Todayish, The Pirate Bay turns 15 years old, which is quite an achievement considering the immense legal pressure it has faced over the years.

While the exact launch date is a bit of a mystery, even to the site’s founders, August 10 was previously chosen as its anniversary.

What we do know is that the site was brought online in 2003 by now-disbanded pro-culture organization Piratbyrån, which is Swedish for Bureau of Piracy.

The group was formed by political activists and hackers in the same year, many of whom had already launched other web projects challenging political, moral, and power structures.

One of the group’s unwritten goals was to offer a counterweight to the propaganda being spread by local anti-piracy outfit Antpiratbyrån. With BitTorrent as the up-and-coming file-sharing technology, they saw fit to start their own file-sharing site to promote sharing of information.

The Pirate Bay first came online in Mexico where Gottfrid Svartholm, aka Anakata, hosted the site on a server owned by the company he was working for at the time.

After a few months, the site moved to Sweden where it was hosted on a Pentium III 1GHz laptop with 256MB RAM. This one machine, which belonged to Fredrik Neij, aka TiAMO, kept the site online and included a fully operational tracker.

The Pirate Bay server

The original idea of Piratbyrån was to create the first public file-sharing network in Sweden, but in the years that followed the site grew out to become a global file-sharing icon.

While The Pirate Bay team was proud of this success, it was not without consequence. Initially, various takedown messages from copyright holders were met with mocking responses, but the legal pressure became a heavy burden.

Behind the scenes, the US Government applied pressure on Sweden, urging the country do something about the taunting pirate site. At the same time, the site’s founders noticed that they were being shadowed by private investigators, who smelled blood.

The pressure eventually reached its first peak when The Pirate Bay’s infrastructure was raided.

May 31, 2006, less than three years after The Pirate Bay was founded, 65 Swedish police officers entered a datacenter in Stockholm. The policemen had instructions to shut down the Pirate Bay’s servers, which was exactly what happened.

Footage from The Pirate Bay raid

Just as the raid was about to go down, Gottfrid noticed that something was up. He warned Fredrik who, as a precaution, decided to make a backup. This turned out to be a pivotal moment in the site’s history. Because of this backup, Fredrik and the rest of the Pirate Bay team managed to resurrect the site within three days.

The swift and deviant comeback turned the site’s founders into heroes for many. The site made headline news around the world and in Stockholm, people were waving pirate flags in the streets, a sentiment that benefited the newly founded Pirate Party as well.

There was also a major downside, however. The raid was the start of a criminal investigation, which led to a trial, and prison sentences for several of the site’s founders.

This became another turning point. Many of the early Piratbyrån members cut their ties with the site, which was handed over to a more anonymous group.

The outspokenness of the early years eventually gave way to the silent treatment. While the site’s moderators are easy to reach nowadays, the people who pull the strings at the top remain behind the scenes at all times.

This was made quite obvious when the site disappeared for weeks following another raid at a Stockholm datacenter in 2014. At the time, even the site’s staffers had no idea what was going on.

The site did eventually return though. And today, fifteen years after it first came online, the site remains one of the top pirate sources.

While the site hasn’t changed its looks in recent years, in many ways it’s an entirely different animal than it once was. The activist attitude is pretty much gone and there are few public updates.

Today’s ‘anniversary’ isn’t even mentioned…

That said, The Pirate Bay isn’t going away anytime soon. While it has regularly suffered downtime over the past several years, it keeps coming back, serving torrents to millions of users every day.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

Last December, TF reported on SitesBloqueados (Blocked Sites) a web portal run by Revolução dos Bytes (Bytes’ Revolution), a group of anti-censorship activists in Portugal.

Internet censorship is common in the country, with more than 1,700 sites banned from regular Internet access for reasons ranging from copyright to gambling. The process does not require intervention from the courts so Revolução dos Bytes decided to keep an eye on things with its Ahoy! Chrome and Firefox extension.

“Ahoy! basically bypasses any traffic to a blocked site through our own proxies, allowing the users to navigate in a free, uncensored internet,” team member Henrique Mouta previously told TF.

Not only is Ahoy! able to unblock sites, it can also detect newly blocked domains and feed information back, so that its unblocking abilities are always up to date.

Things had been going well. After servicing 100,000 users last December, Ahoy! grew to almost 185,000 users this year. However, progress and indeed the project itself is now under threat after arbitrary action by Google.

“Google decided to remove us from Chrome’s Web Store without any justification”, Henrique informs TF.

“We always make sure our code is high quality, secure and 100% free (as in beer and as in freedom). All the source code is open source. And we’re pretty sure we never broke any of the Google’s marketplace rules.”

Users being to plumment after Google takedown

Henrique says he’s tried to reach out to Google but finding someone to help has proven impossible. Even re-submitting Ahoy! to Google from scratch hasn’t helped the situation.

“I tried and resubmitted the plugin but it was refused after a few hours and without any justification,” Henrique says.

“Google never reached us or notified us about the removal from Chrome Web Store. We never got a single email justifying what happened, why have we been removed from the store, or/and what are we breaching and how can we fix it.”

TorrentFreak reached out to Google asking why this anti-censorship tool has been removed from its Chrome store. Despite multiple requests, the search giant failed to respond to us or the Ahoy! team.

The negative effect on the project following removal by Google has been swift. Before the takedown, Ahoy! had around 185,000 users with around 500 installations per day. That progress has now been reversed.

“Right now, we have 174k active users on Chrome, quickly dropping (around 500 each day). We are being contacted every day by our users asking where they can now download the Chrome version, and asking what happened. I can tell you that we’ve noticed a web traffic drop on our API of about ~25%,” Henrique says.

Whatever problem Google has with the Chrome version of Ahoy!, the same cannot be said of its Firefox variant. The extension is living happily on that platform and no ToS breach has been advised.

That seems to suggest the team has done little wrong but with Google refusing to provide an explanation, they have no chance of fixing an issue, if one exists.

“The source code is 100% open source, so it’s easy to see that we’re not doing anything sketchy, we really care about our users’ privacy and security. If we’re doing something wrong, we don’t know what,” Henrique complains.

The issue is critical, not least since 98% of Ahoy! users access it via Chrome. So, until Google provides some kind of explanation, Chrome users will have to install the extension manually via a new site set up for the purpose.

“We have many users asking what happened and how can they download this extension [from the Chrome Store] and I have no answers for them. We’re losing our user base every day, and if we don’t find a solution our project will probably die,” Henrique concludes.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

In recent years, entertainment industry insiders have often portrayed Australia as a piracy-ridden country.

To see if these statements hold true, the Government conducts annual consumer surveys to study local piracy habits. In recent years, this has revealed a steady decline in piracy.

The latest online copyright infringement report, released this week, shows that there’s been a decrease in the number of people who consume music, movies, and TV shows illegally, compared to the year before.

The only category where the percentage of pirates has increased is games, but the overall trend is clearly downward. In 2018, two-thirds of all Aussies consumed content through legal channels, compared to 57% three years ago.

Lawful, unlawful or both?

Interestingly, this pattern doesn’t automatically translate to higher spending. In fact, those who pirate and buy tend to spend much more on average, compared to those who purchase content 100% legally.

This is consistent with previous research indicating that “hybrid” consumers (who pirate and buy) are bringing in the most money, probably because they are the most content-hungry consumers.

Also, while fewer Aussies are pirating in 2018, they’re pirating more. The volume of illegally consumed digital content has grown across all measured categories, which includes music, games, movies, and TV shows.

“When the proportion of lawful and unlawful digital consumption is applied across the Australian population, it can be seen that the proportion of unlawful consumption has increased across all four content types from 2017 to 2018,” the Government concludes.

In other words, there are less Aussie pirates, but they’re pirating more.

Another noteworthy finding deals with the recent pirate site blockades ordered by Australian courts. The entertainment industry argues that these will decrease piracy, and the report appears to back this up.

Of all respondents, only 7% say they will bypass a blocked site if they encounter one. An impressive statistic, but also very misleading.

Blocking response

The 7% refers to all the people that were questioned. This also includes the 76% that don’t use pirate sites at all, who obviously have little reason to bypass a blockade. In addition, the graphic also leaves out the 10% who would find alternative pirate services.

In other words, of ALL respondents, 17% would continue to pirate. This is quite significant, considering that little over 23% of all respondents are pirates.

Finally, it’s worth looking at how Aussies would plan to bypass a blocked site. Among those who said they would, 30% would go for a VPN while 21% would opt for proxy sites. Google Translate, surprisingly, is the third most favored option with 15%.

Whether these people will actually do this remains to be seen. The survey also asked those who encountered a blockade what their response was, and less than 1% said they’d bypass the block. Finding other pirate sources was a more popular option.

All in all the report provides a good overview of recent media consumption trends, particularly where they apply to piracy. It shows that, increasingly, Australians are transforming into legal customers. The blocking efforts are somewhat effective as well, even though total piracy volumes have increased.

Blocking aside, it appears that a lot of progress can still be made on the supply side. Most pirates indicate that they would stop if lawful services were cheaper, if the content they’re interested in is available legally, and if legal services were better.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

Retro gaming is a pastime and passion for countless thousands of nostalgia freaks all over the world but for gaming giant Nintendo, it’s a huge problem – apparently.

Last month, the Japanese company flexed its muscles by filing a complaint at a federal court in Arizona, targeting LoveROMS.com and LoveRETRO.co for copyright and trademark infringement.

The sites, believed to be operated by Jacob Mathias and his company Mathias Designs LLC, offered access to a wide variety of ROMs, including those relating to many Nintendo games.

“The LoveROMs and LoveRETRO websites are among the most open and notorious online hubs for pirated video games,” Nintendo wrote in its complaint.

“Through the LoveROMs and LoveRETRO websites, Defendants reproduce, distribute, publicly perform and display a staggering number of unauthorized copies of Nintendo’s video games, all without Nintendo’s permission.”

Both sites are currently down and displaying messages indicating they probably won’t be back. This development was met with disappointment from the emulator community but now there’s the inevitable problem of fallout and yet more bad news for retro fans.

In an announcement Wednesday, EmuParadise, one of the web’s longest standing emulator and ROM download portals, revealed that it will no longer be offering game ROMs for download. The news came in a heartfelt announcement by its founder MasJ, who explained that he’d pumped nearly two decades of his life into the project.

“Many of you are aware that the situation with regards to emulation sites has been changing recently. What you probably don’t know is that we at EmuParadise have been dealing with similar issues for all 18 years of our existence,” he wrote.

“From receiving threatening letters in the early days to our hosts suddenly shutting down our servers due to complaints, we’ve seen it all. We’ve always complied with takedown requests but as you can see, that is no guarantee of anything.”

MasJ says that having grown up in India, he never got to play any retro games. However, his love for the genre meant that he wanted others to join in, something which led to the creation of EmuParadise and the building of a like-minded team around the platform.

While the legal eagles out there might argue that ROM sites are illegal, this clinical view mostly fails to factor in the allure of retro games – many of them abandoned, many long forgotten – and the passion they generate among the faithful. MasJ highlights some of the feedback he’s had over the years and how people have been positively affected by his site.

“We’ve received thousands of emails from people telling us how happy they’ve been to rediscover and even share their childhood with the next generations in their families,” he writes.

“We’ve had emails from soldiers at war saying that the only way they got through their days was to be lost in the retro games that they played from when they were children. We’ve got emails from brothers who have lost their siblings to cancer and were able to find solace in playing the games they once did as children. There are countless stories like these.”

But now, thanks to gaming giants choosing to protect often decades-old games that a minority play, the ride at EmuParadise is over. MasJ says that despite his passion for retro gaming, he’s not prepared to risk the futures of his team members by continuing.

“It’s not worth it for us to risk potentially disastrous consequences. I cannot in good conscience risk the futures of our team members who have contributed to the site through the years,” he explains.

“Thus, we have decided to make a new start. We will continue to be passionate retro gamers and will keep doing cool stuff around retro games. But you won’t be able to get your games from here for now.”

There are still plenty of reasons to visit EmuParadise, not least the buzzing community that has grown with it over the past 18 years. And of course, many site members will undoubtedly have every game EmuParadise ever had, squirreled away somewhere, waiting for that inevitable rainy day.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

In recent years Hollywood and other entertainment sources have focused their enforcement efforts on pirate streaming sites and services.

According to several reports, streaming sites get more traffic than their P2P counterparts, with the latter being almost exclusively BitTorrent related.

While the rise of online streaming sites can’t be denied, a new research report from anti-piracy outfit Irdeto shows that P2P remains very relevant. In fact, it’s still the dominant piracy tool in many countries.

Irdeto researched site traffic data provided by an unnamed web analytics partner. The sample covers web traffic to 962 piracy sites in 19 countries where P2P was most used. This makes it possible to see how P2P site visits compare to those of pirate streaming sites.

The data reveal that there are massive differences in the relative use of P2P versus streaming sites between countries.

In Russia, for example, only 2% of the visits go to streaming sites, while the rest of the traffic goes to P2P portals. P2P also outperforms streaming in other countries such as Australia, the Netherlands, and India.

This pattern is reversed in Germany, where 88% of all visits go to pirate streaming sites. Similarly, streaming is also the dominant web piracy tool in the United States, France, Spain and other countries.

Additional research in eight countries shows that piracy traffic has grown during the course of 2017. This growth also applies to P2P sites, in all but one country, Germany.

Looking at the sample as a whole, Iredeto notes that 70% of all pirate traffic goes to P2P sites, which appears to run counter to the popular narrative that streaming is more dominant today.

“While many expect P2P piracy to be taken over by streaming and direct downloads, it’s clear that this has not happened yet. P2P piracy is still a big threat to the industry, in which the overall piracy problem is growing,” Peter Cossack, Irdeto’s VP of Cybersecurity Services says.

“While the increase in bandwidth and social media has facilitated growth in content redistribution piracy, particularly around live sporting events, it is clear that other forms of piracy are not going away any time soon.”

Irdeto’s non-weighed data

While the data provide an interesting look at the regional differences it should be interpreted with caution. First, the sample only includes desktop visits. This might be a problem since streaming sites are arguably more popular on mobile platforms.

Also, the 19 countries were selected because they had the highest number of P2P downloads. That’s a significant selection bias that favors P2P sites.

Finally, and perhaps more problematically, the traffic data are not weighed. For example, nearly half of all visits in the sample come from Russia, which is significantly overrepresented.

That means that visits can’t simply be added to draw overall conclusions, something Iredto seems to do.

The company does make a few solid points though. With an estimated 800 million global monthly downloads from P2P sites in 2017, BitTorrent should not be disregarded.

The report also notes that P2P sites are mostly visited by “committed pirates” who don’t use legal streaming sites, while about half of the visits to pirate streaming are from “casual pirates.”

Finally, Irdeto points out that P2P sites are ‘content’ suppliers too. They often act as a source for streaming sites. In other words, the videos people watch on streaming portals were taken from P2P sources, which underlines that these play a vital role in the piracy ecosystem.

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A copy of Irdeto’s report is available here. We asked the company several questions about the methodological issues we found, but at the time of writing we haven’t heard back.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.