Piracy is the most successful form of film distribution. —Werner Herzog
Imitation is the sincerest form of rebellion. —Shanzhai proverb
Where do you want to go today? —Microsoft
Within moments of joining Swedish thinkthank Piratbyrån, anakata had formed a clear vision for the group. BitTorrent, a communication protocol, had been designed in the United States two years prior, and interest in its peer-to-peer (P2P) distribution capabilities was rising. Unlike more rudimentary P2P services, it has the ability to transmit large files. As a result, when he floated the idea of building a BitTorrent tracker, some of the more vocal members expressed their enthusiasm; the group was already hosting humour sites, image-hosting portals… why not another website? This was especially crucial following the rise of copyright lobby group Antipiratbyrån, whose activities were rooted in spreading anti-piracy propaganda: that “intellectual property” was a good, that jobs were being stolen, that piracy was killing creativity. But as ever, Piratbyrån’s primary purpose was to promote the sharing of information.
“I was really interested in the technology,” anakata later said. “And I had a spare computer in an office in Mexico where I was working at the time. I ran out to get some extra memory, then we installed a BitTorrent software and started to experiment.”
That was the easy part. On 10 August 2003, The Pirate Bay was born. Word of its existence travelled quickly, and in the space of a few months anakata’s server was buckling under the pressure. It didn’t have the bandwidth to host that much traffic. Uncertain, he called fellow Piratbyrån member and friend TiAMO back in Sweden, hoping for some kind of alternative—otherwise the site would have to be shut down, and they were only just getting started. Already, he was getting messages of gratitude¹ from unknowns around Sweden praising him for his ingenuity and daredevilry. A kid in Uppsala was especially pleased about their free copy of Call of Duty. A woman from Malmö was sending him love notes. Him! Just another dweeb obsessed with computers. But all of a sudden, he felt popular.
Luckily, TiAMO had a Pentium III 1 GHz laptop lying around. It had a spectacular 256MB of RAM, which made it an obvious contender. No further thought needed to be given: The Pirate Bay was going full speed ahead. TiAMO added in an updated tracker.²
The popularity of the site exceeded the collective’s expectations, with usage expanding not just throughout Northern Europe, but worldwide. Although the rest of Piratbyrån had, for reasons unclear, distanced themselves from the project merely a year after it was launched, the tracker was coordinating a million peers and over 60,000 torrent files. The duo powered ahead, creating their own internet service provider to house it. In particular, they placed an emphasis on the ISP being a safe space³ to host any kind of content, “no questions asked”. By December 2004, over 80 per cent of The Pirate Bay’s users came from other parts of the world. To keep up with downloads of Jay Chou’s «七里香» and Nollywood drama film The Mayors, as well as (of course) Shrek 2 and The Passion of the Christ, the team did a complete site overhaul, and The Pirate Bay was available in several languages by July 2005. In an interview with Adbusters, anakata and TiAMO outlined the artistic vision for the site: “TPB is not just a website. TPB is not just a file-sharing network. TPB is not just a movement. TPB is also art. TPB is a performance. It’s a long-running art project. Very long.” They were raising money to organise a bus to drive themselves from Sweden to Bolzano, Italy, so that they could participate in an event called Manifesta, a roving biennial exhibition of contemporary art. Their plan was to spread the good word of what was now starting to be referred to as “The Bay” to festival attendees (usually made up of a motley crew of well-heeled art buyers, activists, art school kids and institutional backers alike), then leave the bus there.⁴
By the end of 2005, The Pirate Bay was tracking 2,500,000 peers to the site. But the increased visibility meant that they were no longer underground—the authorities, in Sweden and the United States in particular, were keeping close tabs. The Motion Picture Association of America accused them of “assisting in duplicating copyrighted content”. TiAMO responded to their cease-and-desist email: haha c’mon.
Other letters started arriving, and each one received a mocking response in return, each member taking turns to send back something equally rude or passive-aggressive. To Dreamworks, someone wrote: “It is of the opinion of us and our lawyers that you are fucking morons, and you should please go sodomise yourself with retractable batons.” On a drunken walk home one night, anakata kept sensing footsteps behind him as he stumbled from the local pub, as he took a roundabout route due to his inebriated disorientation, as he fell next to a tree to take a piss. ABCK IT PU. A quick text to TiAMO, who read the message as code. He did so accordingly, assuming anakata had received an insider tip-off. Two weeks later, the site experienced three days of downtime as Stockholm police raided a data centre, then confiscated all their servers.
Around that time, anakata wrote in his diary:
Things are coming hard and fast. Since that night at the bar, people have been following my tracks with every turn. It doesn’t feel so much like a joke anymore, or even an experiment. I’m proud of what we have done and the people we have reached. WE ARE A PHENOMENON! But I don’t know what else will happen…
Sweden had already been receiving pressure from the United States government to press charges. Many of The Pirate Bay’s team from their Piratbyrån days were completely cutting ties with the project, leaving anakata, TiAMO and another Piratbyrån member, brokep, to deal with the fallout.
The backup proved to be prescient, and the site sprang back completely unscathed. The only new addition was an updated logo featuring their now-legendary pirate ship firing cannonballs at the Hollywood sign. At this point, The Pirate Bay had an estimated 22 million users. The trio would keep receiving emails expressing support and disdain in equal measure. Years later, brokep told press that he never thought they’d be convicted.
But again, like anakata’s predictions, lawsuits would come in, relentless: the authorities were hell-bent on putting an end to the community that the BitTorrent site had amassed both painstakingly and seemingly out of thin air. There were no retractable batons in sight, only a torrent of court notices that was increasing by the day. (It was also revealed that Carl Lundström, a Swedish businessman with connections to far-right groups, had been funding the project in the background; tabloids started referring to him as “The Pirate Bay’s neo-Nazi sugar daddy.”) The trio remained cavalier⁵ through it all—the site stayed online; even more supporters emerged. On Vimeo, TiAMO uploaded a time-lapse video showing how quickly files were being shared on the platform, in real time⁶—users with Russian, Thai and Italian IP addresses were seeding porn, e-books, movies, academic papers and music as much as they were downloading them. The charges may as well have been free publicity.
By now, especially as the February 2009 court date loomed, it seemed as if the entire world was watching them: governments, fans, copycats and detractors alike. It didn’t matter if people wanted them to leave behind a legacy or go down like a sinking ship—the entire debacle was spectacle in itself. Online, op-eds speculated that it was all a ruse, a publicity stunt for a reality TV show in the making. Offline, seats to the trial at a Stockholm district court were being sold up to $90 a day.⁷
When the date of the trial eventually arrived, the trio had already sold The Pirate Bay off to an alleged “non-profit” organisation in the Seychelles.⁸ This was after an unsuccessful bid at buying independent sovereign micro-nation Sealand, which would have been the ideal undisputed haven for their servers. Supporters turned up outside the courts waving black skull-and-crossbones flags, while others dressed in elaborate steampunk costumes served “creative cookies”—in the shape of the copyleft symbol—to the crowds. On day two of the trial, brokep continued to dismiss the allegations as “bizarre”, comparing their treatment to that of Daniel in the 1984 film The Karate Kid: “In the beginning there are these bullies, that bully Johnny… And then he gets beaten up and that’s where we’re at.” After that, seeds and leeches for the movie reached an all-time high of 20,000.
The trial took a total of six days to conclude. Their verdict? $3.5 million in fines and damages, with anakata, TiAMO and brokep all sentenced to a year each in jail.⁹ Lundström got off scot-free. At a press conference afterwards, TiAMO was adamant that they would not pay; instead, he wrote on a piece of paper in thick black marker: I OWE U 31,000,000 SEK. “That’s as close as you’re going to get,” he declared.
As of this writing—sixteen years since the 128 MB computer hummed noisily in anakata’s Mexican office—The Pirate Bay is still online.¹⁰ Its files now exist in various clouds, off some code that’s been wrapped up and put online for anyone to copy and install on their servers, run by anonymous moderators in unknown, scattered locations. Up to thirty proxy sites¹¹ exist, should one need to bypass internet service providers. Like a body blockade, there is no one node. Whack a mole and another one grows.