why don't you tell me in your own words; what is The Pirate Bay?
Well, that's a hard question. It's hard to define something that is so different to everybody. It's first of all a file sharing service and it's a website that indexes the file sharing service. It's a semi-political interest group. It's an art project. It's a bit of everything. A semi-political group and an art project? How do you see it that way?
The technology is just like a tool for us to you in order to drive a political agenda that we are interested in. All of us. But even though we are not similar. We are just three people in the Pirate Bay, and none of us are similar to each other when it comes to politics, besides the things that we care about such as intellectural property, or the things we don't care about rather. It's a political thing and The Pirate Bay is a tool to make people aware of it and to ... not break it, but ignore it, rather. When you say ignore it, you mean copyright?
Yeah, intellectual property in all kinds of form. We don't care for patents, any of us, we don't care for trademarks and all of that as well. Copyright is the thing that is most visible. Why does a site like this need to exist?
We started because there were a lot of sites being shut down without a legal reason. People were threatened to shut down their sites – like Supernova, which was a big one – and the thing that they all had in common was that it was like 18 or 19 year old administrators that were running the sites and got scared away by the big lawyers from the big companies. So we decided that we should open our own site and try to focus on the Scandinavian market and try to make people aware of the good things about copyright and not only talk about the bad things. When did you guys go online for the first time?
2004 or something, end of the summer I guess? So we're a bit more than five years old. So that was the genesis for it? You guys saw the landscape out there and saw that there were a lot of different sites out there that were being shut down, almost bullied?
We are founded by BFP, which means the bureau for piracy. Which is a Swedish think tank slash political activist group that was founded because there was a lot of anti-pirates in Sweden talking about the bad things about piracy and one day they released a press release ... the media rewrote as a fact without checking with anyone without being critical to the Beta and it didn't see that it fit our own current way of living I guess. So we peeruftenom did a lot of projects to focus on file sharing and on copyright and why we should think about it's existence in the current form and Pirate Bay was one of those projects that BFP did and it's the most famous project so there are more things that just the pirate bay that BFP started this is the one that grew kinda.
What do people download from you? When are you most busy and what are some of the most popular things that are being downloaded?Right now it's TV series, especially now that the new TV season started. But it's different in different countries. In Brazil for instance it's more music than moving pictures than so on. And since we're very global it's hard to say what is very popular because it depends on which country you're asking for. Internationally, I'd say TV series. Are there certain countries where you get the most traffic from? Are you most popular in the U.S. or the U.K. or anything like that?
Well, the U.S. and the U.K. are big users of the Pirate Bay, but we're more in Europe than outside of Europe. We're growing quite rapidly in India and Africa actually right now, but the bigger countries would be Northern Europe, UK, Spain, big European countries. And U.S. and Canada of course.
