SOPA’s main piracy target: The Pirate Bay
One day after a massive online protest against proposed new anti-piracy laws, federal agents shut down Megaupload, a popular hub for illegal file sharing.
But the most famous nexus for digital piracy sailed through the week unscathed. It’s called The Pirate Bay, and it’s the poster child for the kinds of “rogue” overseas sites Congress took aim at with a pair of bills called SOPA and PIPA. (Click here for our explainer: What SOPA is and why it matters.)
Run by an organization registered in the Seychelles, The Pirate Bay bills itself as the “world’s largest tracker of BitTorrent files.”
BitTorrent is a free software program that lets its 150 million users swap and download large media files. The tool has many legitimate uses, but it’s also heavily used to illegally trade movies and other copyrighted content. The Pirate Bay can be confusing to those who aren’t fluent geeks. Downloading files requires installing and learning to use torrent software, and the site’s ad-choked pages aren’t easy to understand at a glance.
But the system is extremely resilient — and it’s a haven for digital piracy. On Friday afternoon, one day after Megaupload’s death, more than 36 million computers were connected to The Pirate Bay’s network. Recent episodes of the TV shows “Vampire Diaries,” “Big Bang Theory” and “The Mentalist” were among the day’s most popular downloads, along with the video game “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3” and the just-released movie “War Horse.”