Swedish website, Pirate Bay, hosts .torrent and magnet links. In this networking site user can share any kind of electronics files, software, computer games via Bit Torrent. This networking site bills “The most popular Bit Torrent site”. And this site is ranking 77th most visited networking sites in the world and 13th in Sweden. The torrent engine has five million plus registered users. And the system hosts over 3.5 million torrent files. As per the Los Angeles Times, this networking site is “the biggest facilitators of downloading in the networking world”.

Swedish anti-copyright organization established TPB site in November 2003. From October 2004, this network has been run as a separate organization.  It was founded by two persons, Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm. On 31 May 2006, Swedish police organized a raid and took down the torrent site, leading to three days of downtime. This site has been involved in lots of lawsuits, in both as plaintiff and also as defendant. On 17th April 2009, these two persons were finding guilty for assistance to copyright infringement and also they were pushed into prison for a one year with 30 million SEK of penalty. On 26th November 2010, court decreasing original prison terms but the court increased fine from 30 million SEK to 46 million SEK. On 17th May 2010, the site was offline due to injunction against bandwidth provider. PQR, a Sweden-based company is hosting this large search engine. This company is provided “highly secure and no-question-asked” hosting service.

TPB allows users to search and also download the Pirate Bay files. Pirate Bay Download always applies for electronic files like videos, applications, games, other and porn. Normally the porn category is not for all users. It’s for only the registered and logged-in users. Registered users need to provide an email address and they can use the torrent system for free. Users can upload their own files and can comment on each file. TPB enables users to see any kind of audio, video and games as well as also comics, audio books. Non-registered users can’t use the Pirate Bay Download. They have to register for downloading electronic files. In this networking site, category contents can be sorted by file name and also by other types like number of seeds, date of posted, etc. Despite the fact that Pirate Bay is not an illegal website, it has been blocked in such international countries like Denmark (2008), Finland (2011), Germany (2010), Greece (2010), Ireland (2010), Italy (2008), Malaysia (2011), Netherland (2009), Norway (2009), Republic of China (2008), Sweden (2010), United Kingdom, Belgium (2010). And it has been blocked by Facebook in 2009. United Kingdom blocked this site for copyright infringement and for pornographic torrents.

TPB download cannot be used in countries where it is blocked. But all users from these locations can remove the block by changing their ISP, or they can just use the new Pirate Bay Pro! Everyone can sign up this network for free and can download or see pornographic videos freely. Some countries have blocked the usual Pirate Bay search engine in their locations, and others block it for copyright infringement; therefore, the Pro can be accessed everywhere.

The Pirate Bay is a website which originated in Sweden. It offers hosts of torrent files and magnet links to the users which can be shared and downloaded for free. These files include music, videos, applications, games and porn. TPB as the website is commonly abbreviated is the world’s largest catalyst of illegal downloading. It is so popular globally that it was recently awarded the 77th position among the top ranked websites.

According to the records prepared in 2011, the website vaunts of a whopping figure of registered users which is estimated to be nearly 5 million. The torrent files hosted by this website are approximately 3.5 million. This website is also an active member of the Movement known as Pro-Piracy. The website is currently hosted by a Swedish based company called PRQ. PRQ’s basic policy includes, “highly secure no-questions-asked hosting services to its customers.”

Pirate Bay is often under the spotlight of the media and famous dignitaries. Bjorn Ulvaeus, singer from the legendary musical group, Abba called TPB and the supporters of this as idle and selfish. They also criticized the website of copyright infringement activities. On the other hand, world bestselling novelist Paulo Coelho supported TPB and was all in favor for the novel concept of sharing online offered by this website. He also stated that a selfish person often has to lead a life of solitude and bitterness. The website has also inspired various movies and documentaries such as Steal This Film, Good Copy Bad Copy etc.

In simple terms, the Pirate Bay provides its users with downloads of limitless files that you would have to pay rather huge sums of money to acquire the very same product “legally” for free.  Think about it, every song, every game, every movie that you own and have purchased from your hard earned money is easily available for free to download for TPB users. All you need is a decent internet connection and a torrent downloader such as The Pirate Bay Download Software and you are good to go. Who doesn’t like the term free? It’s simple human nature, when a multimedia file or software that a customer wants is available to him a click away and is also free, why would that person want to spend time travelling to the market and also pay for the prospective product when all he has to do is click the download button and relax in the sanctity of his own house.

Since the websites launch in September 2003 it has been in the eye of the world for good and bad reasons alike. The five million whopping figure of registered users and still growing is ample proof that no matter how much the authority against piracy hates it, the Pirate Bay is here to stay. After all, man is a social animal and he needs to “Share”.

The conundrum with this website is that it does not matter how the users cut it, but it will still be the ultimate place for people who want to download media for free. This is the only reason for such a downfall in its popularity among different copyright holders. However, many rivals are there that are known for their vicious and huge collection of different media.

Critics believe that moral issues concerning the security of copyright and copy left material will always be there until The Pirate Bay is there on the web. Though downloading torrents from here is completely legal, it has been a serious point of concern among various copyright holders that have their files on the indexes of this torrent engine. The point behind this issue is that what should we call it? Either it is sharing or stealing. So far, there has not been any solid answer to this particular question. Other moral issues with the site include that whether profiting from advertisement is right. Actually the whole torrent system works as a search engine to find things, so it is totally legal.

The Pirate Bay Pro website was made available to public in the mid 2008, but it was just a trial. This is the time when the administrators of this site got charged for the infringement of copyright or copy left material. A few games, movies, a lot of music files were pirated during the trial. Statutory damage due to this piracy ranged to over millions of dollars for prosecution claim. However, from the last five years, the Pirate Bay has been the website that indexes thousands of torrent files downloads every day. As this is the largest among all the peer to peer torrent engines available on the web.

A lot of alternative torrent engines are there now that proves to give a strong competition to the Pirate Bay bit torrent engine. Still the Pro version of the Pirate Bay has remained the most popular p2p search engine. The administrators of the site believe that they need to adapt to the situation, and will have to take some serious steps towards the betterment of the site. This is why the Pro version of Pirate Bay is being improved now, to give its users the maximum of torrent downloading.

Happy birthday to us! We know we’ll celebrate it again next year, the year after that and so on!