Secrets of the Pirate Bay

It’s Saturday night and I’m lounging on a living room sofa surrounded by lanky twenty-somethings in shorts and deep tans. Across from me, a wire emerges from a green Xbox — modified to stream movies from its hard drive — and snakes past two dusty turntables and into a video projector, which is displaying a menu of movies that would make Blockbuster jealous.

Peter, this living room’s owner, selects a title, and the text “For Your Consideration” fades onto the screen, marking this movie as a leaked screener from the Academy Awards: Someone in Hollywood ripped their review DVD copy of the film and uploaded it to the internet, where it eventually found its way to this hacked game console. Peter chuckles, others cheer.

And barely a month after Swedish police raided their server room and carted two administrators and their legal help off in handcuffs, the lanky co-operator of the Pirate Bay — the most popular and hunted piracy site in the world — settles back to watch a pirated copy of Spanglish.

Harbored by a country where 1.2 million out of 9 million citizens tell the census that they engage in file sharing, the Pirate Bay is as much a national symbol as it is a website. Protected by weak Swedish copyright laws, the Bay survived and grew as movie studio lawyers felled competing BitTorrent trackers one-by-one. Today it boasts an international user base and easily clears 1 million unique visitors a day. New movies sometimes appear at the top of the site’s most-popular list before flickering onto a single theater screen.

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