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The Pirate Bay Turns 15 (torrentfreak.com)
Sometime about 15 years ago, a group of hackers and activists launched The Pirate Bay, a notorious torrent search engine. TorrentFreak: 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 Piratbyran, 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 Antpiratbyran. 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.
One of the group's unwritten goals was to offer a counterweight to the propaganda being spread by local anti-piracy outfit Antpiratbyran. 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.
Finding the people who run PirateBay and the person(s) that killed OJ's wife have proven to be difficult.
Thanks, I found there content unavailable anywhere else on the internet. Old books, comics, movies.
Somebody at Mensa is literally shitting themselves trying to find out who you are so they can give you your laurel wreath, you absolute fucking genius.
The Pirate Bay is a well known honey pot. The original Free Culture operators were compromised years ago. Since then, TPB has been operated jointly by the copyright mafia and the Stasi.
Beware!
Cake Day
You have been an essential service for anyone who lacks the money to buy or wants to try first! Thanks!
But at 15, it's too old for Roy Moore.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Were we thought in the future everyone would be able to permanently own a copy of their favorite movie/tv show/album. We figured in the future artists would still be paid gratis (e.g. 'you are my faviorate here is $30 donation please make another album!') But the digital information would be free, in the future anyone would be able to access any movie ever made for free, and maybe only be 'forced' to pay if they wanted HD quality of the latest episode/release. We figured all this increased internet freedom would bring the copyright regime tumbling down, and finally we would have the necessary reform that would allow derivative works like fanfics/fanart and remixes to flourish on the interwebs instead of being shut down.
15 years later and you either need a subscription to Netflix, Amazon, Hulu etc. to maybe watch a couple of movies you might like that may or may not be available that month. Otherwise you are stuck with a box under your TV that demands you pay $5.99-$9.99 EVERY SINGLE TIME you want to watch your favorite action movie. The oppressive copyright regime marches on into new territories and countries, with the US government sending agents to arrest teenagers in countries where its not even illegal to share files online. Youtube continues to take down videos for using 15 seconds of video that is declared 'infringing' even when the included content is not even owned by the party that flagged it to be taken down. Heck this happens even when the content is in the public domain! The same thing happened to music, with more people volunteering to pay for limited streaming access to a library instead of just sharing their favorite tracks with friends.
Instead of technology making us more free it helped the oligarchs to control us even more.
There is still no content that cannot be had for free on the net. This is after YEARS of different tactics from the **AA cartels. Almost seems like digital media cannot be caged. Not for lack of trying.
I still buy certain content, but only when I feel the need to support the author. The VAST MAJORITY of content I am interested in belongs to another faceless corporation, who bought from another faceless corporation, who bought from another and another and another... who is so busy raping what should have been public domain that they wont even notice if I decide to "license" this or that content anyway, but will cry foul if I choose to use my licensed copy on a different device I bought it for.
I am not ashamed. I used to have a DVD collection in the 100s. every single one of them opened with un-skippable commercials and legal threats. I ripped and sold em all as soon as storage became cheap anough.
I also subscribe to Netflix, Amazon prime, and Xbox live. My steam library has 200+ games in it, GOG has about 100, and there is a bookshelf in my den that houses the empty cardboard boxes of hundreds of PC games. Under my TV lives 5 different game consoles, and a few custom jobs. Of all of those games and media, I consume only the ones with no internet connection required, no extra hoops or social clubs, and definitely no 20+DLC options. If those are part of the licensed copy, I will download and play an unlicensed version.
These companies would call me an evil pirate who deserves to owe them more money than I could possible make in my lifetime, but at the end of the day, I'm still one of their best customers.
Big media broke the covenant. I don't feel even a little bit bad. I played by the rules for a long time, but every time copyright is extended, I fly the black flag a little higher. If they can change the deal, then so can I.
WVL.
That's "Big Mouse".
Comment removed based on user account deletion
After all these years the search engine on their site is still pretty bad. Many times I've found better results on piratebay just using google instead of their own search field. Sometimes you will get "no results" on their search engine for the exact same terms that you get lots of TPB results on Google. Really odd, especially if the terms are in the torrent title...