A clip from the upcoming documentary TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard. You can support the filmmakers of this free film on www.tpbafk.tv Help us make this the world's biggest film premiere by watching it with us on February 8! Original ThePirateBay message from the director/producer: Dear Internets! My name is Simon and I am the director/producer of the film TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard. After 5 years of hard work, it's a great pleasure to finally upload a torrent about this great website onto the site itself. In a way, I guess TPB AFK has finally come home. This is not just a film about the founders of TPB, but also a film about all of you who use the site. Please convert this film into all possible formats and share it as much as you can! Feel free to translate them into whatever language you know! Will there be a hindi, japanese, swahili or a 1337 sp33k subtitle? Thank you!¨ The Pirate Bay (commonly abbreviated TPB) is a website that provides torrent files and magnet links to facilitate peer-to-peer file sharing using the BitTorrent protocol. It was founded in Sweden in 2003. In 2009, the website's founders were put on trial in Sweden, charged with facilitating illegal downloading of copyrighted material. They were found guilty by the court and sentenced to a year in prison with a fine of 30 million SEK (€2.7M or US$3.5M as of 2009). In some countries, ISPs have been ordered to block access to the website. Since then, proxies have been made all around the world providing access to The Pirate Bay. History The Pirate Bay in 2004 The Pirate Bay was established in November 2001 by the Swedish anti-copyright organization Piratbyrån (The Piracy Bureau); it has been run as a separate organization 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. 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 SEK (app. 4,200,000 USD; 2,800,000 GBP; or 3,100,000 EUR), after a trial of nine days. The defendants appealed the verdict and accused the judge of giving in to political pressure.[6] On 26 November 2010, a Swedish appeals court upheld the verdict, decreasing the original prison terms but increasing the fine to 46 million SEK. On 17 May 2010, due to an injunction against their bandwidth provider, the site was taken offline. 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. The Pirate Bay was hosted for several years by PRQ, a Sweden-based company, owned by creators of TPB Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij. PRQ is said to provide "highly secure, no-questions-asked hosting services to its customers."[11] From May 2011, Serious Tubes Networks started providing network connectivity to The Pirate Bay. On 23 January 2012, The Pirate Bay added the new category Physibles. These are 3D files described as "data objects that are able (and feasible) to become physical" using a 3D printer. 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). On 10 August 2013, the Pirate Bay announced the release of PirateBrowser, a free web browser used to circumvent internet censorship.

• published: 12 Oct 2013
• views: 10