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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.

how would you characterize your philosophy towards copyright and intellectual property laws?Well, simply put I would say that today copyright and intellectual property is based upon the notion that big companies will make a lot of money out of it, which is not why the community would want some kind of intellectual property and we need to redefine that, we can't have the copyright that has been abused by these companies for so long and we need to redefine what kind of copyright we should have, if we should have any type of copyright, which I think would be the best, we're not for abolishing copyright, we're just for really major remodelling of it I would say to be more fair with how people want to use media, how people want to use the information they can get that they want. It shouldn't be about the money, it shouldn't be about I have to pay this in order to get this type of information which is kind of what the scientology church is doing, we should accept now that we have the biggest library ever. We have the biggest biggest library, and it's so huge and everybody should have a way to use this and the whole idea of ‘culture can't be free' is not the issue. We're not saying that everything should be free, it should be free and so on, we don't say that it doesn't have to be for free, it just has to be free for freedom. To be more current in the way of thinking in the terms of intellectual property, to see what the need is, to see firstly what the society needs and not what the big companies ....

How would you characterize your current status with the entertainment industry? What's your current relationship with the RIAA or the MPAA or the industry at large?

Well, they hate us because they know we're right and they're wrong and it's a big problem for them and also that we have a lot of people that like what we do and they're losing control and they're scared of that. What they've been making money out of the past years is mostly control, and that's it. Losing that of course scares them and makes them believe that they're going to crash and burn and hopefully some of the companies will do that. Companies that can adjust and fulfill something that actually gives something added to just getting money will of course survive. There are a lot of Swedish new companies that for instance, there are seven record labels in Sweden that have founded a coalition called The Swedish Model which is these labels that are for the Internet and they see file sharing as something good. And typically it's young people that are interested and they understand the whole idea of the Internet and sharing and understand they can make money off other things than selling CDs. And the RIAA and the MPAA and all these big entertainment companies they don't really care about anything else besides money, they don't care about the product they don't care about the music, they only care about digits. That is probably because they are so huge, they have their lawyers hired, lawyers that are just good and don't necessarily care about what they are working with as long as they know they can get money from it. So I think the companies have become so huge that it's hard for them to keep track of what they are doing themselves and they've kinda lost focus somewhere becoming so huge. The Pirate Bay has a reputation when it comes to the way that it deals with the music and movie companies – some would call it non-chalant, some might call it antagonizing – I know on your website you post the responses that you actually write back to some of these companies. In an e-mail to Dreamworks, you said “It is the opinion of us and our lawyers that you are morons and that you should please go sodomize yourself with retractable batons” would you say that you guys are antagonizing the industry? And if so, why take this tact with them?

We really enjoy telling them off because that's their tactics, they basically go and scare people. We kind of, there's a saying in Sweden that if you go into the woods and see a bear, of course you're scared of him because he's big and huge and he's probably much stronger than you are, but if you start yelling and screaming at him, he's going to be so scared that he runs away because you have the upper hand. That's kinda what we did. We told them off and they didn't really see that coming and they didn't know how to respond to it. And since we kind of knew that their threats were kind of non-existent, because we already had information that what we did was legal, they kind of got angry with us because we are right and they're wrong and they can't just scare us, which is the usual tactic.

How many times have you had to defend the site in court?

We haven't been up to any court level in Sweden, we're going to the court now on the 16th of February, it's going to be the first court hearing in Sweden. Almost 3 years ago there was a big raid against Pirate Bay. This is the case where the U.S. government forced the Swedish government to put pressue on the police to go over here and steal all of our servers and so on. So it's about aiding with illegal file sharing or illegal copyright infringement. And it's kind of funny, because they don't have one single proven case of infringement but they're still going to try and see if we're guilty of aiding with something that they don't really have. Which is kind of awkward in Sweden. So it's going to be a quite interesting case. But we've been to court before in other countries. We were sued in Italy by IFPI, by the local representative there, i can't remember the name ... and they sued us personally in Italy for copyright infringement, which is not possible when not being in Italy, we're not under their jurisdiction, but they tried suing us anyhow and they didnt' give us notice that they did so, so they just had a court hearing without inviting us even though they didn't have jurisdiction and they got Pirate Bay suspended in Italy for a few weeks, and then I got some lawyers to help us and we won the appeal of course and the Italian judge was really upset that someone tried to censor the Internet and go outside the jurisdiction of Italy since we're in European Union they could have just as easily gone to Sweden, well, it's been proven that it's kind of pointless because they don't really have anything against us because what we do is legal. They're trying any way they can, in Denmark they sued an ISP saying that when the ISP gives access to the Pirate Bay the ISP is aiding with copyright infringement and when they users on the ISP are downloading, they're actually having copyrighted material in their cables, so breaking copyright. Which is kind of weird, it's like saying that the postal service is guilty of terrorism because somebody sent a letter to an al qaeda member or they're guilty of drug smuggling because someone sent narcotics through the postal mail. Does it concern you that some of the groups that hate you the most are big, deep pocketed corporations that could come after you for years?

It doesn't concern us because we're very aware of it, but being so public is really a big defense for us. We've always known that the best thing is to not hide and we've never hidden from anyone, we've always been very open about what we do and why we do it how we do it, all of that. Which is a problem for them, because if something wrongfully happens to us it would be an immediate disaster for all the big media industry and the lobby groups, but of course they're trying to make pirate bay illegal by changing the law in the european union and pushing for laws in Sweden, ACTA. It's totally fucked up. A lot of these things that mean much more than personal problems that I might have when going to the U.S. I don't like the U.S. anyhow, so it's not a problem for me.