NO REGRETS: “It was
well worth doing prison time for The Pirate Bay.”
This was the final battle cry of Pirate Bay cofounder Fredrick Neij despite getting raided
by the police multiple times, being fined 46 million kroner, and being thrown in prison
alongside some of the most vile people on Earth.
In fact, Fredrick was the only person in his entire prison that was there for a virtual
crime.
Everyone else there was convicted of robbery, assault, manslaughter, or worse.
But, things were not too bad in prison says Fredrick.
He immersed himself with reading letters from fans about how much the Pirate Bay meant to
them.
This isn’t to say that Fredrick willing turned himself in though.
Like any normal human being, he very much dreaded the idea of going to jail and he was
on the run for several years as one of the most hated individuals by media organizations
around the world.
But, eventually, the law did catch up with him putting him behind bars.
But, this only strengthened Fredrick’s personal conviction as the letters reminded him of
why did everything in the first place.
Unlike other piracy website creators, Fredrick wasn’t trying to make money or get rich
or screw over big companies.
He had founded The Pirate Bay out of principle.
The idea that information, culture, and knowledge should be shared freely around the world without
the interference of corporate greed, bureaucracy, or political influence.
In fact, Fredrick had been fighting for this cause long before he co founded the Pirate
Bay or gained any sort of notoriety.
Before his Pirate Bay days, Fredrick was part of a Swedish anti copyright group that went
around the world engaging in piracy debates and giving lectures about the right to information.
This is where Fredrick met the other founders Gottfrid Svartholm and Peter Sunde.
And together, they would go on to create one of the most controversial yet legendary sites
of all time.
So, here’s how the Pirate Bay went from being an ideological effort to becoming an
international icon despite police raids, jail time, and the efforts of the media industry
at large.
THE SCALLYWAGS: The story of the Pirate Bay dates back to
the late 1970s and early 1980s to the country of Sweden where all three of our protagonists
were born.
Not much is known about any of the founders’ childhoods, but from what we do know, it wasn’t
anything to brag about.
Fredrick was the oldest of the bunch having been born on April 27, 1978 in the city of
Jönköping Sweden.
There’s rumors that he dropped out of high school and it appears that he just stumbled
though his life one day at at time.
A similar story could be said about Gottfrid as well who was the youngest of the bunch
having been born on October 17, 1984.
Gottfrid was your classic computer nerd/hacker of the 1990s and 2000s.
Think Dennis Nedry from Jurassic Park.
And then there was Peter Sunde who was the only one that would be considered somewhat
successful by modern society, but this wasn’t to say the his childhood was any better.
Peter was born on September 13, 1978 in Uddevalla Sweden.
At first, he life wasn’t all that bad.
His mother was a staff consultant at a large company and his father was a traveling mechanic.
But, all of this fell apart when Peter’s parents got a divorce when he was just 8 years
old.
His mother would become clinically delusional as she developed psychosis which resulted
in the family constantly moving all across Scandanavia.
Unsurprisingly, Peter would end up dropping out of school in his teens, but there was
one saving grace: computers.
Computers were Peter’s one and only escape from his harsh realty and this led to him
becoming quite a skilled programmer.
Ironically, if he had this same childhood in modern times, it’s likely that he would’ve
become a lifeless social media addict like myse..Anyways, things were different back
then.
The people spending all of their time on computers weren’t endlessly scrolling through TikTok.
They were enthusiasts learning how to code and hack systems, and this would catch the
attention of German technology company Siemens.
Siemens is the people behind many of the IT systems used at hospitals, and they would
hire Peter to upgrade their patient registration system from being fingerprint based to being
retinal based.
It seemed like a pretty good gig at first glance, but Peter could not stand it at Siemens
after he joined.
He would discover that his development efforts were being used to identify and deport illegal
immigrants leading them to do unthinkable things.
You see, many of these immigrants would burn their fingers on kitchen stoves before visiting
the hospital to avoid being identified.
This was actually one of the main reasons that Siemens wanted to switch to a retinal
system.
But this simply gave Peter nightmares about immigrants poking out their eyes like Victor
Creel.
He tried to take it up with his managers, but this simply gave him the title of being
negative and difficult to work with.
Being drained from work everyday, the only solace Peter found was during the evenings
when he scrolled through online forums leading him to discover the world of piracy.
FOUNDING THE PIRATE BAY: Peter’s piracy journey started with him
swapping music and movies on invite only servers which led him to meeting fellow scallywag:
Fredrick Neij.
Fredrick introduced Peter to the file-sharing movement and to the newly founded anti copyright
organization: Piratbyrån or The Pirate Bureau.
Piratbyrån was founded on August 1, 2003 by a bunch of societal outcasts just like
Peter, Fredrick, and Gottfrid.
Their goal was to make information available to people of all backgrounds and stature,
and promote free speech above everythign else.
Not saying I agree with how they went about doing this, but honestly, it does seem like
their intentions were way more pure than most of the people who actually control the world
today.
With this idea in mind, the group got to work.
Some members tried opposing pro copyright lobbyist groups.
Others traveled the world and gave lectures on radio and TV.
Our trio decided to create a website.
This was specifically Fredrick’s idea.
He wanted to create a Bittorrent tracker and he would recruit the help of Peter and Gottfrid
for the IT and coding side of things.
Given the relative simplicity of the website, Peter and Gottfrid had this up and running
in no time and Piratbyrån would launch the website on September 15, 2003.
This was actually just one of many websites that this trio launched.
Moving into 2004, Fredrick and Gottfrid would create a full on internet service provider
and web hosting company called PRQ.
Don’t be fooled though, this was no AT&T.
With PRQ, Fredrick and Gottfrid looked to give an online voice to anyone and everyone
regardless of what they stood for or did.
This included some unheard and repressed voices but it also included a bunch of creeps literally.
There were a bunch of forums hosted on PRQ that advocated for how should I say it: unorthodox
relationships.
Though Fredrick and Gottfrid definitely did not agree with everything that was hosted
on their platform, they defended all of their customers equally citing freedom speech.
Something else that sparked a bunch of controversy was yet another one this duo’s ventures:
Americas Dumbest Soldiers.
Honestly, this one was quite distasteful.
The website consisted of a list of deceased American soldiers and it prompted people to
vote on how dumb their deaths were.
Little to say, this site didn’t stay up for very long.
While these other ventures definitely caused a scene by themselves, it turned out that
the trio’s original venture would have the greatest sticking power.
And luckily for them, it was pretty cheap to run.
Afterall, the Pirate Bay didn’t actually have any file hosting or server to client
downloading abilites built in.
The site simply connected people with a library of links and all of the downloading took place
using peer to peer protocols.
So, the trio just had to ensure that they had enough server capacity to handle all of
the search volume, indexing, sorting, and filtering itself.
But, to their surprise it didn’t take long for this itself to become unmanageable.
THE LEGENDARY RISE: As the Pirate Bay exploded it popularity,
it became abundantly clear that this could no longer be treated as a side project.
So, in October of 2004, the trio would transition the site into being a standalone non profit
based in the Seychelles, though this is disputed.
If you also have no idea what this place, you’re not alone.
The Seychelles is an East African country that’s composed of a 115 islands and it
just so happened to be the perfect place to setup a shell company.
Now, they had an entity.
All they needed was infrastructure.
Enter Carl Lundström.
This guy was one of five heirs to the Wasabrod fortune.
I’ve actually never heard of this company, but they’re super big.
They’re extremely popular across Scandinavia and they’re actually the largest crisp bread
producer in the world.
By the time Carl turned 22, this company would be sold to a Swiss pharmaceutical company
called Sandoz which made Carl a mega millionaire by the time most of us would even graduate
college.
Carl would turnaround and use this wealth to fund a variety of extreme political movements
and it wasn’t long till he crossed paths with our protagonists.
He would agree to provide the Pirate Bay with all of the required servers and infrastructure
and before you knew it, the Pirate Bay would become a fully funded venture making copyright
holders around the world cry.
But, they weren’t crying for long.
They were hurt and they were hurt bad.
Hollywood claims that in 2006 alone, piracy cost them $6.1 billion.
And the biggest culprit enabling this asinine behavior was the Swedish site that was just
one Google search away: the Pirate Bay.
Naturally, Hollywood wanted revenge, they wanted justice.
So, they marched over to the Swedish authorities and demanded that the Pirate Bay be taken
down as soon as possible.
This was met with a chuckle from Sweden.
I’m not even kidding.
You see, Sweden is surprisingly chill about copyright and patents.
In fact, they have a full on political party called the Pirate Party who’s entire focus
is to reform copyright law.
Hollywood was gobsmacked and they would take their grievances to the good old USA.
Surely, their hundreds of millions of lobbying dollars would actually earn them some respect
from the American authorities and they were right.
The US would turn around and go “Yo Sweden, you better shutdown those mischievous rascals
you got there.
You don’t want us to bring out the stick and impose trade sanctions through the World
Trade Organizations right?”
And to that Sweden would respond “Your wish is our command” and they would go ahead
and raid the Pirate Bay’s servers in Stockholm on May 31, 2006.
There was so much equipment that the Swedish police would end up filling three trucks worth
of computer equipment and servers.
Surely, this would put an end to the nonsense they thought.
Ummm, the Pirate Bay would be back up in just 3 days.
HOLLYWOOD STRIKES BACK: You’re probably wondering, how was the trio
able to restart the Pirate Bay so quickly?
Well, the answer is that the Pirate Bay is nothing.
It’s really just a massive excel sheet with a bunch of links.
In fact, the entirety of the Pirate Bay can be compressed into a 90 megabyte zip file.
So, they didn’t have to maintain massive convoluted code bases and repositories or
enterprise resource planning software.
All of the servers and equipment were simply there to support the extraordinary traffic.
So, as soon as they were able to find new infrastructure, they were able to upload their
tiny little zip file and go live in no time.
This time, they chose to put their servers in a more discrete location somewhere in the
Netherlands so that the police couldn’t just turn around and raid them again.
Hollywood was triggered.
Not only was the Pirate Bay back up and running, but the police raid had simply drawn even
more attention to the website.
Clearly, Hollywood didn’t have much power in Sweden, so they turned their focus to American
companies.
They might not be able to shutdown the Pirate Bay, but maybe they could prevent you from
accessing it.
They started working with Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and ISPs to suppress the sharing
and searching of Pirate Bay links, but this only made things worse.
Here’s the thing, when you tell people not to do something, that’s when they want to
do it even more and this couldn’t be any truer with the Pirate Bay.
Just because Facebook or Google suppressed Pirate Bay links doesn’t mean jack.
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to go directly to the Pirate Bay and search
up whatever you want, and that was exactly what was happening.
By 2008, the Pirate Bay became the 97th most visited website on the entire internet, and
they were even having talks about selling the website to Global Gaming Factory X AB
for $8.5 million.
It was becoming abundantly clear that there was only one way to stop this madness: strike
the tent.
On January 31, 2008, Swedish prosecutors would file charges against Gottfrid, Fredrick, Peter,
and Carl.
From the very beginning, this was an open and shut case.
The Pirate Bay’s lawyers tried to defend that the Pirate Bay was simply hosting links,
and that it wasn’t actually encouraging or enabling piracy.
If you want, you could use the site to share opensource software.
While this was technically true, I mean, let’s face it, these guys were literally part of
Piratbyrån and all of this was completely intentional.
So, their argument was quickly shut down and on April 17, 2009, all four of them would
be sentenced to one year in jail along with a 30 million kroner fine which is about $3.5
million.
They would try appealing and this did result in shorter prison sentences.
Fredrick would be down to 10 months, Peter would be down to 8 months, and Carl would
be down to 4 months.
But, the appeal also came with a larger fine of 46 million Kroner or $6.5 million.
The walls were closing in, and there was only one thing that the trio could do: get on the
run.
UNSTOPPABLE LEGACY: If you’re wanted by Hollywood at large for
causing billions of dollars worth of lost revenue, you would think that it would be
a good to lay low.
But all three of our protagonists would do the exact opposite.
Fredrick would run away to Laos/Thailand and he would create yet another file sharing site
called BayFiles in 2011.
Apparently, this website was supposed to comply with copyright rules, but you can take that
for what you will.
Not only did Fredrick launch another site, but he would regularly cross the border between
Laos and Thailand because he had residences in both countries.
In fact, he crossed the border almost 30 times before getting caught in November of 2014
at which point he would be deported back to Sweden where he spent 200 days in jail.
Atleast Fredrick created another side that was legal atleast on the front.
Gottfrid on the other hand would run away to Cambodia and go full on spy mode and became
a regular hacker for Wikileaks.
He would literally infiltrate Denmark’s social security and driver’s license databases.
I don’t think that you’d be surprised to hear that when he was caught in August
of 2012, his prison sentence would be upped to three and a half years, but he would be
let go after 3 years.
And finally as for Peter, well, my man straight up joined Finland’s Pirate party and ran
for European Parliament in the 2014 election.
Let’s just say, he was arrested a few days after the election and had to serve five months
in jail.
By late 2014, all three founders were not only disconnected from the Pirate Bay, but
they were all straight up in jail.
So, prosecuters figured that this was the perfect time to end this once and for all.
On December 9, 2014, the police would conduct yet another raid on the Pirate Bay and they
would shut down the original website once and for all.
Surely, the founders couldn’t pull any quick ones this time right?
Well, they were right.
None of the founders would try to restart the Pirate Bay after their jail sentence.
Fredrick would return Laos and get a job in IT.
Peter would work on a micropayments system called Flattr and a messaging platform called
Hemlis.
Gottfrid would also return to the IT sector and move on from the Pirate Bay, but none
of this mattered.
Yes, the founders were done and out, but there were thousands of people wanting to carry
on the legacy.
Remember how we talked about it being really easy to store the entirety of the Pirate Bay.
Well, it turns out that a lot of people had been regularly saving copies of the website.
So whenever one version of the website is taken down, it’s just a matter of time until
another one pops up with a slightly different domain.
At first, prosecutors tried taking down these websites one after another, but it quickly
became evident that this was simply a waste of time, effort, and resources because the
legacy of the Pirate Bay was truly unstoppable.
THE FINAL SAY: In the end, the Pirate Bay started off as
a project created by a bunch of misfits and outcasts, but it quickly turned into the icon
of the internet and the worst nightmare of copyright holders.
Hollywood tried burying it, shredding it, and burning it, but in the end they decided
to just give it all away because what other choice did they really have.
Also, if you’re wondering about what happened to the fine well here’s what Peter had to
say about it.
During the press conference following the verdict, Peter would hold up a sign saying
that he owes the government 31 million kroner and that that confession is all that the government
would get.
If that wasn’t clear enough, he would go onto clarify that he doesn’t have the money
he didn’t have any money and even if he did, he’d rather burn everything and not
even give them the ashes.
And that right there is the legendary history of the Pirate Bay.
Do you guys think piracy is moral?
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