The Pirate Bay's backstory

By Cory Doctorow at 6:11 am Wednesday, Aug 16

Wired News just published part one of Quinn Norton's tremendous feature on the story behind Sweden's notorious Pirate Bay, and the political movement it spawned, The Pirate Party. Today's installment tells the story of the founding of the Pirate Bay and the yeoman technical effort undertaken by its runners when the MPAA coaxed Swedish police into seizing their servers, and the political backlash. Also included is an archive of documents showing that the MPAA was responsible for ordering the raids. The next installment promises to cover "A Nation Divided over Piracy" -- the Pirate Party its fortunes.

Founder Gottfrid Svartholm was working as a programmer for a security consultancy on a one-year assignment in Mexico City, when he volunteered to help a Swedish file-sharing advocacy group called Piratbyran set up its own BitTorrent tracker. Svartholm's spare bit of caseless hardware wasn't meant to be extraordinary -- it was just meant to be a specifically Swedish site.

He chose the name Pirate Bay to make clear what the site was there for: no shame, no subtlety. These people were pirates. They believed the existing copyright regime was a broken artifact of a pre-digital age, the gristle of a rotting business model that poisoned culture and creativity. The Pirate Bay didn't respect intellectual property law, and they'd say it publicly.

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