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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