The Pirate Bay Tops 10 Million Users

An anonymous reader suggests we go over to Slyck for news that The Pirate Bay has cracked 10 million users. The publicity from the upcoming court case probably helped. "Today, The Pirate Bay asserts itself as the self-proclaimed 'World's Largest Tracker' by topping over 10 million peers, while managing over 1 million torrents. Peter Sunde of The Pirate Bay told Slyck, 'We're very happy to be part of all of this and we hope our users keep sharing those files!... And we're looking to break 20 million as well.'"

Comments

Re:10 million users?

[Seumas]

Pirating is something organized criminals selling copyrighted content for money on the streets in Malaysia do. I don't believe there are any pirates on the pirate bay. Aaargh.

It all comes down to $$$

[ihaveamo]

I don't believe they do it for the love, (or some damn-fool idealistic crusade, for that matter). Anyone know how much money a site like the pir8 bay makes?? (Just banner revinue, or something more insidious)

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[CSMatt]

All the Pirate Bay administrators are doing is providing a tracker, which can very well (and does) link to legal content as well as illegal. The fact that they are generating income from ads placed on search results is irreverent. You might as well say that Google is guilty of infringement as well, since they index both legal and illegal material with a similar business model and are constantly defending their ability to do so.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[Damon Tog]

You might as well say that Google is guilty of infringement as well, since they index both legal and illegal material with a similar business model and are constantly defending their ability to do so.

A couple of other companies have used a similar argument, shortly before getting shut down. Napster and Grokster were basically search engines that could be used for both legal or illegal purposes, but the courts didn't buy it.

Google, or an ISP, can reasonably argue that they provide services that are mostly used for lawful purposes, even though some illegal activity takes place. The difficult argument that the pirate trackers are faced with is that when you are providing a service that is being used primarily to infringe copyrights, even if the service can be used to share Linux distributions, you're potentially liable.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[timmarhy]

I could believe PB would chew close to 93K a month in costs if they have 10 million users.

if 1/2 their registered users visit just once a month and they get another 5 million drive by's (which is easy to see happening) and the average bandwidth used per user is 0.5meg (also pretty mild) it would mean they need 5 terabytes of bandwidth spread out over multiple 100mbit links, not to mention how much all the rackspace would set them back.

if google can make billions providing ad based search results then i can't hold the PB guys to ransom over what ever measley profit they make. after all all the PB stuff is indexed on google anyway.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[Alsn]

Know much about Swedish law do you? Because according to every single article i've read in Swedish from a reliable source the prosecutor has no case whatsoever.

The google defense seems to be working just fine since theyve used it for years already...

Suprnova?

[mcrbids]

Anybody remember what Suprnova was like at its peak? I remember that Suprnova accounted for something like 40% of the traffic online, or something ridiculously similar. How does TPB compare?

Re:Suprnova?

[dotancohen]

ALL torrent traffic from EVERYWHERE accounts for 35% of the internet The remaining 65% breaks down to spam and porn.

Re:10 million users?

[ILuvRamen]

that reminds me. I bet they just had a "You know, we probably should have picked a different name" moment like all the not so wisely named sites out there that took off. I mean youtube is like you and tube, I mean it's genius! But you gotta wonder if the Flickr creator ever sat down and thought "too bad flicker was already taken" lol. I know I've had one of those moments. I've now written 36 very popular stories on a certain site and now 20,000 people read each one and I'm stuck with my stupid nickname that I pulled out of my ass in 30 seconds the first time. So yeah, do you think the owner of the pirate bay ever walked into the office one day and asked someone "you think the name's why they're suing us?" They might have done better with Happyland or Distributed Data Inc.
P.S. for all you literal people out there, this post was mostly half joking and not serious

Say hello to Sweden

[eebra82]

Pirate Bay now has more users than Sweden, which is at about 9 million. I wonder what the Swedish authorities think of that.

Re:But remember kids - piracy actually *helps* peo

[Mike89]

because they only download movies they wouldn't watch otherwise.

I download movies I wouldn't pay to see at the cinema. If I like it, I buy the DVD.

And shows they watch anyways. For "backup" purposes.

Half of the shows I like aren't broadcast in my country, and if they are, in no particular order.

And computer programs and games they are thinking about getting. For evaluation purposes.

I can't argue with you on this one, but a lot of the community here uses all freeware/open source and has no need to pirate shitty overpriced software.

Maybe if the Pirate Bay is able to make so much money off this, the RIAA/MPAA should get smart and do the same. I'd happily buy the TV shows and movies I download now if there was a legitimate way to pay for them and get them in a format that I actually wanted (Xvid, please). If DVDs didn't have 10 minutes of forced watching at the start, they'd get more sales out of them too. Do you really think the multi-million (billion?) dollar corporations need you here to stand up for them?

Re:Biggest tracker and it shows

[dmsuperman]

The best one I ever used was Demonoid, but since they've recently gone down due to the CRIA...
You could find anything on there, and it always had seeders, and it was always well described and had a lot of comments, and there were never fakes, and it was always good quality. Demonoid just plain owned.