Pirate Bay, The Pirate Party & The Court Case you don’t know about.

the_pirate_bay_logoBy: Billy Beerslugger

Bit Torrent is a peer to peer file sharing protocol.  Think of it as a way more accurate, efficient, and reliable Napster or LimeWire.  Bit Torrent traffic, by some estimates, makes up about 35% of all internet traffic.  It is by far the most popular protocol for large file sharing.

A Bit Torrent Client is essentially a program which manages downloads and uploads. There are many Bit Torrent Clients out there and apparently LimeWire supports to a limited extent Bit Torrents.  One of the more popular Bit Torrent Clients is uTorrent, very lightweight.

A Torrent (of the Genus and Species Bit) is really whatever you want it to be.  It can hold Mp3’s, movies, datasets, computer programs, Tv Shows… if it’s in a digital form you can probably put it in a Torrent.

A Bit Torrent Tracker is a web based interface which provides search functionality (much like Google) for Bit Torrents.

The Pirate Bay is a bit torrent tracker.  It is the most popular bit torrent tracker, ranked as the 106th most popular website by Alexa Internet and is the defendant (or at least the operaters are) of a major laswsuit.

On April 17, 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 app. 3,620,000 USD after a 9 day trial.  The defendants are appealing the verdict, seeking a re-trial and recent news has come out that the judge presiding over the case was a member of Pro-Copyright groups.  The Website is still in operation.

In a scenario similar to others regarding prosecuting file sharing sites/companies, membership to The Pirate Bay surged following the verdict.  The more media coverage of the site and what it does, the more it’s members continue to grow.

In Sweden, which is the headquarters of The Pirate Bay, supporters of the site have formed their own political party.  It is currently the 4th largest political party in terms of members in Sweden.  It’s ranks grew by about 20% in the hours following the verdict and increases by the minute.  The number of young members in the party put it at number one in that demographic.

The Pirate Bay and Bit Torrent in general have been the subject of much debate in the United States and Internationally.  Not only for the issue of copyright infringement but from throttling bit torrent traffic, packet sniffing and other ways Internet Service Providers have tried to limit access to Bit Torrents.

Whether or not you personally support the prosecution of The Pirate Bay, file sharing is not going away.  Movie Studios and Record Labels need to find a way to a way to distribute their content and sustain profit off of it.   Old ways of doing this like Cd’s and Dvd’s are not going to cut it in our computer/gadget centric society.  Optimally the solution they come up with does not impede upon how you use the Internet or Net Neutrality.