Internet Piracy: the Pirate Bay
Case S t u d y | 51 CASE STUDY Internet Piracy: The Pirate Bay he Pirate Bay (www.thepiratebay.org), a Web site located in Sweden, has become one of the world's most popular pirated music and content sites, offering free access to millions of copyrighted songs and thousands of copyrighted Hollywood movies. In February 2009, the site reported that it Thad 22 million simultaneous users. To put that number in perspective, consider that that is more than twice the population of Sweden itself (9 million). The Pirate Bay has spearheaded a European social and political movement that opposes copyrighted content and demands that music, videos, TV shows, and other digital content be free and unrestricted. In the words of the Pirate Party, which organized parties and protests outside the Stockholm Court throughout spring 2009, "The Pirate Bay is a unique platform for distributing culture between regular people and independent artists, and that's something we want to preserve." According to John Kennedy, head of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), The Pirate Bay 1 The R e v o l u t i o n Is Just B eg i n n i n g has become "The world's No. 1 source of illegal music," following successful court actions four years ago against the P2P file-sharing sites Grokster in the United States and Kazaa in Australia. In a unique twist on prior organized efforts to provide "free" music, The Pirate Bay does not operate a database of copyrighted content. Neither does it operate a network of computers owned by "members" who store the content, nor create, own, or distribute software (like BitTorrent and most other so-called P2P networks) that permit such networks to exist in the first place.
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