2003

The Pirate Bay

In a basement at his job in Mexico City, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg creates file sharing site The Pirate Bay in 2003. The servers are later moved to Gothenburg, Sweden, and soon Fredrik Neij and Peter Sunde are spokespeople for the file sharing site which will be hunted by both authorities and the entertainment industry.

The Pirate Bay logo is a pirate ship with a cassette tape on its sail. The symbol is a nod to the cassette copying movement of the 80s.

Quickly turns into an international phenomenon

The Pirate Bay is soon an international phenomenon, and for a while the web site represents 40 percent of the world's internet traffic, according to Peter Sunde.

The technology behind The Pirate Bay is called Bittorrent

The technology, bittorrent, enables the millions of users on the web site to share files with each other easily and quickly, but the movies, applications or songs are not stored on The Pirate Bay's servers themselves. This is why the creators of The Pirate Bay insist that the site is legal, something not everybody agrees with.

The raid on The Pirate Bay in 2006

At lunch time on May 31, 2006, the Swedish police perform a raid at the web hotel PRQ in Stockholm, where The Pirate Bay servers are housed. The police seize more than 180 servers, many belonging to other customers and companies, and a number of computers at the PRQ offices as well as in private homes. The men behind The Pirate Bay are charged with copyright crimes.

Almost three years later – on April 17 2009 – the three founders and their financier Carl Lundström are sentenced to one year in jail and to pay 30 million SEK in damages. The court of appeals later reduces the jail time a couple of months, but also increase the damages to 46 million SEK. In spite of these verdicts and other raids, The Pirate Bay still lives on today.