The Pirate Bay, the world's largest Bit Torrent tracker, has lost a legal battle in Denmark, that could cause a ripple effect and drastically change the fate and happiness of hackers worldwide. Since the establishment of the Pirate Bay, it has been inevitable that a legality issue would surface. Many international organization have tried and failed to shutdown The Pirate Bay, in it's native Sweden. They have tried to fine them, block ISP's from accessing them and confiscating their servers. All these attempts have been defeated due to the fact that under Danish law, the Pirate Bay is a legal site and has done nothing wrong, in that it hosts no illicit content or material. The Pirate Bay has also made preparations so that even if the Danish government were to close down their serve, they would have back ups through out the world. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) won it's lawsuit last week against Danish Internet service provider (ISP), Tele2. The Danish court has ordered Tele2 to block access to the site because it is used as a means to traffic copyrighted materials between users . It seems the ban is having the opposite affect that the IFPI had hoped for. The Pirate Bay is now getting record traffic from users in Denmark and has found ways of help Tele2 users to get around the ban.
The Pirate Bay started in Sweden as a way for users to find music, movies and other content using the Bit Torrent protocol. Bit Torrent is a way of distributing large amounts of data without the original distributor incurring the entire costs of hardware or bandwidth resources. When data is distributed each user supplies pieces of the data to newer users, reducing the burden on any given person. To share a file users first create a torrent file. This small file contains metadata which holds information about the files that are shared and about the tracker, the computer that coordinates the file distribution. Users who want to download these files get a torrent file for it, and connect to the specified tracker, which tells them which other users have the pieces of the file to download.
The interesting part of the law suit is that the Pirate Bay hosts no pirated content. It only hosts the torrent files needed to download the content. Also the Danish court singled out Tele2, making it the only ISP in the country blocking the site, while other ISPs were allowed to continue serving up Pirate Bay. This move signals a dangerous shift in the law, as ISPs could also be forced to censor sites that are providing to host illegal content. In oppressive countries the government is the one that decides what information the people can get and what should be censored. In this case IFPI, a private organization is deciding what content people should have access to.
