracy. The group was formed by political activists and hackers in the same year, many of whom had already launched other web projects challenging political, moral, and power structures.

One of the group's unwritten goals was to offer a counterweight to the propaganda being spread by local anti-piracy outfit Antpiratbyrån. With BitTorrent as the up-and-coming file-sharing technology, they saw fit to start their own file-sharing site to promote sharing of information.

The Pirate Bay first came online in Mexico where Gottfrid Svartholm, aka Anakata, hosted the site on a server owned by the company he was working for at the time. After a few months, the site moved to Sweden where it was hosted on a Pentium III 1GHz laptop with 256MB RAM. This one machine, which belonged to Fredrik Neij, aka TiAMO, kept the site online and included a fully operational tracker.

Related: Anti-Piracy Firm: P2P Piracy Still Relevant

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Monday August 13 2018, @06:48PM (5 children)

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Monday August 13 2018, @06:48PM (#721092) Journal

    It is too expensive, and I don't mean just $. Copyright restrictions hold back society and progress.

    I consider it a civic duty to rebel against unfair laws and restrictions. I wish people would boycott the whole industry, stop watching movies, listening to music, and reading books altogether, until the industry agrees to substantial reform or abolishment of copyright laws. I

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by tftp on Monday August 13 2018, @07:05PM (1 child)

    by tftp (806) on Monday August 13 2018, @07:05PM (#721104) Homepage
    There is a strong state interest in generic you sitting on a couch and consuming hours and hours of TV, including movies and music. This is the "circuses" part. Recently social networks became part of the curcuses as well. Books are on a back burner for several decades already, as few read them, whereas 95% of the population watch tv and [occasionally] listen to the radio, and 99% are on the Internet. Never in the world the circuses had been so cheap per head of the population.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @06:25AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @06:25AM (#721257)
      That's fine for "sustainable growth". The Bread has to be real but the Circuses can be virtual.

  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 13 2018, @08:09PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 13 2018, @08:09PM (#721120)

    You're just consumers.

    • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 13 2018, @08:33PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 13 2018, @08:33PM (#721122)

      You're just an incel! You and your ilk can't get laid!

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 13 2018, @11:52PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 13 2018, @11:52PM (#721174)

      Quite a few people liked my fanfics, thank you very much.