Most of the site’s current users are probably unaware that without a few essential keystrokes in the site’s early years, The Pirate Bay may have not been here today.

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 were already seen as a major threat to the entertainment industry.

At the time The Pirate Bay wasn’t the giant it is today though. And ironically, the raid only made the site bigger, stronger and more resilient.

While the police were about to enter the datacenter, Pirate Bay founders Gottfrid and Fredrik got wind that something was up.

In the months before the raid they were already being watched by private investigators day and night, but this time something was about to happen to their trackers.

At around 10am in the morning Gottfrid told Fredrik that there were police officers at their office, and asked him to get down to the co-location facility and get rid of the ‘incriminating evidence,’ although none of it, whatever it was, was related to The Pirate Bay.

As Fredrik was leaving, he suddenly realized that the problems might be linked to their tracker. He therefore decided to make a full backup of the site, just in case.

When he later arrived at the co-location facility the concerns turned out to be justified. There were dozens of policemen floating around taking away dozens of servers, most of which belonged to clients unrelated to The Pirate Bay.

Footage from The Pirate Bay raid

In the days that followed it became clear that Fredrik’s decision to start a backup of the site was probably the most 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.

Of course, the entire situation was handled with the mockery TPB had become known for.

Unimpressed, the site’s operators renamed the site “The Police Bay” complete with a new logo shooting cannon balls at Hollywood. A few days later this logo was replaced by a Phoenix, a reference to the site rising from its digital ashes.

Logos after the raid

Instead of shutting it down the raid brought the site into the mainstream press, not least due to its swift resurrection. All the publicity also triggered a huge traffic spike for TPB, exactly the opposite effect Hollywood had hoped for.

Despite a criminal investigation leading to convictions for the site’s founders, The Pirate Bay kept growing and growing in the years that followed.

The site’s assets, meanwhile, were reportedly transferred to the Seychelles-based company Reservella.

Under new ownership several major technical changes occurred. In the fall of 2009 the infamous BitTorrent tracker was taken offline, turning The Pirate Bay into a torrent indexing site.

Early 2012 The Pirate Bay went even further when it decided to cease offering torrent files for well-seeded content. The site’s operators moved to magnet links instead, allowing them to save resources while making it easier for third-party sites to run proxies.

These proxies turned out to be much-needed, as The Pirate Bay is now the most broadly censored website on the Internet. In recent years ISPs all around the world have been ordered by courts to block subscriber access to the torrent site.

While TPB swiftly recovered from the “original” raid, it did suffer nearly two months of downtime late 2014 when another raid took place.

Initially it was believed that some of the site’s crucial servers were taken by the police, but the TPB team later said that it was barely hit and that they took the site offline as a precaution.

While the first raid make The Pirate Bay stronger, the two-month stint of downtime was a big hit. While the site still has millions of visitors per day, it is no longer the most dominant player, and is still suffering from regular outages.

That said, The Pirate Bay is expected to live on and on. To celebrate its turbulent past the site’s operators declared May 31 to be Pirate Independence Day a few years ago.

“Let today be the pirates’ Independence Day! Today we celebrate the victories we’ve had and the victories that will come. Today we celebrate that we’re united in our efforts. Keep on seeding!” the TPB team said at the time.

But remember, if there hadn’t been a recent backup back in 2006, things may have turned out quite differently.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

With over a billion users YouTube is the largest video portal on the Internet.

Every day users watch hundreds of millions of hours of video on the site, and for many it’s a prime source to enjoy music as well.

While YouTube is a blessing to thousands of content creators, there are also concerns among rightsholders. Music labels in particular are not happy with the fact that music videos can be easily downloaded from the site with help from external services.

To address the problem YouTube is contacting these third party sites, urging them to shut down this functionality. Most recently, YouTube’s legal team contacted the popular download service TubeNinja.

“It appears from your website and other marketing materials that TubeNinja is designed to allow users to download content from YouTube,” the email from YouTube’s legal team reads.

According to YouTube the video downloader violates the terms of service (ToS) of both the site and the API. Among other things, YouTube’s ToS prohibits the downloading of any video that doesn’t have a download link listed on the site.

Later, Google’s video service adds that if the site owner continues to operate the service this “may result in legal consequences.”

Email from YouTube’s legal team

Despite the threatening language, TubeNinja owner Nathan doesn’t plan to take the functionality offline. He informed YouTube that his service doesn’t use YouTube’s API and says that it’s the responsibility of his users to ensure that they don’t violate the ToS of YouTube and TubeNinja.

“Our own ToS clearly states that the user is responsible for the legitimacy of the content they use our service for,” Nathan tells us.

TubeNinja doesn’t believe that YouTube has a very strong case and Nathan has asked the company for clarification. He also mentions that Google’s very own Chrome service lists many plugins that offer the exact same functionality.

“They don’t even seem to enforce removal of Chrome plugins that enable users to do the exact same thing,” Nathan says.

“Also the fact that services like Savefrom, Keepvid, clipconverter etc have been around since 2008, we find it hard to believe that there is any legal case at all. Kind of like suing a maker of VHS-recorders for users taping the television broadcast,” he adds.

This isn’t the first time that YouTube has taken action against download services. The site has gone after similar sites in the past

In 2012 Google went after Youtube-mp3.org with a message similar to the one TubeNinja received, but despite these efforts the site remains one of the most used conversion tools with millions of visitors per day.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

While torrents remain popular with millions of file-sharers, cheaper bandwidth and faster Internet connections have contributed to an explosion of content being streamed online.

Today there are thousands of sites offering huge libraries of unauthorized content, all of it available via a YouTube-like interface accessible via any Internet browser. With a non-existent learning curve, it’s piracy anyone can get involved in.

As a result these kinds of sites can quickly gain a massive following and efforts to hinder their operations continue every day. With millions of links being removed from search engines and site-blocking a regular occurrence, other more aggressive options are also regularly explored.

Currently that is the stance of prosecutors in Rome, Italy, who say they have carried out a large operation to shut down a network of sites offering live sports events, movies, TV shows and concerts without permission from copyright holders.

Titled Operation Match Off 2.0, the action was carried out by the Comando Unità Speciali (Special Command Unit) of the Guardia di Finanza (GdF), a department under Italy’s Minister of Economy and Finance tasked with dealing with financial crime.

According to GdF the operation targeted 50 sites running on 41 servers located on three continents. Three servers were seized locally in Italy. After raids were carried out in a number of regions across the country, five suspects were detained. Further details on the sites and the suspects are yet to be released.

The sites are said to have offered live streaming of sports, on-demand content such as movies and TV shows, plus scheduling features in return for a ten euro payment per month. Italian authorities say the equivalent official offering would cost nearer 100 euros.

GdF report that the five suspects had built of a “vast network” of users and were generating huge profits from them.

“To understand the scope of the operation we detected the presence of more than 340,000 registered users within a community,” GdF said in a statement.

“Assuming that everyone had an illegal ‘subscription’, you can, with a simple calculation, estimate that the turnover is nearly €3,500,000 monthly ($3.89m), or more than €40,000,000 ($44.46) per year.”

Should they be found guilty, the five suspects would face fines and up to four years in prison.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

This week we have three newcomers in our chart.

X-Men: Apocalypse is the most downloaded movie.

The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are BD/DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

Ranking	(last week)	Movie	IMDb Rating / Trailer
torrentfreak.com
1	(6)	X-Men: Apocalypse (HDCam)	7.7 / trailer
2	(…)	13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi	7.4 / trailer
3	(1)	Zootopia	8.3 / trailer
4	(2)	Captain America: Civil War (TC)	8.4 / trailer
5	(…)	Hardcore Henry (HDrip – subbed)	7.0 / trailer
6	(…)	The Do Over (Webrip)	6.0 / trailer
7	(3)	Gods of Egypt	5.6 / trailer
8	(10)	Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (TS)	7.5 / trailer
9	(8)	Deadpool	8.6 / trailer
10	(7)	How To Be Single (Web-DL)	6.2 / trailer

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Like many other Hollywood studios, Paramount Pictures sees online piracy as a major threat to its revenues.

Torrent sites such as The Pirate Bay and KickassTorrents represent a thorn in the side and the company is doing everything in its power to limit the damage.

For Paramount this includes tracking down and warning individual users of these sites. Generally speaking, rightsholders monitor people who share recent blockbusters or TV-shows, but there are exceptions.

TorrentFreak has learned that the Hollywood studio started sending takedown notices targeting Internet subscribers whose accounts were used to download and share an episode of the 1972 classic The Godfather.

With help from its anti-piracy partner IP-Echelon the studio is contacting ISPs, asking the companies to “disable” the copyright infringements and make sure that their subscribers stop sharing the film.

“We are requesting your immediate assistance in removing and disabling access to the infringing material from your network. We also ask that you ensure the user and/or IP address owner refrains from future use and sharing of Paramount materials and property,” the letter reads, listing the technical details.

In addition, Paramount urges the ISP not to destroy any data such as IP-address logs, even if the retention period has expired. The movie studio mentions that this data may be required if a lawsuit is filed at a later stage.

“In complying with this notice, [ISP] should not destroy any evidence, which may be relevant in a lawsuit, relating to the infringement alleged, including all associated electronic documents and data relating to the presence of infringing items on your network, which shall be preserved while disabling public access, irrespective of any document retention or corporate policy to the contrary.”

The lawsuit mention may cause some file-sharers to panic, but is likely little more than a mafia-inspired threat. Paramount is generally not known to file cases against individual file-sharers, even though it has sent out many similar takedown notices in the past.

In fact, many Hollywood studios and other rightsholders send out similar letters, such as HBO with recent episodes of Game of Thrones. That said, the Godfather notice is by far the “oldest” we have seen, which makes it record-worthy.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.