Founded in 2003 by Swedish think tank Piratbyrån, The Pirate Bay facilitates the connection among users of the peer-to-peer torrent protocol, which are able to contribute to the site through the addition of magnet links.

[5][6][7][8][9] In April 2009, the website's founders Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde and Gottfrid Svartholm were found guilty in the Pirate Bay trial in Sweden for assisting in copyright infringement and were sentenced to serve one year in prison and pay a fine.

[4] The Pirate Bay has sparked controversies and discussion about legal aspects of file sharing, copyright, and civil liberties and has become a platform for political initiatives against established intellectual property laws as well as a central figure in an anti-copyright movement.

The Pirate Bay was first run by Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm with Peter Sunde as the spokesperson;[14] the founders are known by their nicknames "TiAMO", "anakata" and "brokep", respectively.

[29] On the second day after the raid EZTV was reported to be showing "signs of life" with uploads to ExtraTorrent and KickassTorrents and supporting proxy sites like eztv-proxy.net via the main website's backend IP addresses.

[49] Registrations were reopened in June 2023, following the closure of RARBG, which further restricted the online possibilities of new potential uploaders and pushed TPB team to act.

As of September 2008[update], The Pirate Bay consisted of 31 dedicated servers including nine dynamic web fronts, a database, two search engines, and eight BitTorrent trackers.

[68] In April 2007, a rumour was confirmed on the Swedish talk show Bert that The Pirate Bay had received financial support from right-wing entrepreneur Carl Lundström.

This caused some consternation since Lundström, an heir to the Wasabröd fortune, is known for financing several far-right political parties and movements like Sverigedemokraterna and Bevara Sverige Svenskt (Keep Sweden Swedish).

During the talk show, Piratbyrån spokesman Tobias Andersson acknowledged that "without Lundström's support, Pirate Bay would not have been able to start" and stated that most of the money went towards acquiring servers and bandwidth.

"[92] In response to claims of annual revenue exceeding $3 million made by the IFPI, Sunde argues that the website's high bandwidth, power, and hardware costs eliminate the potential for profit.

[93] In 2012, banner ads for Canada's Department of Finance Economic Action Plan were placed atop search results, as part of a larger "media buy", but were pulled "quickly".

[139] On 2 December 2012, some ISPs in the UK such as BT, Virgin Media, and BE started blocking The Promo Bay[140] but stopped a few days later when the BPI reversed its position.

[144] The P2P news blog TorrentFreak reported on 12 October 2007 that the Internet domain ifpi.com, which previously belonged to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, an anti-piracy organisation, had been acquired by The Pirate Bay.

They required enforcement for ending The Pirate Bay's accessory to copyright infringement that had not stopped despite the court order in April, and in the complaint listed several pages of works being shared with the help of the site.

[173][174] The Stockholm district court ruled on 21 August that Black Internet must stop making available the specific works mentioned in the judgment, or face a 500,000 kronor fine.

[182][183] On 28 October 2009, the Stockholm District Court ordered a temporary injunction on Neij and Svartholm with a penalty of 500,000 kronor each, forbidding them from participating in the operation of The Pirate Bay's website or trackers.

He was detained in Phnom Penh by officers executing an international warrant issued against him in April after he did not turn up to serve a one-year jail sentence for copyright violations.

[195][196] The criminal charges were supported by a consortium of intellectual rights holders led by IFPI, who filed individual civil compensation claims against the owners of The Pirate Bay.

The hearings ended on 3 March 2009 and the verdict was announced at 11:00 am on Friday 17 April 2009: Neij, Sunde, Svartholm and Lundström were all found guilty and sentenced to serve one year in prison and pay a fine of 30 million Swedish krona (app.

[212] On 24 August 2009, one of The Pirate Bay's upstream providers was ordered to discontinue service for the website by a Swedish court in response to a civil action brought by several entertainment companies including Disney, Universal, Time Warner, Columbia, Sony, NBC, and Paramount.

[143] According to the TPB Blog, this caused a downtime of 3 hours;[213] however, some users were unable to access the site immediately following the relocation due to unrelated technical difficulties.

[232][233] In retaliation to the raid, a group of hackers claiming to be part of Anonymous allegedly leaked email log-in details of Swedish government officials.

[233][239] On 22 December 2014, a website was resumed at the domain thepiratebay.se, showing a flip clock with the length of time in days and hours that the site had been offline, and a waving pirate flag.

[247] The Pirate Bay has sparked controversies and discussion about legal aspects of file sharing, copyright, and civil liberties and has become a platform for political initiatives against established intellectual property laws and a central figure in an anti-copyright movement.

[11] The website faced several shutdowns and domain seizures which "did little to take the site offline, as it simply switched to a series of new web addresses and continued to operate".

[254] This means that when the rights holders find a website (IP and URL for the Pirate Bay) they can inform Telia who are legally required to block it in 2–3 weeks.

When a user sends an instant message that contains a link to The Pirate Bay, Windows Live Messenger prompts a warning and claims "Blocked as it was reported unsafe".

[261][262] In late November 2021, Google removed The Pirate Bay and more than 100 related domains from its search results in the Netherlands due to the Dutch court order.

[265][266] Björn Ulvaeus, member of the Swedish pop music group ABBA, criticised copyright infringing activities of The Pirate Bay supporters as "lazy and mean".