The Pirate Bay: 15 Years and Still Unstoppable

The internet continues to evolve at an unprecedented pace, but one thing remains constant: The Pirate Bay. Back in 2009, in a quiet corner of my school’s library, I booted up my battered laptop, making sure no one was peeking over my shoulder. I knew it was risky to do this on the school’s WiFi, but it still felt safer than doing it at home. All it took was visiting one website and running one program on my computer. Suddenly, I could get almost any digital content for free.

I had no idea that the site I was using—The Pirate Bay—would become embroiled in serious legal trouble because of millions of users like me. Nor did I expect that, ten years later, I’d still be using the same site as if nothing had happened.

The explosive growth of the internet in the early 2000s introduced me to many things: search engines, pornography, chat rooms, online shopping. But nothing caught my attention like piracy—it seemed like just a flashy label for illegally downloading copyrighted content. I grew up in the ‘90s, a consumer of VHS tapes and audio cassettes. Now, there was an alternative—a treasure trove of songs, TV shows, and movies, all just a few clicks away thanks to the magic of peer-to-peer file sharing. For a kid with little spare cash to spend on CDs, it was a godsend. The problem was, many early programs were riddled with viruses, unreliable files, and unstable connections.

But then there was The Pirate Bay.

Every longtime user remembers falling in love with The Pirate Bay, which launched in 2003 and remains a symbol of unstoppable force. A 35-year-old Reddit user, “John,” described discovering The Pirate Bay as “feeling a ray of sunshine leading me to a better world of piracy, where I didn’t have to deal with ugly interfaces and junk files.” Alex (a pseudonym, as he works as a lawyer), a 28-year-old from Los Angeles, said The Pirate Bay became his “clear favorite” after his first use, thanks to its organization and structure, which felt “far less superficial” than other sites. Thomas Pascoal, one of my college roommates, summed it up best: “It was always easy to find what you needed, instead of clicking on a Batman movie and finding some dumb porn instead,” he laughed. “The site changed everything.”

Unlike early peer-to-peer file sharing programs, The Pirate Bay uses torrents, which allow for faster and more efficient downloads. Instead of getting a file from a single source, torrents create a decentralized network, pulling data from many users in different locations. The more people share a file, the faster the download speed.

But this technical advantage doesn’t fully explain why the internet’s love affair with The Pirate Bay remains so strong. Other competitors fell to lawsuits, criminal cases, and competition. The people who founded and maintained The Pirate Bay faced similar fates. Yet, despite massive legal scrutiny, blocks in many countries, and millions in fines, the site with its iconic red-brown pirate ship logo sails on, kept afloat by an anonymous crowd of die-hard pirates who revive it every time it seems to disappear for good. “It’s absurd that this platform still works and is still so popular, given its illegality. I’m impressed by its longevity,” says Pascoal. “I remember when they lost their original .org URL, and the next day you could find a hundred identical mirrors on Google with the same torrents.”

The Legal Battles and Resilience

A decade ago, the Swedish government tried to punish The Pirate Bay’s founders with 34 copyright infringement charges. Half were dismissed for lack of evidence, but the case ended with an unprecedented verdict: a year in prison and $3.5 million in fines for the four defendants. At the time, lawyers called it the most high-profile file-sharing case in Europe, as significant as the U.S. attack on Napster (which was effectively killed by its lawsuit).

Other historic projects like Kazaa, Limewire, Kickass Torrents, and ExtraTorrents were shut down by lawsuits. Meanwhile, despite fears that the Swedish case would kill the site, The Pirate Bay is still alive, still hosting torrents, and has survived for 15 years. One reason for its longevity may be that it hasn’t been caught red-handed in a stricter jurisdiction, says Annemarie Bridy, a law professor at the University of Idaho with experience in online piracy. “But another part of the problem is The Pirate Bay’s legacy, which has grown into something bigger than just the people who started it,” she says. “It’s a whole phenomenon. And there are people who are ideologically committed to keeping it running. As long as that’s true, it’ll be very, very hard to shut down.”

This is the story of a simple-looking website that emerged during the most fertile period of the early internet, boldly flipping the bird to intellectual property laws and copyright holders, and surviving for what amounts to an eternity in the digital age. It thrived, growing from 25 million users to reportedly more than double that in the last decade, showing little sign of slowing down. “It’s a testament to what an anonymous team, truly believing in a common cause—access to products so vulnerable to corporatization and monetization—can do,” says John.

The 2006 Raid and Aftermath

The legal pursuit of The Pirate Bay began in 2006, just after noon on May 31, when police raided a data center in Stockholm. Although 65 officers were involved, nothing particularly dramatic happened: surveillance footage shows people calmly entering the server room, searching the racks, and then turning off the cameras.

The Pirate Bay was launched three years earlier by the Swedish anti-copyright group Piratbyrån (“The Pirate Bureau”), supported by Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm. The two coders not only believed in a free, uncensored internet, but also seemed to enjoy provoking the authorities. In 2004, they created their own ISP, PRQ, which had a uniquely permissive hosting policy—even if other providers censored a site, it could find refuge with them.

Later, Peter Sunde, also a member of Piratbyrån, joined as the third co-founder and official spokesperson. The trio quickly attracted negative attention, and months before the 2006 raid, Neij and Svartholm noticed private investigators following them. So Svartholm wasn’t surprised when police arrived at the data center on May 31. He immediately called Neij, urging him to come. At that moment, the raid’s exact target was unclear, but Neij hesitated to leave his apartment. If the target was The Pirate Bay’s tracker, it would be safer to back up the site first. That’s exactly what he did.

This moment is considered a “turning point” in The Pirate Bay’s survival. The server seizure took the site offline, but the backup allowed it to return just two days later (with a new logo showing the ship firing cannons at Hollywood, just for fun). The founders believed the Swedish authorities acted under pressure from powerful international trade groups, mainly the Motion Picture Association of America. They all remained defiant. “I’m sure we won’t be convicted,” Sunde said two years later in an interview as prosecutors prepared for trial.

Meanwhile, the founders tried to create a physical safe haven by buying the island of Sealand, a man-made structure seven miles off the British coast, technically not belonging to any country. They failed to raise the money, and eventually “sold” The Pirate Bay to a mysterious company, Reservella, registered in the Seychelles, later claiming in court that the sale was real despite no evidence of any money changing hands. Sunde, Svartholm, and Neij also arrogantly ignored takedown requests from industry groups and copyright holders. One such request from DreamWorks SKG prompted Svartholm to reply: “In our opinion and our lawyers’ opinion, you’re just fucking morons, so go shove your telescopic batons up your ass.” This attitude didn’t change when, in February 2009, the trial began against the three operators and Carl Lundström, a Swedish businessman accused of supporting them.

When charges were dropped for lack of evidence on the second day of the trial, it seemed like a good sign, and the three founders remained confident throughout the investigation. In the 2013 documentary The Pirate Bay AFK, Neij testifies about setting up an email filter to ignore takedown requests. “I get a lot of spam. Spam is mail I didn’t ask for,” he deadpans. (He also earned internet fame for tweaking the site’s code and bringing it back online from inside the courthouse on the trial’s final day.)

Despite this attitude—or perhaps because of it, given rumors of the judge’s bias toward copyright holders—the four were convicted on April 17, 2009. Each received a year in prison and a total fine of $3.5 million. But Sunde, Svartholm, and Neij refused to give in. “We can’t pay, and we won’t pay,” Sunde said at a press conference. “Even if I had the money, I’d rather burn everything I own and not even give them the ashes.”

Instead, he made a sign out of a piece of paper reading, “I OWE YOU 31,000,000 SEK,” referring to Swedish kronor. “That’s all you’ll get,” Sunde said. “We noticed some people have started collecting money to pay these stupid fines. Please don’t. Don’t collect, don’t send money. We don’t need it, because we’re not paying any fines!”

They might have gotten away with it, but the case split the trio. Neij fled Sweden for Malaysia, then Laos, where he spent most of the next three years and even married a Thai woman. He was arrested in November 2014 crossing the Thai border and extradited to Sweden to serve 10 months in prison. Thai authorities said the Motion Picture Association of America, not the Swedish government, hired a local lawyer who worked with police to execute the Interpol warrant. Later, leaked Sony Pictures emails revealed MPAA executives celebrated Neij’s arrest as a “big win.”

Svartholm faced a similar fate, fleeing to Cambodia until he was found and deported in 2012. He served a shortened sentence in Sweden, then was imprisoned again in Denmark on unrelated hacking charges, finally released in 2015, joking throughout his time behind bars.

Sunde hid in southern Sweden for two years before being caught and serving a reduced sentence. “People ask if I’d do anything differently if I could,” he told The Guardian from prison. “I say no. It’s just five months of lost time.”

The Pirate Bay’s Legacy and the Future of Piracy

Since leaving prison, the three co-founders have led relatively quiet lives. Sunde is the most visible, having created and sold the microtransaction app Flattr, dabbled in politics as a socialist, and run for the European Parliament with Finland’s Pirate Party. Svartholm reportedly returned quietly to IT. Neij now lives in Southeast Asia, raising children with his wife.

All claim they no longer work with The Pirate Bay. While this can’t be proven, experts believe The Pirate Bay is now run by anonymous operators. The three rebels have been replaced by a hidden network of devoted fans. What remains is their idea: the importance of supporting an open and free internet, challenging copyright, and, as Neij put it, “it’s just really cool” to keep such a technically complex project running. Its legacy is hard to overshadow. “The Pirate Bay was run by very outspoken people who weren’t afraid to stand up to copyright holders. In that sense, they were unique,” says Ernesto van der Sar, founder and editor of TorrentFreak.com, which covers the industry in detail.

He adds that The Pirate Bay is no longer the gold standard for decentralized file sharing, and it’s easy to find complaints that it’s not as reliable or feature-rich as newer platforms like YTS or 1337x. However, the current prevalence of torrents and the evolution of other piracy technologies are directly linked to what The Pirate Bay started 15 years ago. Ironically, the raid and trial only increased its appeal—operators say traffic doubled almost overnight after the 2006 raid took the site down for a day.

Van der Sar notes that even though the site still operates, the 2009 verdict shattered the myth that lawmakers and law enforcement couldn’t punish those running decentralized file-sharing sites. If Napster’s death showed the danger of running a service directly linking people to copyrighted content, torrent technology was supposed to provide plausible deniability. “That’s why many thought the site was invulnerable, but its prosecution showed that wasn’t true. It was a turning point,” he adds.

Maybe that’s a good thing. Since then, The Pirate Bay has become more mobile and flexible, moving to the cloud instead of physical hosting and taking other clever measures. Even the massive 2014 raid, which took the site offline for two months, didn’t kill it. Sunde was right when he wrote in 2013: “Blocking The Pirate Bay in any country always increased the site’s traffic. It’s like trying to shoot arrows at a black hole.”

For now, the site’s biggest fans can breathe easy, but it’s unclear how legal tactics will adapt. Alex says he’s always supported the site’s “Robin Hood” mission, giving content to the masses without forcing them to pay unfair prices. He also worries that the political climate around copyright and piracy hasn’t changed much, even after many studies have shown illegal downloading doesn’t affect creators’ profits. “The Pirate Bay has come back again and again. I don’t know what the future holds, but for now, it’s still running. But the system’s problem hasn’t gone away—governments still go after people who support things like The Pirate Bay,” Alex says. “That hasn’t changed at all.”

Bridy, the law expert, agrees that industry groups like the MPAA and Recording Industry Association of America are still focused on fighting piracy. She says it’s worth watching the extradition case of Kickass Torrents founder Artem Vaulin to the U.S. for trial. But a key difference, she says, is that torrent sites like The Pirate Bay are no longer the favorite target of prosecutors. “Most lawsuits now target illegal streaming services. In 2019, they became the most popular. So yes, they’ll keep going after streamers and other cases where the industry expects to win and get good PR. There’s an unsavory side to suing peer-to-peer sites, but most lawsuits now involve pornography. Trade groups just aren’t as interested anymore.”

I admit I still visit The Pirate Bay from time to time, but the rise of legal streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, and Spotify has seriously dulled my urge to pirate. Bridy, like Alex, notes that affordable prices are the best anti-piracy measure. But we’re also seeing streaming services split apart, with Disney leaving Netflix for its own site and other major networks planning to do the same. From my perspective, this threatens users—do I now have to pay for two sites to get the same amount of content?

Many people are asking this question as they weigh the cost of entertainment in 2019. It makes me think The Pirate Bay still has a long road ahead, even though Sunde recently spoke cynically about The Pirate Bay and the “lost war” for a free internet. It also reminds me of a scene from The Pirate Bay AFK, when the trio were much more idealistic about the world and their role in it. Sunde and Svartholm are at a press conference, and the moderator asks what will happen to The Pirate Bay if the operators are found guilty.

“Nothing,” Sunde says. He looks at Svartholm, who nods in agreement.

“What can they do?” Svartholm adds. “They already tried to shut it down once. Let them fail again.”