REMEMBER THE
FIRST TIME YOU
USED NAPSTER?
During its brief, digital lifespan, it felt
like magic.
You could type in the name of any musical artist in the history of the world
and Napster would produce dozens, if
not hundreds, of song titles. Click any
of them, and within minutes you could
listen to the song. When Napster first
launched, in the days when CDs and radio still dominated the music scene, this
alone was a revelation. But what made
it even better, what made it ubiquitous,
was that it was free — which also meant
that it wouldn’t last long.
The music industry marshaled its lawyers and crushed Napster, effectively
putting it out of business for buccaneers infringing on its copyrights. Kazaa,
Grokster, LimeWire and countless others
followed in Napster’s footprints: meteoric rises coupled with throngs of avid users, then rapid downfalls at the hands of
established competitors and the courts.
But then along came The Pirate Bay,
a service that an 18-year-old Swede
named Gottfrid Svartholm founded in
BY JOE SATRAN
ILLUSTRATION BY MIRKO ILIC
2003. As the other Napster clones fell,
TPB grew, and Svartholm recruited two
other fellow techies, Fredrik Neij and
Peter Sunde, to help him run it. Eventually, its users were exchanging millions of songs and movies, many copyrighted, every month.
Today, TPB is one of the largest illegal
file-sharing services on the planet, and
its resilience and relative longevity is
testimony to the powers of innovation,
the merits of defiance, and — on a much
more practical level — to the benefits of
having your servers located in Sweden
and being able to move them elsewhere
at the drop of a hat.
Lawyers from movie studios and record labels have sent TPB angry letters
asking it to take down material that they
said violated copyright protection. The
site has traditionally responded with famously rude emails.
“As you may or may not be aware,
Sweden is not a state in the United
States of America. Sweden is a country
in northern Europe,” read an email TPB
posted on its site. “Unless you figured it
out by now, U.S. law does not apply here.
For your information, no Swedish law is