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The Pirate Bay allows users to search for Magnet links. These are used to reference resources available for download via peer-to-peer networks which, when opened in a BitTorrent client, begin downloading the desired content. (Originally,^[29] the Pirate Bay allowed users to download BitTorrent files (torrents), small files that contain metadata necessary to download the data files from other users). The torrents are organized into categories: "Audio", "Video", "Applications", "Games", "Porn" and "Other".^[30] Registration requires an email address and is free; registered users may upload their own torrents and comment on torrents. According to a study of newly uploaded files during 2013 by TorrentFreak, 44% of uploads were television shows and movies, porn was in second place with 35% of uploads, and audio made up 9% of uploads.^[31]

The website features a browse function that enables users to see what is available in broad categories like Audio, Video, and Games, as well as sub-categories like Audio books, High-res Movies, and Comics. The contents of a category can be sorted by file name, the number of seeds or leechers, the date posted, etc.

According to Piratbyrån, The Pirate Bay is a long-running project of performance art.^[32] Normally the front page of The Pirate Bay features a drawing of a pirate ship with the logo of the 1980s anti-copyright infringement campaign, Home Taping Is Killing Music, on its sails.^[33]

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Initially, The Pirate Bay's four Linux servers ran a custom web server called Hypercube. An old version is open source.^[15] On 1 June 2005, The Pirate Bay updated its website in an effort to reduce bandwidth usage, which was reported to be at 2 HTTP requests per millisecond on each of the four web servers,^[16] as well as to create a more user friendly interface for the front-end of the website. The website now runs Lighttpd andPHP on its dynamic front ends, MySQL at the database back end, Sphinx on the two search systems, memcached for caching SQL queries and PHP-sessions and Varnish in front of Lighttpd for caching static content. As of September 2008, The Pirate Bay consisted of 31 dedicated servers including nine dynamic web fronts, a database, two search engines, and eight BitTorrent trackers.^{[17][citation needed]}

On 7 December 2007, The Pirate Bay finished the move from Hypercube to Opentracker as its BitTorrent tracking software, also enabling the use of the UDP tracker protocol for which Hypercube lacked support.^[18]This allowed UDP multicast to be used to synchronize the multiple servers with each other much faster than before.^[19] Opentracker is free software.^[20][21]

In June 2008, The Pirate Bay announced that their servers would support SSL encryption (accessible via https://thepiratebay.se) in response to Sweden's new wiretapping law.^[22][23] On 19 January 2009, The Pirate Bay launched IPv6 support for their tracker system, using an IPv6-only version of Opentracker.^[24] On 17 November 2009, The Pirate Bay shut off its tracker service permanently, stating that centralized trackers are no longer needed since distributed hash tables (DHT), peer exchange (PEX), and magnet links allow peers to find each other and content in a decentralized way.^[25][26]

On 20 February 2012, The Pirate Bay announced in a Facebook post that after 29 February the site would no longer offer torrent files, and would instead offer only magnet links. The site commented: "Not having torrents will be a bit cheaper for us but it will also make it harder for our common enemies to stop us."^[27] The site added that torrents being shared by fewer than ten people will retain their torrent files, to ensure compatibility with older software that may not support magnet links.^[28]

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The Pirate Bay was established in November 2001 by the Swedish anti-copyright organization Piratbyrån (The Piracy Bureau); it has been run as a separate organization since October 2004. The Pirate Bay was first run by Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij, who are known by their nicknames "anakata" and "TiAMO", respectively. They have both been accused of "assisting in making copyrighted content available" by the Motion Picture Association of America. On 31 May 2006, the website's servers inStockholm were raided and taken away by Swedish police, leading to three days of downtime.^[4] The Pirate Bay has been involved in a number of lawsuits, both as plaintiff and as defendant. On 17 April 2009, Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Carl Lundström were found guilty of assistance to copyright infringement and sentenced to one year in prison and payment of a fine of 30 million SEK (app. 4,200,000 USD; 2,800,000 GBP; or 3,100,000 EUR), after a trial of nine days. The defendants appealed the verdict and accused the judge of giving in to political pressure.^[5] On 26 November 2010, a Swedish appeals court upheld the verdict, decreasing the original prison terms but increasing the fine to 46 million SEK.^[6] On 17 May 2010, because of an injunction against their bandwidth provider, the site was taken offline.^[7] Access to the website was later restored with a message making fun of the injunction on their front page. On 23 June 2010, the group Piratbyrån disbanded due to the death of Ibi Kopimi Botani, a prominent member and co-founder of the group.^[8]

The Pirate Bay was hosted for several years by PRQ, a Sweden-based company, owned by creators of TPB Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij.^[9] PRQ is said to provide "highly secure, no-questions-asked hosting services to its customers."^[10] From May 2011, Serious Tubes Networks started providing network connectivity to The Pirate Bay.^[11]

On 23 January 2012, The Pirate Bay added the new category Physibles. These are 3D files described as "data objects that are able (and feasible) to become physical" using a 3D printer.^[12]

In May 2012, as part of Google's newly inaugurated "Transparency Report", the company reported over 6,000 formal requests to remove Pirate Bay links from the Google Search index; those requests covered over 80,500 URLs, with the five copyright holders having the most requests consisting of: Froytal Services LLC, Bang Bros, Takedown Piracy LLC, Amateur Teen Kingdom, and International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI).^[13]

On 10 August 2013, the Pirate Bay announced the release of PirateBrowser, a free web browser used to circumvent internet censorship.^[14]

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The Pirate Bay (commonly abbreviated TPB) is a website that provides magnet links to facilitate peer-to-peer file sharing using the BitTorrent protocol. It is the most visited torrent directory on the World Wide Web.^[2] The site was founded in Sweden in 2003.

In 2009, the website’s founders were found guilty in Sweden for "assisting in making copyright content available". In some countries, ISPs have been ordered to block access to the website. Since then, proxies have been made all around the world providing access to The Pirate Bay.^[3]