The Pirate Bay Launches

2003

Date: 15 September 2003 · Place: thepiratebay.org, hosted Stockholm, Sweden · Figures: Gottfrid Svartholm, co-founder · Fredrik Neij, co-founder · Peter Sunde, spokesman (from 2004) · Piratbyran, parent collective · Tags: Platform, Piracy, BitTorrent 01. A Swedish Anti-Copyright Collective Ships a Tracker Piratbyran, a Swedish anti-copyright collective, hosts a BitTorrent tracker called The Pirate Bay starting 15 September 2003. Gottfrid Svartholm writes the original code. Fredrik Neij maintains the servers. Peter Sunde becomes the public face from 2004. The site indexes torrent files for movies, music, software, games, books. Within two years it is the largest torrent index in the world. By 2008 it serves twenty-five million peers. 02. The Legal Threats Become Mascots The Pirate Bay publishes its takedown letters from Hollywood studios and law firms, with snarky responses appended. The page becomes a forum thread of its own. The pirate-ship logo, the cheeky FAQ, the legal-threats archive: this is the first major platform that turns hostility from the industry into branding. Sweden raids the servers in May 2006. The site is back in three days. The founders are convicted in 2009. The site remains online through mirror after mirror. The Pirate Bay is the prototype for every later jurisdiction-resistant protocol-as-meme, from Sci-Hub to LibGen to BitTorrent itself as identity. Sources • Wired, 'The Pirate Bay defends itself' (June 2006) • TPB AFK documentary (Simon Klose, 2013) • Stockholm District Court, judgment B 13301-06 (17 April 2009)