WEBVTT 00:00:00.590 --> 00:00:05.790 JACK: I’m honestly confused on what pirating music actually is. 00:00:05.790 --> 00:00:10.960 When I had CDs, for example, I could loan out a CD to my friend and that was legal, 00:00:10.960 --> 00:00:15.250 but I wasn’t allowed to make a copy of that CD and loan the copies out. 00:00:15.250 --> 00:00:21.250 Apparently I only purchased a license to listen to it myself, but what if that CD got scratched, 00:00:21.250 --> 00:00:22.340 lost, or broken? 00:00:22.340 --> 00:00:24.710 I bought the license to listen to it, right? 00:00:24.710 --> 00:00:29.599 So therefore if it got scratched, I should be able to download it and listen to it because 00:00:29.599 --> 00:00:31.279 I still have the license, right? 00:00:31.279 --> 00:00:32.989 Yeah, no, that’s illegal. 00:00:32.989 --> 00:00:38.090 Or, let’s say I go into iTunes and buy a song in digital form, like an MP3. 00:00:38.090 --> 00:00:42.800 Do I have the right to let my friends borrow it just like I did with CDs? 00:00:42.800 --> 00:00:47.949 I think if they actually take my ability away to play that MP3 then it is legal, so if I 00:00:47.949 --> 00:00:52.640 give them a hard drive or that’s the only copy of the MP3 I have and it’s on there, 00:00:52.640 --> 00:00:58.160 then that’s okay, but no, no, no, there’s no way I’m loaning my only MP3 out to my 00:00:58.160 --> 00:00:59.730 friend on a hard drive. 00:00:59.730 --> 00:01:03.960 I learned my lesson from that scratched CD; I’m backing up all my music in multiple 00:01:03.960 --> 00:01:06.000 places so that I don’t lose it. 00:01:06.000 --> 00:01:11.880 So, if I loan out an MP3, I’m only gonna loan out a copy of that which now means I’m 00:01:11.880 --> 00:01:13.480 making copies and giving them out. 00:01:13.480 --> 00:01:18.001 Or what if I’m just totally done with the songs I’ve downloaded and paid for, like 00:01:18.001 --> 00:01:21.150 MP3s I bought from iTunes or Amazon? 00:01:21.150 --> 00:01:22.540 Can I resell those? 00:01:22.540 --> 00:01:25.490 Like, is there a used MP3 marketplace somewhere? 00:01:25.490 --> 00:01:28.259 No, a judge has ruled that’s illegal, too. 00:01:28.259 --> 00:01:33.979 So, it looks like the music industry has really failed to adapt to the digital age when it 00:01:33.979 --> 00:01:38.450 comes to copyright and they have faced many fierce opponents in this battle. 00:01:38.450 --> 00:01:44.299 One of their biggest rivals has been The Pirate Bay and this battle fascinates me, so let’s 00:01:44.299 --> 00:01:45.299 get into it. 00:01:45.299 --> 00:01:49.580 Oh, and in this episode there are a few swear words, so expect them to jump out here and 00:01:49.580 --> 00:01:50.580 there. 00:01:50.580 --> 00:01:53.850 If you’d rather not listen to bad language, well, you’ve been warned. 00:01:53.850 --> 00:02:01.870 (INTRO): [INTRO MUSIC] These are true stories from the dark side of the internet. 00:02:01.870 --> 00:02:07.060 I’m Jack Rhysider. 00:02:07.060 --> 00:02:10.660 This is Darknet Diaries. 00:02:10.660 --> 00:02:17.989 [INTRO MUSIC ENDS] 00:02:17.989 --> 00:02:38.290 SINGER: [MUSIC] Oh, I come from the days of The Pirate Bay when we would torrent and leech 00:02:38.290 --> 00:02:39.950 all day. 00:02:39.950 --> 00:02:43.870 The MP3s and MKVs but I always kept clear of the .exes. 00:02:43.870 --> 00:02:47.470 Soon, may the ISP come to bring us news of copyright scum. 00:02:47.470 --> 00:02:51.670 One day, when downloading is done, we’ll take our leave and go. 00:02:51.670 --> 00:02:54.200 JACK: So, who started this thing? 00:02:54.200 --> 00:02:56.170 PETER: Not really sure. 00:02:56.170 --> 00:02:57.170 JACK: Okay. 00:02:57.170 --> 00:02:59.110 PETER: That’s a simple answer. 00:02:59.110 --> 00:03:03.520 We were this group of people and we were in an IRC channel. 00:03:03.520 --> 00:03:10.500 There were hackers, there were philosophers, there were engineers, everything you can imagine. 00:03:10.500 --> 00:03:16.120 We didn’t agree on things; we just agreed on internet is interesting, it’s fun, and 00:03:16.120 --> 00:03:19.230 we can’t let companies decide what’s gonna go on. 00:03:19.230 --> 00:03:22.620 So, we don’t really know who started The Pirate Bay. 00:03:22.620 --> 00:03:25.580 It was kind of a group effort. 00:03:25.580 --> 00:03:29.360 We don’t really know who came up with this topic to even discuss. 00:03:29.360 --> 00:03:31.480 We don’t remember who made the logo. 00:03:31.480 --> 00:03:36.870 JACK: In this story we’re talking about The Pirate Bay, the largest file torrenting 00:03:36.870 --> 00:03:38.540 index probably ever. 00:03:38.540 --> 00:03:42.890 Basically, it’s a search engine which you could type in the name of any song or movie 00:03:42.890 --> 00:03:47.420 and it would help you find a pirated version of that and connect you with the people who 00:03:47.420 --> 00:03:50.560 have it, so you can download it from them if you want. 00:03:50.560 --> 00:03:53.690 This is Peter, one of the co-founders of The Pirate Bay. 00:03:53.690 --> 00:04:00.930 PETER: So, I’m Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi and in 2000 – early 2000s, I was part of starting 00:04:00.930 --> 00:04:05.680 The Pirate Bay which is a somewhat-known file-sharing service. 00:04:05.680 --> 00:04:09.280 JACK: Yeah, while it’s not really clear who started it, it eventually got picked up 00:04:09.280 --> 00:04:14.170 by three people in Sweden to run the site; Gottfrid, Fredrik, and Peter. 00:04:14.170 --> 00:04:20.220 PETER: As a group, we were really – I think we were really bizarre because we are on three 00:04:20.220 --> 00:04:23.900 different political spectrums. 00:04:23.900 --> 00:04:25.720 We could not be in the same room together. 00:04:25.720 --> 00:04:32.020 We would start fighting but we all agreed on the value of the internet and freedom of 00:04:32.020 --> 00:04:35.900 information and kind of the equal access to information. 00:04:35.900 --> 00:04:42.650 So, kind of whatever your view is, if you’re left wing, if you’re right wing, ultra libertarian, 00:04:42.650 --> 00:04:47.710 whatever you want to call yourself, we all need a basis where we can – that we can 00:04:47.710 --> 00:04:50.530 agree upon which would be access to information. 00:04:50.530 --> 00:04:56.160 Otherwise, you can’t make educated decisions and I think that’s where we kind of – we 00:04:56.160 --> 00:04:59.910 agreed on that and nothing else and I think that’s also very powerful that we didn’t 00:04:59.910 --> 00:05:03.880 agree on [00:05:00] anything else, because we didn’t bring those topics up because 00:05:03.880 --> 00:05:06.810 they would just ruin the thing we were working on. 00:05:06.810 --> 00:05:09.090 So, we focused very much on one thing. 00:05:09.090 --> 00:05:10.090 Otherwise, we started fighting. 00:05:10.090 --> 00:05:14.460 JACK: Well, besides wanting things to be freely available on the internet, they also all three 00:05:14.460 --> 00:05:16.750 shared a burning love for technology. 00:05:16.750 --> 00:05:21.490 They loved computers, networking, websites, programming, system administration, the internet, 00:05:21.490 --> 00:05:23.830 and Linux, and they were good at what they did. 00:05:23.830 --> 00:05:28.750 They were able to build a pretty stable high-traffic website running on minimal equipment with 00:05:28.750 --> 00:05:32.889 not many resources and just doing their best to keep it going under the heavy load. 00:05:32.889 --> 00:05:36.440 PETER: Yeah, yeah, okay, okay, so we had some things more in common. 00:05:36.440 --> 00:05:38.410 JACK: Okay, so what exactly is The Pirate Bay? 00:05:38.410 --> 00:05:43.570 Well, it’s an index of BitTorrent files, and BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file-sharing 00:05:43.570 --> 00:05:44.570 technology. 00:05:44.570 --> 00:05:47.700 So, if you want to send a file to someone else online, one way to do that is through 00:05:47.700 --> 00:05:51.700 BitTorrent which is quite amazing because it lets you download from multiple places 00:05:51.700 --> 00:05:56.510 at once and as soon as you start getting some of it downloaded, you start sharing what you’ve 00:05:56.510 --> 00:05:59.110 downloaded with others so they can download it, too. 00:05:59.110 --> 00:06:04.720 BitTorrent is more robust and typically faster than downloading from one central location. 00:06:04.720 --> 00:06:07.599 Now, using BitTorrent is perfectly fine and legal. 00:06:07.599 --> 00:06:12.069 Most Linux installation discs are free and the team that makes that Linux distribution 00:06:12.069 --> 00:06:15.960 will often just add it to BitTorrent as a way to download it, and I think it’s actually 00:06:15.960 --> 00:06:19.660 the preferred way that they recommend you download it, because it won’t bog down their 00:06:19.660 --> 00:06:20.660 systems. 00:06:20.660 --> 00:06:26.020 But when this protocol came out, people were like oh, hey, let’s use this to share and 00:06:26.020 --> 00:06:32.381 trade pirated stuff like copies of movies, music, books, and games. 00:06:32.381 --> 00:06:34.430 That worked wonderfully. 00:06:34.430 --> 00:06:39.030 People were sharing music and movies and giving them away for free, and then those people 00:06:39.030 --> 00:06:43.500 would immediately share it so others could download it, and it just became a big file-sharing 00:06:43.500 --> 00:06:44.500 party. 00:06:44.500 --> 00:06:48.910 But the problem is, how do you find movies and music that you want to download? 00:06:48.910 --> 00:06:52.150 Well, that’s where The Pirate Bay came in. 00:06:52.150 --> 00:06:56.800 Pirate Bay by itself is a blank page, but users would submit torrent files which were 00:06:56.800 --> 00:07:02.110 just locations of where you could download the music or movies, and so The Pirate Bay 00:07:02.110 --> 00:07:06.220 became a sort of search engine to find pirated content. 00:07:06.220 --> 00:07:10.490 It didn’t host any of this content itself; it really was just like a search engine. 00:07:10.490 --> 00:07:14.039 PETER: The core basis of Pirate Bay was that here’s a platform. 00:07:14.039 --> 00:07:15.150 It’s good technology. 00:07:15.150 --> 00:07:18.690 You can upload whatever as long as you’re correct in your descriptions. 00:07:18.690 --> 00:07:21.830 You could upload a virus, you could upload basically whatever. 00:07:21.830 --> 00:07:23.240 If you say it’s a virus, then it’s fine. 00:07:23.240 --> 00:07:27.819 If it’s not a virus, we’re gonna take it down if you’re lying about it. 00:07:27.819 --> 00:07:34.080 The good thing was that it’s more of a freedom project than it is a technology project in 00:07:34.080 --> 00:07:35.180 many ways. 00:07:35.180 --> 00:07:39.860 So, if you want to use it for your home videos, if you want to use it for your Linux distributions, 00:07:39.860 --> 00:07:43.430 if you want to use it for Hollywood movies, everything goes. 00:07:43.430 --> 00:07:44.430 Everything’s fine. 00:07:44.430 --> 00:07:45.490 It’s up to you. 00:07:45.490 --> 00:07:46.860 It’s just a tool. 00:07:46.860 --> 00:07:51.000 JACK: It started in Sweden and it was just hosting Swedish content at first. 00:07:51.000 --> 00:07:56.889 PETER: It became kind of a famous site in Sweden, then in the rest of Scandinavia, and 00:07:56.889 --> 00:08:00.270 then it kind of just grew. 00:08:00.270 --> 00:08:04.850 [MUSIC] But because of the technology, it was – we added a server every year. 00:08:04.850 --> 00:08:08.159 It wasn’t much more than that. 00:08:08.159 --> 00:08:09.740 I remember a few things that happened. 00:08:09.740 --> 00:08:17.610 There was a big torrent site in Spain that got shut down, and Pirate Bay was all in Swedish 00:08:17.610 --> 00:08:22.940 but all of a sudden it was just filled with Spanish content like Spanish movies, Spanish 00:08:22.940 --> 00:08:26.669 books, Spanish music. 00:08:26.669 --> 00:08:30.060 We didn’t really understand what was going on until we realized there was some news about 00:08:30.060 --> 00:08:32.880 a really big torrent site in Spanish going down. 00:08:32.880 --> 00:08:37.149 So, they just defaulted to moving over to Pirate Bay which was the only one that they 00:08:37.149 --> 00:08:41.120 could find on search engines, I guess. 00:08:41.120 --> 00:08:45.750 The most downloaded torrent at that time on Pirate Bay was actually a Swedish language 00:08:45.750 --> 00:08:51.040 course and I found it really funny because they were trying to learn Swedish so they 00:08:51.040 --> 00:08:56.120 could use Pirate Bay because there was this desperation for something. 00:08:56.120 --> 00:09:01.380 I think we realized that it was kind of an important project at that time. 00:09:01.380 --> 00:09:09.230 Then we also had this idea that we wanted to play with the concept of Pirate Bay and 00:09:09.230 --> 00:09:14.470 not follow traditional standards, so we actually sent in a letter to the Swedish king saying 00:09:14.470 --> 00:09:18.380 look, we’re promoting your language; maybe give us medal. 00:09:18.380 --> 00:09:23.089 That was just like, this is – maybe it’s illegal, maybe it doesn’t really matter, 00:09:23.089 --> 00:09:29.760 but so many people in Spain are now trying to learn Swedish because of us, so you should 00:09:29.760 --> 00:09:32.250 just gratulate us and give us a medal. 00:09:32.250 --> 00:09:39.150 People got really, really pissed at us for being annoying and at the same time right, 00:09:39.150 --> 00:09:43.839 and I just loved that whole vibe that we got with Pirate Bay. 00:09:43.839 --> 00:09:48.570 JACK: After a few years, Pirate Bay was the largest pirate search engine on the internet, 00:09:48.570 --> 00:09:52.560 with millions of users, and they didn’t really care what was on their search engine 00:09:52.560 --> 00:09:56.839 which meant tons of people were sharing pirated software on The Pirate Bay. 00:09:56.839 --> 00:10:01.480 Music, movies, games, books, apps, docs, whatever can be [00:10:00] shared digitally could be 00:10:01.480 --> 00:10:03.200 listed on The Pirate Bay. 00:10:03.200 --> 00:10:11.019 Okay, so the powers that be think that this is piracy which goes against some laws. 00:10:11.019 --> 00:10:14.230 What’s your justification that this is not illegal? 00:10:14.230 --> 00:10:17.649 PETER: But I don’t really care if it’s illegal or not. 00:10:17.649 --> 00:10:20.870 That’s kind of the core, again. 00:10:20.870 --> 00:10:26.140 Someone has defined what is legal and what’s illegal, and I don’t really agree with that 00:10:26.140 --> 00:10:27.250 perspective. 00:10:27.250 --> 00:10:29.550 For me, it’s more important what’s moral and what’s immoral. 00:10:29.550 --> 00:10:34.980 For me, it’s immoral to actually say that you can’t have this, you can’t be part 00:10:34.980 --> 00:10:40.720 of the cultural conversation because you don’t have enough money. 00:10:40.720 --> 00:10:45.700 So for me, that was the justification of everything I did, is because I want access to information. 00:10:45.700 --> 00:10:50.010 I want everyone to have the same access of information that I had growing up because 00:10:50.010 --> 00:10:56.450 I think it’s a way to actually educate people and be part of a global conversation. 00:10:56.450 --> 00:11:01.760 So, the law should – if there is a law against this, which there isn’t in every country 00:11:01.760 --> 00:11:07.200 – but those laws are unjust, so I don’t – I think it’s fine to break a law that’s 00:11:07.200 --> 00:11:08.200 not correct. 00:11:08.200 --> 00:11:10.830 JACK: Hm, that actually sounds pretty compelling. 00:11:10.830 --> 00:11:15.570 Like, for instance, Spotify lets you listen to millions of songs free, right? 00:11:15.570 --> 00:11:20.720 But actually, Spotify only works in certain countries in the world and up until February 00:11:20.720 --> 00:11:25.350 2021, there were only five countries in Africa that could get Spotify. 00:11:25.350 --> 00:11:30.620 So, there’s tons of people in Africa who can’t afford to buy music and movies, and 00:11:30.620 --> 00:11:35.279 they can’t stream it either, and no, you can’t use iHeart or Pandora there either. 00:11:35.279 --> 00:11:38.830 Both of those are legal in mostly English-speaking countries. 00:11:38.830 --> 00:11:43.040 So, just by sheer luck, if you happen to be born in one of the countries that doesn’t 00:11:43.040 --> 00:11:48.040 have Spotify, Pandora, or iHeartRadio, how are you going to enjoy the millions of songs 00:11:48.040 --> 00:11:53.430 that have had such an impact on our lives and shaped us to become who we are? 00:11:53.430 --> 00:11:58.620 A lot of people in Africa can’t afford food, much less to buy music, and there’s this 00:11:58.620 --> 00:12:02.450 copyright system set up not even in their country that restricts them from getting a 00:12:02.450 --> 00:12:06.550 copy online at a place like The Pirate Bay. 00:12:06.550 --> 00:12:09.399 But you might ask what about the people who create the content? 00:12:09.399 --> 00:12:12.670 Shouldn’t they be paid fairly for the stuff they’ve worked so hard on? 00:12:12.670 --> 00:12:14.040 Yeah, sure, absolutely. 00:12:14.040 --> 00:12:18.639 Nobody’s saying they shouldn’t, but what The Pirate Bay does is it challenges whether 00:12:18.639 --> 00:12:24.410 or not the current copyright system is the best way for artists to make money, because 00:12:24.410 --> 00:12:29.019 even though The Pirate Bay had millions of users downloading music illegally, the music 00:12:29.019 --> 00:12:31.740 industry was still smashing records. 00:12:31.740 --> 00:12:37.199 Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, Kanye West, and Adele were selling massive amounts of their albums 00:12:37.199 --> 00:12:41.670 during the height of piracy where you could just get it for free online. 00:12:41.670 --> 00:12:49.620 PETER: We are copies of other things and the opposition, the anti-copyright – the copyright 00:12:49.620 --> 00:12:54.380 people and the anti-pirate people, they’re kind of against us as human beings in many 00:12:54.380 --> 00:12:55.380 ways. 00:12:55.380 --> 00:12:57.880 JACK: Whoa, that’s getting a little bit too far out there for me. 00:12:57.880 --> 00:13:00.320 I mean, I guess it’s true, but what? 00:13:00.320 --> 00:13:05.470 Now, I want to say again that The Pirate Bay doesn’t store any music or movies on their 00:13:05.470 --> 00:13:06.470 service. 00:13:06.470 --> 00:13:09.480 It’s just a search engine to connect you to the place that does have it, which in my 00:13:09.480 --> 00:13:12.870 opinion makes it very similar to what Google is. 00:13:12.870 --> 00:13:17.570 The thing is, with the right skills, you can find all this same stuff on Google. 00:13:17.570 --> 00:13:23.190 You can do things like type in the name of a song and then type in title:indexof and 00:13:23.190 --> 00:13:27.899 mp3, and essentially you’re telling Google you want to search the contents of a directory 00:13:27.899 --> 00:13:29.370 to find music files. 00:13:29.370 --> 00:13:34.180 So, you could easily point at Google and say they’re also contributing to the piracy 00:13:34.180 --> 00:13:35.180 problem. 00:13:35.180 --> 00:13:39.340 PETER: Well, I think Google – if you look at piracy, Google is doing it for money and 00:13:39.340 --> 00:13:43.870 they’re actually having copies of the data on their servers, so they’re definitely 00:13:43.870 --> 00:13:47.440 much worse than Pirate Bay has ever been, ‘cause with Pirate Bay you never had a copy 00:13:47.440 --> 00:13:48.440 on the server. 00:13:48.440 --> 00:13:53.430 You – and you didn’t – there was no way of making money from that, so Google are 00:13:53.430 --> 00:13:56.490 definitely commercially a pirate entity. 00:13:56.490 --> 00:14:01.170 JACK: Not only that, but you can easily find copyrighted music and videos all over YouTube. 00:14:01.170 --> 00:14:05.190 I don’t know how that’s legal, but I’m always surprised to see people uploading full 00:14:05.190 --> 00:14:10.100 movies or songs that are obviously copyrighted that just stay up for years and have hundreds 00:14:10.100 --> 00:14:11.290 of thousands of downloads. 00:14:11.290 --> 00:14:16.190 PETER: The difference between Pirate Bay and Google is that they’re considered good guys 00:14:16.190 --> 00:14:20.940 because they’re business people, so I think that – I’d say the opposition to Pirate 00:14:20.940 --> 00:14:24.930 Bay, they would also be business people that are interested in doing business with other 00:14:24.930 --> 00:14:25.930 businesses. 00:14:25.930 --> 00:14:31.310 They’re not interested in talking to some asshole people from Sweden challenging their 00:14:31.310 --> 00:14:37.980 existence, because I was very clear and I think my friends were very clear that we don’t 00:14:37.980 --> 00:14:42.139 see a place for these copyright holders in the world that we’re trying to build, so 00:14:42.139 --> 00:14:47.740 they’re not the enemy; [MUSIC] they’re just like, not worthwhile at all, so we didn’t 00:14:47.740 --> 00:14:48.740 have them as enemies. 00:14:48.740 --> 00:14:54.000 We just had them as someone to not care about whatsoever and that’s dangerous for, I think, 00:14:54.000 --> 00:14:58.740 the business people when someone says you should not be even – even be part of the 00:14:58.740 --> 00:14:59.740 discussion. 00:14:59.740 --> 00:15:01.699 JACK: Ah yes, of course; [00:15:00] business. 00:15:01.699 --> 00:15:07.230 The music and film industry are big businesses and when you buy an album, it’s the music 00:15:07.230 --> 00:15:13.340 industry that takes most of the money, leaving the artists with pennies on each sale. 00:15:13.340 --> 00:15:17.360 While the media industries were trying to contact the people at The Pirate Bay to get 00:15:17.360 --> 00:15:22.699 them to take this content off, The Pirate Bay just didn’t even bother to respond. 00:15:22.699 --> 00:15:27.010 They had no interest in dealing with the film or music industry at all. 00:15:27.010 --> 00:15:32.530 PETER: Someone has framed the discussion around something and we just take that framing for 00:15:32.530 --> 00:15:36.860 granted, and that’s – I think that’s the big thing we did with Pirate Bay, is that 00:15:36.860 --> 00:15:42.740 we did not allow our opposition’s framing to be the frame that we accepted. 00:15:42.740 --> 00:15:45.020 So, we made our own frame. 00:15:45.020 --> 00:15:51.990 We framed the copyright discourse about freedom rather than money, and I think a lot of people 00:15:51.990 --> 00:15:58.500 enjoyed Pirate Bay because of the attitude and because of – I wouldn’t say revolutionary 00:15:58.500 --> 00:16:06.639 but this alternative world that is available when you have free access to information. 00:16:06.639 --> 00:16:09.899 JACK: How were you making money in those days? 00:16:09.899 --> 00:16:17.980 Or, yeah, I’m also curious if this was enough to make it your full-time job as well. 00:16:17.980 --> 00:16:20.490 PETER: None of us worked on this full-time. 00:16:20.490 --> 00:16:27.139 So, Fredrik and Gottfrid, they had a hosting company called PRQ, so they were working on 00:16:27.139 --> 00:16:28.139 that. 00:16:28.139 --> 00:16:32.949 I worked at a small company myself and I worked for different clients. 00:16:32.949 --> 00:16:38.069 Pirate Bay was just costing money, so there were advertising on Pirate Bay but the people 00:16:38.069 --> 00:16:45.240 that put up ads on Pirate Bay, they were like ringtones or some weird shit that was kind 00:16:45.240 --> 00:16:51.949 of semi-legal to sell whatsoever, and they didn’t really pay much or anything at all. 00:16:51.949 --> 00:16:55.910 JACK: The ads they placed on the site would offset the cost of running The Pirate Bay, 00:16:55.910 --> 00:16:59.110 but it doesn’t look like the team made much money from this. 00:16:59.110 --> 00:17:03.269 It actually seems like they were operating at a loss, like the whole time. 00:17:03.269 --> 00:17:10.220 PETER: Basically, in 2005 I think, 2004, 2005, we rebuilt Pirate Bay. 00:17:10.220 --> 00:17:17.559 It was a one-week task, and then we never really looked at Pirate Bay – we never did 00:17:17.559 --> 00:17:19.439 anything with Pirate Bay in a technical way after that. 00:17:19.439 --> 00:17:27.350 There was never any new features, there was never any new code, so since 2004, I don’t 00:17:27.350 --> 00:17:29.890 think there’s been any new code whatsoever. 00:17:29.890 --> 00:17:31.210 Maybe now in the latest years. 00:17:31.210 --> 00:17:32.820 I haven’t followed the past two years much, but… 00:17:32.820 --> 00:17:34.990 JACK: Yeah, it looks the same even today. 00:17:34.990 --> 00:17:40.220 PETER: Yeah, it looks – it always looked like shit and it always worked like crap. 00:17:40.220 --> 00:17:41.860 JACK: I totally agree, actually. 00:17:41.860 --> 00:17:43.920 The Pirate Bay has always frustrated me. 00:17:43.920 --> 00:17:45.760 First, it’s always been very slow. 00:17:45.760 --> 00:17:49.640 Second, the interface is hard to navigate sometimes to find a good torrent you’re 00:17:49.640 --> 00:17:52.810 trying to download, and I’ve thought about complaining to them many times. 00:17:52.810 --> 00:17:57.750 PETER: A lot of people were complaining about a lot of things and we always had the same 00:17:57.750 --> 00:18:00.610 answer and it’s like first of all, we don’t care. 00:18:00.610 --> 00:18:01.789 [MUSIC] It works good enough. 00:18:01.789 --> 00:18:05.659 We have other things to work on like day jobs that actually pay the bills so we can have 00:18:05.659 --> 00:18:10.640 a place to stay and have food, and then if you don’t like it, then build your own. 00:18:10.640 --> 00:18:16.370 Because it was also very important for us to not become a centralized hub and the irony 00:18:16.370 --> 00:18:20.790 is – because everyone else shut down because of legal threats – we became the only go-to 00:18:20.790 --> 00:18:21.790 place. 00:18:21.790 --> 00:18:22.790 The Pirate Bay was just the only place left. 00:18:22.790 --> 00:18:25.620 It was never the best file-sharing system. 00:18:25.620 --> 00:18:26.970 It was never the best search engine. 00:18:26.970 --> 00:18:32.480 It was quite crap, but we wanted people to be really annoyed about this and make something 00:18:32.480 --> 00:18:35.910 better so we didn’t have to be the only alternative. 00:18:35.910 --> 00:18:39.940 So instead of it being like Facebook and all of these other social media giants that are 00:18:39.940 --> 00:18:43.360 improving their technology all the time, it’s like, it’s good enough. 00:18:43.360 --> 00:18:46.740 Someone will have to make something better because there’s a lot of things that could 00:18:46.740 --> 00:18:47.740 be improved. 00:18:47.740 --> 00:18:50.720 So, we spent really little time on technology. 00:18:50.720 --> 00:18:53.830 The only thing we did was to move when we couldn’t pay the bills. 00:18:53.830 --> 00:18:56.590 So, that was basically – then we copied it, then put it somewhere else. 00:18:56.590 --> 00:18:57.920 So, no one worked on the technology. 00:18:57.920 --> 00:19:00.460 Of course, there was no support or anything else. 00:19:00.460 --> 00:19:07.330 There was nothing, so our time that we spent on Pirate Bay was basically talking to media 00:19:07.330 --> 00:19:11.830 or talking to people about where to host next and so on. 00:19:11.830 --> 00:19:17.900 JACK: Where to host next; see, that became the constant question because the powers that 00:19:17.900 --> 00:19:23.600 be were trying to close in on The Pirate Bay and get it shut down. 00:19:23.600 --> 00:19:31.250 Do you agree that your site has been the most attacked by takedowns and just attacks in 00:19:31.250 --> 00:19:34.860 general than any other site out there? 00:19:34.860 --> 00:19:37.340 PETER: Definitely. 00:19:37.340 --> 00:19:41.820 I think that’s – we’ve been very much after that, I think, as well. 00:19:41.820 --> 00:19:47.030 We’ve been kind of – not hunting problems but we have not ever done something in a sane 00:19:47.030 --> 00:19:50.160 way when it comes to how to reply to legal threats or anything. 00:19:50.160 --> 00:19:57.559 We just – have you seen Monty Python’s – this movie about the knights who say Ni? 00:19:57.559 --> 00:19:58.559 JACK: Yeah. 00:19:58.559 --> 00:20:02.030 PETER: So you have this guy; [00:20:00] he’s in a fight. 00:20:02.030 --> 00:20:05.230 Someone cuts off his leg and he’s like come on, come at me. 00:20:05.230 --> 00:20:06.440 He doesn’t back off. 00:20:06.440 --> 00:20:08.950 He loses his arms, he loses everything. 00:20:08.950 --> 00:20:12.820 It’s just the head left and he’s still like, so come attack me, you know? 00:20:12.820 --> 00:20:14.740 I think Pirate Bay’s exactly the same. 00:20:14.740 --> 00:20:20.530 We didn’t have this normal survival skill and people got really annoyed and just attacked 00:20:20.530 --> 00:20:21.890 more and more and more. 00:20:21.890 --> 00:20:27.600 I think that since we had this idea that we were going to survive because of some higher 00:20:27.600 --> 00:20:32.780 values than just money or whatever, we’re still around and most other people would have 00:20:32.780 --> 00:20:34.130 shut down a long time ago. 00:20:34.130 --> 00:20:39.820 But you get to a point where it’s like you’re already so fucked that you can’t be more 00:20:39.820 --> 00:20:44.820 fucked, so it doesn’t really matter if you fuck someone else, you know? 00:20:44.820 --> 00:20:48.350 If you’re sued in one country and you’re gonna lose all of the money you never had 00:20:48.350 --> 00:20:52.169 to begin with, it doesn’t matter if you get sued in ten more countries and lose exactly 00:20:52.169 --> 00:20:54.990 the same amount which is zero in the end, right? 00:20:54.990 --> 00:21:00.770 So, it’s more a way of giving payback to asshole people that are against your project. 00:21:00.770 --> 00:21:04.630 JACK: Here we’ve come to the part of the story that I’m completely dumbfounded by. 00:21:04.630 --> 00:21:09.450 I mean, still, after researching all this and learning as much as I can, I still can’t 00:21:09.450 --> 00:21:11.659 figure out why this site is still operational. 00:21:11.659 --> 00:21:17.030 I mean, if you have the world’s largest pirating site on the internet, surely that 00:21:17.030 --> 00:21:18.470 won’t last long, right? 00:21:18.470 --> 00:21:23.260 Well, here we are in the year 2021 and The Pirate Bay is still going strong. 00:21:23.260 --> 00:21:27.540 So, for the rest of this episode, I want to hear about all the ways people have tried 00:21:27.540 --> 00:21:32.789 to stop The Pirate Bay, and this is a long road, so buckle up and get comfy. 00:21:32.789 --> 00:21:39.809 PETER: [MUSIC] The first big takedown we had with Pirate Bay when it was – because of 00:21:39.809 --> 00:21:42.130 cops coming to actually take machines. 00:21:42.130 --> 00:21:44.894 They were not after Pirate Bay; they were after another customer that the PRQ was hosting 00:21:44.894 --> 00:21:45.894 which was Kavkaz Center, which – it’s a Chechen rebel movement that Putin was very 00:21:45.894 --> 00:21:46.894 upset about, so he ordered basically the Swedish cops to make a raid against PRQ. 00:21:46.894 --> 00:21:47.894 Accidentally, it took down The Pirate Bay as well. 00:21:47.894 --> 00:21:52.220 JACK: The Pirate Bay was hosted at a Swedish company called PRQ which actually was Gottfrid’s 00:21:52.220 --> 00:21:55.120 company, one of the other co-founders of The Pirate Bay. 00:21:55.120 --> 00:22:00.740 PRQ had sort of a reputation for hosting questionable stuff, and so the cops came and took a bunch 00:22:00.740 --> 00:22:04.539 of servers from PRQ trying to take one of their customers offline. 00:22:04.539 --> 00:22:07.390 PETER: That was the first time we got raided; was not because of Pirate Bay. 00:22:07.390 --> 00:22:12.410 It was because of Putin being upset with PRQ hosting a customer which was a Chechen rebel 00:22:12.410 --> 00:22:13.410 movement. 00:22:13.410 --> 00:22:24.510 JACK: Okay, we’re off to a good start, right? 00:22:24.510 --> 00:22:29.610 Vladimir Putin was behind their first real takedown. 00:22:29.610 --> 00:22:33.730 The cops took Pirate Bay’s servers but they just got some more and rebuilt the site. 00:22:33.730 --> 00:22:35.380 It took them only a few days to get it back. 00:22:35.380 --> 00:22:40.370 Now, for some reason, PRQ couldn’t get enough bandwidth to run The Pirate Bay properly, 00:22:40.370 --> 00:22:43.090 so they had to move The Pirate Bay to another data center. 00:22:43.090 --> 00:22:49.120 PETER: [MUSIC] So, we had moved Pirate Bay into actually a banking data center because 00:22:49.120 --> 00:22:53.600 – it was also kind of a funny thing because a lot of people thought that we were hiding 00:22:53.600 --> 00:22:54.600 Pirate Bay. 00:22:54.600 --> 00:22:56.010 We were there totally plain sight. 00:22:56.010 --> 00:23:03.480 We had a picture of the servers in the rack with a GPS coordinates and a map of where 00:23:03.480 --> 00:23:04.549 they were actually hosted. 00:23:04.549 --> 00:23:08.340 JACK: At this point, they knew people wanted to take them down and they’d probably get 00:23:08.340 --> 00:23:13.570 raided by the cops again, so you would think if you know you’re gonna get raided by the 00:23:13.570 --> 00:23:18.040 cops, you want to probably hide where you’re hosting your servers, right? 00:23:18.040 --> 00:23:19.490 Yeah, no, not these guys. 00:23:19.490 --> 00:23:24.299 They put exactly where The Pirate Bay was hosted clearly and visible on their website, 00:23:24.299 --> 00:23:26.690 the exact latitude and longitude coordinates. 00:23:26.690 --> 00:23:27.690 Why? 00:23:27.690 --> 00:23:31.180 Because it was hosted in a place that they didn’t think was touchable by the Swedish 00:23:31.180 --> 00:23:32.180 police. 00:23:32.180 --> 00:23:37.620 PETER: It was very much a fuck you because we knew that what we were doing was legal, 00:23:37.620 --> 00:23:41.700 and then we placed it in a banking data center because it was protected. 00:23:41.700 --> 00:23:46.400 It’s a protected facility in Sweden, so the police are not actually allowed to go 00:23:46.400 --> 00:23:47.400 in. 00:23:47.400 --> 00:23:48.400 It’s only the military. 00:23:48.400 --> 00:23:51.750 The whole idea was that it would fuck with the police because they’re now allowed. 00:23:51.750 --> 00:23:54.380 They don’t have jurisdiction when it comes to banking. 00:23:54.380 --> 00:23:58.809 That’s the military basically, in Sweden, so they were not allowed to go in and actually 00:23:58.809 --> 00:23:59.950 raid it. 00:23:59.950 --> 00:24:04.549 JACK: They were getting more takedown notices and cease and desist letters, but they just 00:24:04.549 --> 00:24:05.549 kept ignoring them. 00:24:05.549 --> 00:24:08.179 PETER: So, what happened is that the Swedish movie and music companies, they were really, 00:24:08.179 --> 00:24:11.610 really upset with Pirate Bay, so they went to the cops all the time. 00:24:11.610 --> 00:24:17.059 It’s like, here’s our movie that you can download and so on, and the prosecutors were 00:24:17.059 --> 00:24:21.860 looking into this quite a lot and trying to find ways to take it down because they knew 00:24:21.860 --> 00:24:22.909 there was a lot of pressure. 00:24:22.909 --> 00:24:25.390 These are influential people. 00:24:25.390 --> 00:24:33.179 They always came to the same conclusion that we’re just a carrier, like an index, like 00:24:33.179 --> 00:24:35.140 the phone book, whatever. 00:24:35.140 --> 00:24:37.450 So, it was totally legal. 00:24:37.450 --> 00:24:42.809 We have this in black and white that The Pirate Bay is legal according to Swedish law. 00:24:42.809 --> 00:24:49.809 So, the lobby groups, the anti-pirates, they kind of – in Hollywood started talking to 00:24:49.809 --> 00:24:53.530 their friends in the White House and said you have to do something about this. 00:24:53.530 --> 00:24:57.360 [00:25:00] We can’t just let these kids in Sweden with these weird nicknames that 00:24:57.360 --> 00:25:04.690 are all druggie and alcoholics and sex-craved people, whatever, just weird guys; you can’t 00:25:04.690 --> 00:25:06.779 let them ruin our business. 00:25:06.779 --> 00:25:13.039 So, the White House eventually invited the Swedish Minister of Justice to come over and 00:25:13.039 --> 00:25:15.620 talk about Pirate Bay as an issue. 00:25:15.620 --> 00:25:20.370 The Minister of Justice informed them that according to Swedish law, a minister cannot 00:25:20.370 --> 00:25:23.419 tell the prosecutors what to focus on. 00:25:23.419 --> 00:25:29.059 Then he went back home to Sweden and he told the prosecutor that you have to focus on file-sharing 00:25:29.059 --> 00:25:35.680 systems using torrents because otherwise the US has said that we will stop trading with 00:25:35.680 --> 00:25:41.130 Sweden, so we can’t sell Volvos, we can’t sell ABBA CDs whatsoever to the United States, 00:25:41.130 --> 00:25:45.660 and they’re threatening to go to the World Trade Organization and asking to put Sweden 00:25:45.660 --> 00:25:49.360 on the list together with Palestine and Cuba, that you’re not allowed to trade with these 00:25:49.360 --> 00:25:50.400 countries. 00:25:50.400 --> 00:25:55.540 So, the prosecutors in Sweden got this from the Minister of Justice, that you have to 00:25:55.540 --> 00:26:00.821 focus on this and they said – [MUSIC] basically, they said but it’s not illegal. 00:26:00.821 --> 00:26:04.190 Everything is legal and said we don’t care. 00:26:04.190 --> 00:26:09.190 JACK: Peter thought that what they were doing was legal because they weren’t hosting any 00:26:09.190 --> 00:26:10.970 of this pirated material themselves. 00:26:10.970 --> 00:26:19.720 They compared what they were doing to a phone book or search engine, and the Swedish police 00:26:19.720 --> 00:26:22.890 sided with them on that, agreeing it was legal. 00:26:22.890 --> 00:26:27.630 But the guys at The Pirate Bay saw signs that pressure was mounting to take them down anyway. 00:26:27.630 --> 00:26:34.280 But they were ready; their servers were hosted in a banking data center, untouchable by police. 00:26:34.280 --> 00:26:36.720 There would be no way for the police to raid them there. 00:26:36.720 --> 00:26:38.050 PETER: But they did anyhow. 00:26:38.050 --> 00:26:42.620 A few people lost their job for actually letting them in because they didn’t have this jurisdiction. 00:26:42.620 --> 00:26:48.610 They came with fifty, sixty cops, raided The Pirate Bay, arrested people. 00:26:48.610 --> 00:26:51.710 JACK: The police arrested Peter, Gottfrid, and Fredrik. 00:26:51.710 --> 00:26:53.690 PETER: They didn’t know what they were doing. 00:26:53.690 --> 00:27:00.720 They took mice, speakers from everyone, they arrested our lawyer which was kind of funny 00:27:00.720 --> 00:27:06.580 because they were asking which lawyers we want and when we asked – or when Gottfrid 00:27:06.580 --> 00:27:09.930 asked for his lawyer, they just said you can’t have him. 00:27:09.930 --> 00:27:11.730 Then he said why can’t I have my lawyer? 00:27:11.730 --> 00:27:15.270 Then had to agree that – or admit that he’s also arrested. 00:27:15.270 --> 00:27:17.370 It was a very bizarre situation. 00:27:17.370 --> 00:27:20.920 JACK: Okay, so there you go. 00:27:20.920 --> 00:27:21.920 Story’s over, right? 00:27:21.920 --> 00:27:25.240 The three guys from The Pirate Bay arrested and their servers were taken down. 00:27:25.240 --> 00:27:27.240 Yeah, no. Nice try. 00:27:27.240 --> 00:27:31.411 Peter, Fredrik, and Gottfrid were arrested but the way Swedish courts work is that there 00:27:31.411 --> 00:27:35.320 needed to be a trial and since these were not violent criminals, they were allowed to 00:27:35.320 --> 00:27:36.910 go home until their trial. 00:27:36.910 --> 00:27:41.090 So, pretty much the same day they were arrested and the site was taken down, they immediately 00:27:41.090 --> 00:27:42.820 started working to get it back up. 00:27:42.820 --> 00:27:47.010 [MUSIC] They were not fazed by this takedown or arrest at all. 00:27:47.010 --> 00:27:50.070 PETER: Yeah, exactly. 00:27:50.070 --> 00:27:52.050 Why should we close it down? 00:27:52.050 --> 00:27:54.050 It was legal. It was fun. 00:27:54.050 --> 00:27:55.159 We were already fucked. 00:27:55.159 --> 00:27:58.000 It’s kind of like, there’s no point in bringing it down. 00:27:58.000 --> 00:28:00.610 We didn’t want to let them win. 00:28:00.610 --> 00:28:05.909 JACK: They knew that what they had was powerful, revolutionary almost. 00:28:05.909 --> 00:28:11.480 It was challenging big media industries all over the world and they fully believed that 00:28:11.480 --> 00:28:13.269 what they were doing was right. 00:28:13.269 --> 00:28:19.340 The Pirate Bay was down for a total of three days as a result of this raid and arrest, 00:28:19.340 --> 00:28:22.640 and then the site came back up but this time it was hosted in the Netherlands. 00:28:22.640 --> 00:28:25.260 PETER: Yes, I think it was Holland mostly. 00:28:25.260 --> 00:28:30.570 We started doing something else after the raid. 00:28:30.570 --> 00:28:36.890 Instead of having the servers in one place, we put up basically a front-end load balancer 00:28:36.890 --> 00:28:40.769 at one location and then we had a backup location for that. 00:28:40.769 --> 00:28:46.460 Then we started loaning or renting machines from people we knew. 00:28:46.460 --> 00:28:50.400 JACK: Yeah, so they didn’t want The Pirate Bay to have one point of failure. 00:28:50.400 --> 00:28:54.430 They started hosting the website in multiple locations at once which would make it fully 00:28:54.430 --> 00:28:55.430 redundant. 00:28:55.430 --> 00:28:58.769 This way, if one of the hosting providers went down, there would be another ready and 00:28:58.769 --> 00:29:04.149 the cops would have to do some kind of international coordinated raid to take them out this time. 00:29:04.149 --> 00:29:08.309 So, the thing is, is like if the White House is putting pressure on Sweden to say stop 00:29:08.309 --> 00:29:14.779 these guys and then they say okay, well, we raided them and we arrested them, and then 00:29:14.779 --> 00:29:18.360 you get it back up again, I’m surprised the White House didn’t say again, look, 00:29:18.360 --> 00:29:20.260 they’ve still got it up. 00:29:20.260 --> 00:29:22.149 Go ahead, stop them for real this time. 00:29:22.149 --> 00:29:24.309 Like, why are you letting them still run this? 00:29:24.309 --> 00:29:28.519 Then oh, well, maybe Sweden was saying well, we got a court date coming up so we’re gonna 00:29:28.519 --> 00:29:31.140 sort it out in court, or maybe something else was going on. 00:29:31.140 --> 00:29:32.140 Do you know? 00:29:32.140 --> 00:29:36.789 PETER: Well, we tried getting to know what happened and then they said we’ll be totally 00:29:36.789 --> 00:29:39.870 open about all of the communication with the White House that we’ve had and we’re gonna 00:29:39.870 --> 00:29:42.669 have – everything’s gonna be totally transparent. 00:29:42.669 --> 00:29:48.409 Then over 700 documents are still marked Top Secret about what happened between Sweden 00:29:48.409 --> 00:29:52.660 and the White House regarding this case, so we don’t really know what happened, all 00:29:52.660 --> 00:29:57.590 of the details, and that’s kind of an interesting thing that I want to see. 00:29:57.590 --> 00:30:00.710 Maybe when I’m like, [00:30:00] eighty years old they’ll actually reveal all of the papers 00:30:00.710 --> 00:30:04.580 or someone leaks it on one of the favorite platforms we have. 00:30:04.580 --> 00:30:12.279 But yeah, I think also Sweden have a really – there’s a really open political discussion 00:30:12.279 --> 00:30:15.620 in Sweden and it’s a small country. 00:30:15.620 --> 00:30:22.830 We’re very strong when it comes to the rights we have as citizens and all of these things. 00:30:22.830 --> 00:30:28.790 Previously, Sweden wasn’t like these pussies that they are today with being totally scared 00:30:28.790 --> 00:30:34.690 of everyone, but we even – Sweden even had a prime minister that said that the US were 00:30:34.690 --> 00:30:39.130 fucking murderers because of the Vietnam war and stuff, so there is a history of Sweden 00:30:39.130 --> 00:30:44.179 not being – not having to listen to the United States and also being very proud of 00:30:44.179 --> 00:30:52.730 its independence and the political openness of being able to actually go be a little bit 00:30:52.730 --> 00:30:53.730 punk. 00:30:53.730 --> 00:31:04.039 JACK: [MUSIC] By this time, they really started getting a lot of takedown notices, DMCA violations, 00:31:04.039 --> 00:31:06.530 lawsuits filed against them, and cease and desist letters. 00:31:06.530 --> 00:31:13.130 PETER: Disney sent a few, Dreamworks sent the best ones, Apple sent a few, like State 00:31:13.130 --> 00:31:19.320 TV, but I think some days we got a few thousand DMCA takedown notices which is interesting 00:31:19.320 --> 00:31:21.429 because Sweden’s not part of United States. 00:31:21.429 --> 00:31:26.340 We very often replied exactly that, that we know that United States have this law called 00:31:26.340 --> 00:31:27.340 DMCA. 00:31:27.340 --> 00:31:33.649 It’s not applicable outside of the United States and I know you like to invade countries 00:31:33.649 --> 00:31:37.630 because – and enforcing your law and so on, but you have to do it before you can actually 00:31:37.630 --> 00:31:44.860 tell us to use your law, so we basically told them fuck you, fuck off. 00:31:44.860 --> 00:31:50.960 We were very aggressive in replies to these companies that sent DMCA takedown notices. 00:31:50.960 --> 00:31:54.890 JACK: Yeah, what were some of the other replies you sent them? 00:31:54.890 --> 00:32:02.750 PETER: Well, some of the favorite ones were when we told them which batons to put up their 00:32:02.750 --> 00:32:08.529 asses, or we – I remember I sent a map once of where Sweden was and where the United States 00:32:08.529 --> 00:32:14.929 was and like, here’s places to bomb in Sweden ‘cause you usually bomb when you don’t 00:32:14.929 --> 00:32:16.159 like us. 00:32:16.159 --> 00:32:21.100 I sent – once I sent a picture of a polar bear as a reply to I think Dreamworks as well, 00:32:21.100 --> 00:32:24.409 and they were kind of confused about – they just replied well, why did you send a picture 00:32:24.409 --> 00:32:25.600 of a polar bear? 00:32:25.600 --> 00:32:29.440 I said it’s – this polar bear is standing outside of my kitchen right now and he’s 00:32:29.440 --> 00:32:33.210 trying to kill me ‘cause polar bears are very aggressive and they like to eat people, 00:32:33.210 --> 00:32:36.279 so I don’t really care about corporate issues right now. 00:32:36.279 --> 00:32:38.299 Polar bears are dangerous. 00:32:38.299 --> 00:32:39.669 Corporate is not important. 00:32:39.669 --> 00:32:42.769 So, they were very confused with our replies. 00:32:42.769 --> 00:32:47.309 They’re just very used to people listening to like oh shit, I got a legal threat, I’m 00:32:47.309 --> 00:32:51.279 gonna listen to them, they have all of the power, and just close down whatever. 00:32:51.279 --> 00:32:58.720 But we did the opposite; we just told them to fuck off aggressively, very – let’s 00:32:58.720 --> 00:33:07.350 say very teenager kind of words, so a lot of fuck, a lot of bad jokes, aggressiveness, 00:33:07.350 --> 00:33:12.860 and then we published all of them on The Pirate Bay just to be – make them even more pissed 00:33:12.860 --> 00:33:13.860 with us. 00:33:13.860 --> 00:33:18.620 JACK: There’s a documentary about some of this called The Pirate Bay AFK and in it, 00:33:18.620 --> 00:33:23.289 Gottfrid is asked what he did with the DMCA takedown notices and he says well, the first 00:33:23.289 --> 00:33:26.530 hundred times we’d get it from someone we’d just tell them to contact the person who’s 00:33:26.530 --> 00:33:29.840 sharing and uploading the files and that The Pirate Bay does not store any copyrighted 00:33:29.840 --> 00:33:30.840 material. 00:33:30.840 --> 00:33:36.399 Then he says after the hundredth takedown notice that he would lose his patience and 00:33:36.399 --> 00:33:40.030 that’s when they’d reply with all these crude comments. 00:33:40.030 --> 00:33:43.700 One of the media companies that were really upset with The Pirate Bay was a company called 00:33:43.700 --> 00:33:44.700 MediaDefender. 00:33:44.700 --> 00:33:49.920 PETER: So, MediaDefender was this really – it was – I think it’s a spin-off from Universal, 00:33:49.920 --> 00:33:50.920 I think. 00:33:50.920 --> 00:33:52.190 I can’t remember now; it’s ages ago. 00:33:52.190 --> 00:33:56.720 But it was a company that basically protected media on the internet. 00:33:56.720 --> 00:33:57.940 That was their business thing. 00:33:57.940 --> 00:34:04.880 So, they uploaded – let’s say Spider-Man is out and people start pirating Spider-Man. 00:34:04.880 --> 00:34:09.530 They would upload a fake Spider-Man torrent and when people start downloading it, they 00:34:09.530 --> 00:34:14.800 would take the IP address and then go to the internet provider, ask about the customer 00:34:14.800 --> 00:34:20.470 data, and then send you a threatening letter and say you have to pay $500 or we’re gonna 00:34:20.470 --> 00:34:21.860 take you to court. 00:34:21.860 --> 00:34:25.649 JACK: Now, what’s fascinating is that this fake Spider-Man film they listed on The Pirate 00:34:25.649 --> 00:34:28.020 Bay wasn’t actually the Spider-Man film. 00:34:28.020 --> 00:34:32.149 It was just a dummy video the same size and format as a movie, but there was nothing in 00:34:32.149 --> 00:34:33.149 it. 00:34:33.149 --> 00:34:37.800 So, it’s crazy that people were fined $500 for downloading a film that had absolutely 00:34:37.800 --> 00:34:41.109 nothing to do with Spider-Man except for the filename. 00:34:41.109 --> 00:34:46.020 PETER: These were really annoying people ‘cause they were trying to make money out of basically 00:34:46.020 --> 00:34:47.169 scamming people. 00:34:47.169 --> 00:34:52.099 A lot of – it was not only on Pirate Bay but on all of the torrent sites and other 00:34:52.099 --> 00:34:53.440 file-sharing systems. 00:34:53.440 --> 00:35:01.859 So, an acquaintance to us [00:35:00] actually hacked them [MUSIC] and got full access to 00:35:01.859 --> 00:35:10.671 their e-mail boxes and their internal network and their voiceover IP system and everything. 00:35:10.671 --> 00:35:16.730 It was very interesting times because they got paid a shitload of money to – from the 00:35:16.730 --> 00:35:17.730 clients. 00:35:17.730 --> 00:35:22.460 Like, Sony and these guys paid them millions to protect stuff on the internet. 00:35:22.460 --> 00:35:27.200 They were lying quite a lot to their clients about how much they were helping. 00:35:27.200 --> 00:35:32.460 The interesting thing was that we – since we got the copies of the e-mails; we had like, 00:35:32.460 --> 00:35:36.609 every time they got an e-mail, we had it a second later because it was forwarded to us 00:35:36.609 --> 00:35:38.869 automatically. 00:35:38.869 --> 00:35:43.450 These e-mails always included which IP ranges they were using to share movies on The Pirate 00:35:43.450 --> 00:35:48.720 Bay, so we of course blocked them before they could even start using these services and 00:35:48.720 --> 00:35:53.250 messing with The Pirate Bay users. 00:35:53.250 --> 00:35:56.840 It was – when we realized that they were doing all of this, then they sent out a lot 00:35:56.840 --> 00:36:02.760 of press releases saying how effective they were about getting people – stop people 00:36:02.760 --> 00:36:04.109 from file sharing. 00:36:04.109 --> 00:36:10.089 So, we made it kind of our thing that we would mess with them. 00:36:10.089 --> 00:36:16.560 This guy that’s our acquaintance, he actually leaked all of the – all of their software 00:36:16.560 --> 00:36:23.940 that they made and I think a lot of e-mail as well and some phone calls, very funny phone 00:36:23.940 --> 00:36:24.940 calls. 00:36:24.940 --> 00:36:27.210 They are still on Pirate Bay, I think, that you can download and listen to them. 00:36:27.210 --> 00:36:28.349 JACK: Oh, right. 00:36:28.349 --> 00:36:30.320 Okay, I have to download this and listen. 00:36:30.320 --> 00:36:31.320 MDEFENDER: Hello? 00:36:31.320 --> 00:36:32.320 AGO: Yes. 00:36:32.320 --> 00:36:33.320 MDEFENDER: Hi, this is Ben… 00:36:33.320 --> 00:36:34.320 AGO: Hello. 00:36:34.320 --> 00:36:35.320 MDEFENDER: …Grodsky, MediaDefender. 00:36:35.320 --> 00:36:38.790 JACK: This is a call between MediaDefender and the attorney general’s office in New 00:36:38.790 --> 00:36:39.790 York. 00:36:39.790 --> 00:36:43.119 Apparently MediaDefender was helping them investigate a child porn case but on this 00:36:43.119 --> 00:36:46.900 call, they’re talking about e-mails that got leaked and how there must be a hacker 00:36:46.900 --> 00:36:51.339 somewhere but neither side wants to admit there’s a hacker in their network. 00:36:51.339 --> 00:36:58.240 MDEFENDER: We’ll talk by phone unless we can share some PGP keys for e-mail. 00:36:58.240 --> 00:37:02.020 If you can check on your end again, just – and I’m checking on my end, too. 00:37:02.020 --> 00:37:05.900 I’m not accusing you guys but I think we need to – under the sensitivity of this 00:37:05.900 --> 00:37:11.800 thing, we both need to make sure that both of our systems are secure on both ends, both 00:37:11.800 --> 00:37:17.690 our mail servers and our networks to make sure that whoever saw that e-mail didn’t 00:37:17.690 --> 00:37:23.420 see it on either of our mail servers or on the inside of either of our networks. 00:37:23.420 --> 00:37:24.420 AGO: Right. 00:37:24.420 --> 00:37:29.231 JACK: So, MediaDefender knew someone had seen their e-mails and had a hunch that maybe it 00:37:29.231 --> 00:37:33.619 was the guys from The Pirate Bay but were sort of dumbfounded as to what to do. 00:37:33.619 --> 00:37:36.740 MDEFENDER: You know, somebody’s got access to a mail server, they might have access to 00:37:36.740 --> 00:37:42.990 other machines on the network, and the argument goes that even though the data that’s being 00:37:42.990 --> 00:37:48.290 sent from us to you in a secure fashion is secure, if there’s somebody sniffing around 00:37:48.290 --> 00:37:52.710 on your network or on our network, it’s not secure on either end before it gets into 00:37:52.710 --> 00:37:54.710 the tunnel. AGO: Okay. 00:37:54.710 --> 00:37:56.610 MDEFENDER: So, yeah, I think we’re good. 00:37:56.610 --> 00:37:58.849 PETER: So, we actually sued them in the end. 00:37:58.849 --> 00:38:04.500 So, we went to the cops in Sweden, said that this company is illegally using our service 00:38:04.500 --> 00:38:08.619 and they’re breaking the terms of service and that they know that they’re doing it, 00:38:08.619 --> 00:38:12.390 so they’re actually violating our copyright, so we sued them over that in Sweden. 00:38:12.390 --> 00:38:15.020 JACK: So, this lawsuit was more of a joke. 00:38:15.020 --> 00:38:19.440 The Pirate Bay guys knew they had no rights when it came to imposing their website’s 00:38:19.440 --> 00:38:23.720 rules on a US company, and that was kinda the point of the lawsuit, to show them how 00:38:23.720 --> 00:38:29.370 silly it seemed to go after some guys in another country for violating your arbitrary rules. 00:38:29.370 --> 00:38:33.260 But MediaDefender wasn’t just waging legal threats on The Pirate Bay; they were actively 00:38:33.260 --> 00:38:34.850 attacking Pirate Bay’s website. 00:38:34.850 --> 00:38:39.150 In fact, some of the e-mails that got leaked had discussed how MediaDefender was conducting 00:38:39.150 --> 00:38:41.740 denial-of-service attacks on The Pirate Bay. 00:38:41.740 --> 00:38:46.869 So now, The Pirate Bay was seeing how MediaDefender was poisoning The Pirate Bay with fake torrents 00:38:46.869 --> 00:38:47.990 and DDossing them. 00:38:47.990 --> 00:38:49.890 PETER: Yeah, they did quite a lot of those. 00:38:49.890 --> 00:38:51.530 We used that as evidence against them. 00:38:51.530 --> 00:38:56.910 JACK: So, you decided to pick up the phone and dial the CEO of MediaDefender to say cut 00:38:56.910 --> 00:38:59.000 it out? PETER: Yeah. 00:38:59.000 --> 00:39:00.329 It’s funny. 00:39:00.329 --> 00:39:03.800 That’s the thing, it’s the irony. 00:39:03.800 --> 00:39:05.750 I love the irony. 00:39:05.750 --> 00:39:08.410 So, yeah, why not? 00:39:08.410 --> 00:39:10.020 We had like, a banter going. 00:39:10.020 --> 00:39:12.720 I remember one time I was actually reading their e-mail. 00:39:12.720 --> 00:39:18.150 It was coming into my e-mail box and I was talking to him on the phone about something. 00:39:18.150 --> 00:39:22.010 I think I told him that we’re – handed over the lawsuit against them and so on and 00:39:22.010 --> 00:39:23.010 he was laughing about that. 00:39:23.010 --> 00:39:25.369 He said fuck you and so on. 00:39:25.369 --> 00:39:31.080 Then I saw that there was an e-mail from the reception of MediaDefender saying someone 00:39:31.080 --> 00:39:37.720 called John had a birthday, so the cake is available now in the reception; everyone come 00:39:37.720 --> 00:39:38.720 have cake. 00:39:38.720 --> 00:39:42.369 Then it said oh, I’m busy, I have to go, and it said oh, enjoy the cake. 00:39:42.369 --> 00:39:44.880 He didn’t react to that. 00:39:44.880 --> 00:39:49.670 I think maybe he understood afterwards that oh my god, the guy was reading my e-mail all 00:39:49.670 --> 00:39:50.670 along. 00:39:50.670 --> 00:39:54.320 I really hope that he, you know, understood how much better we are than him. 00:39:54.320 --> 00:39:59.380 JACK: But you accused a police investigator of [00:40:00] conflict of interest with MediaDefender… 00:39:59.380 --> 00:40:00.690 PETER: Yes. 00:40:00.690 --> 00:40:02.990 JACK: …and how did you know that? 00:40:02.990 --> 00:40:06.493 PETER: So, this is the guy that made – for two and a half years, he was the guy who did 00:40:06.493 --> 00:40:07.590 The Pirate Bay investigation, right? 00:40:07.590 --> 00:40:13.290 So, the – after the raid he was the head cop for the whole investigation. 00:40:13.290 --> 00:40:16.460 So, we were in touch with him quite often. 00:40:16.460 --> 00:40:20.430 Since there was a lot of other machines that were actually taken down during The Pirate 00:40:20.430 --> 00:40:24.060 Bay raid, we asked for some of them to be returned. 00:40:24.060 --> 00:40:28.240 There were a lot of political organizations that had their machines, so we were many people 00:40:28.240 --> 00:40:35.660 in the group and around The Pirate Bay group that had a lot of contact with him, so we 00:40:35.660 --> 00:40:37.130 knew him quite well. 00:40:37.130 --> 00:40:42.660 One of the guys he called in as a witness during the investigation actually just as 00:40:42.660 --> 00:40:43.770 a joke added him on Facebook. 00:40:43.770 --> 00:40:49.100 Facebook was kind of new and you still had this thing called networks on Facebook, so 00:40:49.100 --> 00:40:55.450 when you joined Facebook you would say I’m in this network; I work for the cops or whatever. 00:40:55.450 --> 00:41:00.510 The way we found out that he started working for Warner Brothers was that he changed network 00:41:00.510 --> 00:41:06.410 on Facebook from Swedish Police to Warner Brothers the day after he quit being a cop 00:41:06.410 --> 00:41:12.319 which is the day he handed over the final investigation of The Pirate Bay. 00:41:12.319 --> 00:41:18.720 So, we reported this to the police and to the prosecutor and the whole – and to the 00:41:18.720 --> 00:41:21.820 court, everything. 00:41:21.820 --> 00:41:25.850 This was also the guy that we had during the whole investigation period. 00:41:25.850 --> 00:41:31.910 We also filed criminal complaints against MediaDefender, to him actually, and he was 00:41:31.910 --> 00:41:33.460 the one who was supposed to investigate that. 00:41:33.460 --> 00:41:37.710 We didn’t know that he actually was working or he was going to start working for the – he 00:41:37.710 --> 00:41:42.810 was already – he had a contract and everything almost a year before he handed over the investigation. 00:41:42.810 --> 00:41:48.950 But in Sweden, it turns out that there was no law against police actually starting working 00:41:48.950 --> 00:41:55.260 for one of the parties in a criminal case because Sweden is very naive when it comes 00:41:55.260 --> 00:42:02.460 to this, because everyone in Scandinavia has had a really privileged, blessed, uncorrupt 00:42:02.460 --> 00:42:06.200 state for a long while, so all of a sudden these very corrupt companies come over and 00:42:06.200 --> 00:42:08.500 see like oh, it’s totally fine to employ a cop. 00:42:08.500 --> 00:42:09.500 Let’s do that. 00:42:09.500 --> 00:42:11.280 JACK: Okay, so where are we now? 00:42:11.280 --> 00:42:17.390 Two raids by the cops, their servers are seized, arrested, DDoS attacked from the media industry, 00:42:17.390 --> 00:42:19.390 but this is just a warm-up. 00:42:19.390 --> 00:42:25.050 We’re only in the year 2008 at this point of the story and the site is still up today, 00:42:25.050 --> 00:42:29.220 so there’s another thirteen years of battles left in this story. 00:42:29.220 --> 00:42:33.309 So, stay with us through the break to hear the rest. 00:42:33.309 --> 00:42:39.019 In your opinion, is there anything that is – that – I mean, don’t you think that 00:42:39.019 --> 00:42:43.859 – regarding copyright, is there anything that should be copyrighted and protected? 00:42:43.859 --> 00:42:49.369 Because if somebody makes great art and then somebody just says okay, I’m gonna sell 00:42:49.369 --> 00:42:56.220 this for half price on my website or give it away free, is that – how – where is 00:42:56.220 --> 00:43:00.510 your justification for zero copyright or do you even believe there should never be? 00:43:00.510 --> 00:43:05.460 PETER: Well, first of all, if you look at what copyright started out as being, the whole 00:43:05.460 --> 00:43:10.270 idea of copyright was to make sure that a copy was the correct copy, that no one changed 00:43:10.270 --> 00:43:15.450 and altered the content of a book, for instance, that you would know that if I read this book 00:43:15.450 --> 00:43:20.030 it will be the same thing that the author has written because it was important pieces 00:43:20.030 --> 00:43:25.160 of information that he wanted not to be distorted or changed somewhere along the road. 00:43:25.160 --> 00:43:29.760 That was copyright, and then someone made it into some sort of financial system. 00:43:29.760 --> 00:43:39.140 For me, the whole thing is like, as an individual, I should not be limited in my access to information. 00:43:39.140 --> 00:43:43.849 Between companies, whatever kind of business deal they work out, that’s up to them. 00:43:43.849 --> 00:43:45.920 I don’t even consider that as copyright. 00:43:45.920 --> 00:43:47.880 They use copyright as the grounds for that. 00:43:47.880 --> 00:43:53.380 But for me, the problem is when copyright becomes the default censorship method. 00:43:53.380 --> 00:44:00.950 Because we’ve had a limitation before of how many physical copies we can produce, how 00:44:00.950 --> 00:44:04.950 to distribute, there was actual costs involved with distribution. 00:44:04.950 --> 00:44:06.790 With the internet, everything changed. 00:44:06.790 --> 00:44:12.450 All of a sudden, if you would pay for every song on the internet, just had access to them, 00:44:12.450 --> 00:44:16.270 you would have to pay so many millions of whatever. 00:44:16.270 --> 00:44:21.490 It doesn’t make sense because we’ve altered the way that we use arts, we use any type 00:44:21.490 --> 00:44:23.380 of culture, right? 00:44:23.380 --> 00:44:29.390 So, we also need to alter the way we look at financial renumeration when it comes to 00:44:29.390 --> 00:44:30.390 this. 00:44:30.390 --> 00:44:36.180 So, I think that we solved the distribution method with the internet which also needed 00:44:36.180 --> 00:44:39.910 the payment method to change or the financing of culture. 00:44:39.910 --> 00:44:45.040 The problem is that when you talk to people about copyright, you end up talking to a lawyer 00:44:45.040 --> 00:44:48.380 from a company that owns someone else’s work. 00:44:48.380 --> 00:44:50.750 You never really talk to an artist about copyright. 00:44:50.750 --> 00:44:55.300 For most artists, it’s more important to actually build a fanbase that will be able 00:44:55.300 --> 00:44:59.069 to help them pay bills by going to a concert or [00:45:00] whatever that pays them actual 00:44:59.069 --> 00:45:03.270 money, because most of the money when it comes to music or movies, they actually go to the 00:45:03.270 --> 00:45:07.230 companies and not to the producers of the content, and then the companies say that they’re 00:45:07.230 --> 00:45:11.240 there to protect the people that actually steal the money from. 00:45:11.240 --> 00:45:16.550 It’s an unjust system and I can’t really accept that because it’s bad for me, it’s 00:45:16.550 --> 00:45:17.750 bad for the artists. 00:45:17.750 --> 00:45:21.130 We never said that we’re against people getting paid for content. 00:45:21.130 --> 00:45:25.990 It’s just that we need to find a new method of actually renumerating them. 00:45:25.990 --> 00:45:33.140 If it’s based on tax or Patreon in your case, for instance, that’s much more interesting 00:45:33.140 --> 00:45:37.910 and much fairer because you take out some sort of middle man that is controlling who 00:45:37.910 --> 00:45:39.450 gets access to things. 00:45:39.450 --> 00:45:46.569 A typical example is like, today we think we solve this thing of music distribution 00:45:46.569 --> 00:45:53.990 with Spotify, but if you look at the countries like Brazil, Kosovo, or poorer countries, 00:45:53.990 --> 00:46:00.240 poorer nations, Spotify is not interesting on being available in these regions, so people 00:46:00.240 --> 00:46:02.740 don’t have access to music the same way there. 00:46:02.740 --> 00:46:07.950 For them, it’s really vital that there are torrent sites out there that can actually 00:46:07.950 --> 00:46:11.650 download music from to be able to listen to them at all, because they are not served by 00:46:11.650 --> 00:46:12.740 some sort of markets. 00:46:12.740 --> 00:46:17.250 For me, it’s about the fairness of access to information. 00:46:17.250 --> 00:46:22.300 Then it’s a separate question on how to make sure that artists can actually make money 00:46:22.300 --> 00:46:27.730 from this, because that’s not the most important thing but if they make great art, they will 00:46:27.730 --> 00:46:29.500 make money from it somehow. 00:46:29.500 --> 00:46:32.739 It’s always been the case, but it’s never been the case that you make your money from 00:46:32.739 --> 00:46:35.079 – it’s very few people that make their money from copyright. 00:46:35.079 --> 00:46:39.329 JACK: Oh, and if you’re wondering what they would do if someone were to put child porn 00:46:39.329 --> 00:46:43.220 or other horrible things up on Pirate Bay, they would delete that. 00:46:43.220 --> 00:46:48.559 They had a moderation team that would go through and clear certain stuff out. 00:46:48.559 --> 00:46:53.650 If you remember, they were arrested in 2006 for running this thing, and so on February 00:46:53.650 --> 00:46:57.250 16, 2009, their trial started. 00:46:57.250 --> 00:47:02.210 [BACKGROUND TALK] They were accused of violating Swedish copyright law. 00:47:02.210 --> 00:47:05.790 The prosecution team had lawyers from Hollywood there. 00:47:05.790 --> 00:47:09.940 That documentary called The Pirate Bay AFK does a good job at documenting this court 00:47:09.940 --> 00:47:10.940 case. 00:47:10.940 --> 00:47:15.290 You can see all three of them up there getting questioned on the stand, and I have to say 00:47:15.290 --> 00:47:20.170 they acted flippant on the stand, almost like they weren’t taking this seriously at all. 00:47:20.170 --> 00:47:24.790 Someone asked Gottfrid if he’s a computer genius during the trial, and this is what 00:47:24.790 --> 00:47:31.290 it sounded like in the Swedish courtroom. 00:47:31.290 --> 00:47:40.280 [SWEDISH] But when the prosecutor asked him if he can elaborate on what kind of competencies 00:47:40.280 --> 00:47:44.440 he has, he refused to answer that, saying that it doesn’t seem like the appropriate 00:47:44.440 --> 00:47:49.880 time for him to go over his resume and that question is just too hard to answer. 00:47:49.880 --> 00:47:55.730 [SWEDISH] They asked Peter how he met Fredrik and Gottfrid, and he said oh, I don’t remember; 00:47:55.730 --> 00:47:56.980 probably in a chatroom or something. 00:47:56.980 --> 00:48:01.109 The prosecutor said no, no, no; when did you meet them IRL? 00:48:01.109 --> 00:48:03.470 Someone in the trial was like, what’s IRL mean? 00:48:03.470 --> 00:48:04.470 The prosecutor said… 00:48:04.470 --> 00:48:05.980 PROSECUTOR: In real life. 00:48:05.980 --> 00:48:07.119 JACK: Peter said something like… 00:48:07.119 --> 00:48:12.450 PETER: I really hate the term IRL because it minimizes us and it minimizes the importance 00:48:12.450 --> 00:48:13.450 of the internet. 00:48:13.450 --> 00:48:16.020 I think we are always ourselves on the internet now. 00:48:16.020 --> 00:48:17.990 It’s very rarely we’re not ourselves on the internet. 00:48:17.990 --> 00:48:22.589 We would be more open and honest on the internet than we are in – out of the internet, so 00:48:22.589 --> 00:48:27.630 I think it’s a old saying that doesn’t really exist anymore. 00:48:27.630 --> 00:48:33.270 I’ve always been promoting the concept of AFK, away from keyboard, instead of in real 00:48:33.270 --> 00:48:39.960 life because I always wanted people to understand that the internet is for real and it’s actually 00:48:39.960 --> 00:48:41.640 where most of our lives are today. 00:48:41.640 --> 00:48:45.869 JACK: You can imagine how this trial went when three guys continued to answer questions 00:48:45.869 --> 00:48:46.920 in this way. 00:48:46.920 --> 00:48:51.710 But honestly, this is actually the way lawyers talk, with extreme precision and accuracy, 00:48:51.710 --> 00:48:55.190 without volunteering any extra details to help the other side. 00:48:55.190 --> 00:48:59.080 But the prosecution team was dumbfounded by the way they acted in court. 00:48:59.080 --> 00:49:05.700 The responses were accurate but just extremely specific and somewhat ideological and there 00:49:05.700 --> 00:49:09.660 were a lot of people who came to attend this trial, fans of The Pirate Bay. 00:49:09.660 --> 00:49:11.930 PETER: Everyone was totally on our side. 00:49:11.930 --> 00:49:16.550 There were chants outside and then The Pirate Party had started a few years before and they 00:49:16.550 --> 00:49:21.050 were like, this was their way of actually getting a lot of attention, so they had people 00:49:21.050 --> 00:49:27.181 there making cookies and we pirated recipes, and it was very – it was a festival thing 00:49:27.181 --> 00:49:29.090 going on. 00:49:29.090 --> 00:49:31.859 The attention in Scandinavia was huge. 00:49:31.859 --> 00:49:34.369 It was insane. 00:49:34.369 --> 00:49:40.060 The court case was the first court case where it was actually distributed on Swedish radio, 00:49:40.060 --> 00:49:42.160 so live, you could listen into the court case. 00:49:42.160 --> 00:49:49.670 It was going on for three weeks so we had seven hours, eight hours per day that was 00:49:49.670 --> 00:49:51.089 live radio from the court case. 00:49:51.089 --> 00:49:57.600 It was all very new for everyone involved because the judge had never seen anything 00:49:57.600 --> 00:49:58.600 like it. 00:49:58.600 --> 00:50:05.030 [00:50:00] We’ve never been to court before and it was just, the defense was very confused 00:50:05.030 --> 00:50:09.730 about – they were all very – we had famous lawyers, all of us, and they were still very 00:50:09.730 --> 00:50:14.150 confused about how big this was and they didn’t really understand all of a sudden the BBC 00:50:14.150 --> 00:50:18.630 is there and interviewing them about things and how Swedish legal system works and so 00:50:18.630 --> 00:50:20.670 on. It was interesting. 00:50:20.670 --> 00:50:22.390 Let’s say that. 00:50:22.390 --> 00:50:24.569 JACK: Anyway, they lost the court case. 00:50:24.569 --> 00:50:28.780 [MUSIC] The judge ruled that they must serve one year in prison and pay thirty million 00:50:28.780 --> 00:50:33.549 Swedish crowns or about 3.6 million in US in penalties. 00:50:33.549 --> 00:50:37.290 PETER: Well, the case was kind of corrupt. 00:50:37.290 --> 00:50:40.950 Let’s be honest. 00:50:40.950 --> 00:50:44.530 I got convicted for things that never happened which is kind of strange. 00:50:44.530 --> 00:50:51.569 They said I was responsible for some servers that was not even in the rest – in the raid. 00:50:51.569 --> 00:50:56.130 They didn’t take any of those machines, but the judge didn’t understand what that 00:50:56.130 --> 00:51:04.870 meant which is kind of interesting because yeah, it was a very corrupt, weird court case. 00:51:04.870 --> 00:51:09.970 We kind of figured that out after the first two, three days that something was off. 00:51:09.970 --> 00:51:15.230 So, we started treating it more as a theatre performance than actual court case. 00:51:15.230 --> 00:51:21.079 Actually, before the court case we said that we wanted to move the court from being in 00:51:21.079 --> 00:51:26.260 Stockholm’s normal, small court because we needed a bigger audience, because we had 00:51:26.260 --> 00:51:27.260 a huge audience. 00:51:27.260 --> 00:51:33.109 We needed like, let’s say a theatre with 80,000 seats so all of our fans can visit 00:51:33.109 --> 00:51:34.790 and be part of the court case. 00:51:34.790 --> 00:51:39.780 That was the attitude we had towards this, that it’s a theatre piece. 00:51:39.780 --> 00:51:46.800 We called it the spectrial; it was spectacle trial. 00:51:46.800 --> 00:51:51.589 Of course, it’s not really good advice in how the court will treat you when you treat 00:51:51.589 --> 00:51:57.859 them as being some sort of theatre rather – performance rather than actually being 00:51:57.859 --> 00:51:59.849 some sort of legit court. 00:51:59.849 --> 00:52:04.119 JACK: So, after the court case you were convicted of one year in prison. 00:52:04.119 --> 00:52:09.520 Well, number one, why didn’t you go prison and number two, why didn’t this take The 00:52:09.520 --> 00:52:12.000 Pirate Bay down after being convicted of this? 00:52:12.000 --> 00:52:15.030 You would think Pirate Bay would be shut down at that point. 00:52:15.030 --> 00:52:17.960 PETER: Well, why should you go to prison? 00:52:17.960 --> 00:52:19.079 That’s a weird… 00:52:19.079 --> 00:52:21.079 JACK: Well… PETER: I can… 00:52:21.079 --> 00:52:25.440 JACK: No, it’s not – why did – so, don’t the police – like, you’re in court; the 00:52:25.440 --> 00:52:27.260 police say okay, you’re guilty. 00:52:27.260 --> 00:52:29.340 Okay, come this way, it’s time for prison. 00:52:29.340 --> 00:52:30.340 Right? 00:52:30.340 --> 00:52:31.340 You have one year you have to serve. 00:52:31.340 --> 00:52:33.119 Why didn’t that just happen immediately? 00:52:33.119 --> 00:52:35.309 PETER: No, no. 00:52:35.309 --> 00:52:37.890 You’ve seen too many Hollywood movies. 00:52:37.890 --> 00:52:41.089 Also, we’re not in Hollywood. 00:52:41.089 --> 00:52:45.650 JACK: He goes on to explain the way the system works in Sweden, but the short story is that 00:52:45.650 --> 00:52:47.130 he appealed the case. 00:52:47.130 --> 00:52:50.890 If you appeal, you don’t yet need to go to prison and you can keep living at home 00:52:50.890 --> 00:52:52.810 and wait for your second trial. 00:52:52.810 --> 00:52:58.890 So, in the meantime, they completely ignored any requests to shut The Pirate Bay down. 00:52:58.890 --> 00:53:00.619 PETER: Because we didn’t want to. 00:53:00.619 --> 00:53:03.859 I think it’s that simple. 00:53:03.859 --> 00:53:09.620 It was just not hard to run and it was running in different places and we were in different 00:53:09.620 --> 00:53:13.390 countries, and we just decided none of us were – none of us had the interest of going 00:53:13.390 --> 00:53:15.700 to prison, so we didn’t go. 00:53:15.700 --> 00:53:20.089 JACK: It just – I mean, it doesn’t work that way in the US. 00:53:20.089 --> 00:53:26.470 You can’t be arrested and sentenced to a crime that you committed for copyright infringement 00:53:26.470 --> 00:53:30.440 and then they – and then just say I appeal this and I’m gonna keep it going. 00:53:30.440 --> 00:53:35.079 It’s so weird that you just think that that’s an option and that was what happened. 00:53:35.079 --> 00:53:39.119 PETER: But I think it’s weird that you don’t see that as an option. 00:53:39.119 --> 00:53:45.290 Why would you have to go to prison for something which is not a crime, and why would you help 00:53:45.290 --> 00:53:50.090 someone to go – why would you help the state by voluntarily going to prison for something 00:53:50.090 --> 00:53:52.090 which is… JACK: Well… 00:53:52.090 --> 00:53:53.090 PETER: You know. 00:53:53.090 --> 00:53:55.720 JACK: Well, it’s not so much that it’s not a crime; it’s that in court, they deemed 00:53:55.720 --> 00:54:00.010 it as a crime and a jury convicted you of yes, you’re guilty of that crime, so that’s 00:54:00.010 --> 00:54:05.380 the final verdict there of the court has ruled this way, and so whether you believe it’s 00:54:05.380 --> 00:54:09.250 a crime or not does not matter anymore ‘cause the court has ruled a certain way. 00:54:09.250 --> 00:54:10.970 PETER: I don’t agree. 00:54:10.970 --> 00:54:12.250 I don’t agree. 00:54:12.250 --> 00:54:15.930 First of all, it was not a valid court, you know. 00:54:15.930 --> 00:54:19.920 Okay, going back to the corruption thing; it turned out that the judge in our case was 00:54:19.920 --> 00:54:22.450 also the chairman for the Pro Copyright Society of Sweden. 00:54:22.450 --> 00:54:29.190 I can’t take that seriously when he convicts me of breaking copyright on evidence which 00:54:29.190 --> 00:54:32.859 was basically look, here are people downloading things from The Pirate Bay. 00:54:32.859 --> 00:54:37.609 It says well, tracker is down because we had an – we didn’t have bandwidth when they 00:54:37.609 --> 00:54:42.210 were actually doing the evidence, so when they tried downloading things it didn’t 00:54:42.210 --> 00:54:46.030 work, so all of the screenshots they were using as evidence in the court case actually 00:54:46.030 --> 00:54:50.510 said Pirate Bay’s not working, so they showed that none of these things has been downloaded 00:54:50.510 --> 00:54:55.400 from Pirate Bay which was funny but it didn’t help. 00:54:55.400 --> 00:55:01.820 But of course, I don’t take that – it was [00:55:00] totally not a legit court case. 00:55:01.820 --> 00:55:09.070 I think also being wanted by Interpol is a better option than going to prison because 00:55:09.070 --> 00:55:11.430 it gives me the right to say I’ve been wanted by Interpol afterwards. 00:55:11.430 --> 00:55:12.430 That’s worthwhile. 00:55:12.430 --> 00:55:17.140 I didn’t get a t-shirt but at least I have the saying; I can say I’ve been wanted by 00:55:17.140 --> 00:55:18.430 Interpol. 00:55:18.430 --> 00:55:25.400 JACK: Was there fear inside you at all that maybe, just maybe sometime you might get arrested 00:55:25.400 --> 00:55:27.829 and extradited to the US and spend twenty years in prison? 00:55:27.829 --> 00:55:33.200 ‘Cause I mean, in the US they were – here – making huge fines on people for downloading 00:55:33.200 --> 00:55:38.980 like, one song, like $200,000 or something you’re fined for this, and it was ridiculous 00:55:38.980 --> 00:55:43.090 stuff going on over here, so I can imagine them catching the kingpin of this and saying 00:55:43.090 --> 00:55:46.470 not only are you gonna get a million-dollar fine but you’re also gonna go to prison 00:55:46.470 --> 00:55:47.770 for a long time in the US. 00:55:47.770 --> 00:55:50.369 I mean, was there something like that in the back of your head? 00:55:50.369 --> 00:55:55.500 PETER: I think even though we realized this is a kind of corrupt court case, we also realized 00:55:55.500 --> 00:56:03.200 that Sweden cannot extradite people that are citizens or neighboring country – I’m 00:56:03.200 --> 00:56:05.779 not a Swedish person but the other guys were Swedish. 00:56:05.779 --> 00:56:08.570 They would never be able to be extradited to another country for the same crime. 00:56:08.570 --> 00:56:11.740 It’s also like this double jeopardy thing that you can’t be convicted in another country 00:56:11.740 --> 00:56:14.160 for a crime and so on. 00:56:14.160 --> 00:56:18.980 The US of course, for – not only for Pirate Bay but for everything else we’ve been involved 00:56:18.980 --> 00:56:23.720 in, we couldn’t go – well, we’re super welcome to go to the US but we will never 00:56:23.720 --> 00:56:28.000 be able to leave, so we’re just staying out, right? 00:56:28.000 --> 00:56:32.579 We were never scared of the US that way but I wouldn’t want to help them. 00:56:32.579 --> 00:56:35.220 But we’re never afraid when it comes to The Pirate Bay. 00:56:35.220 --> 00:56:39.430 We’re never afraid of being extradited to the US. 00:56:39.430 --> 00:56:46.030 Interesting thing in Sweden is that it’s not illegal to not go to prison. 00:56:46.030 --> 00:56:50.030 So when you get sentenced to prison, I think this is actually the case in most countries, 00:56:50.030 --> 00:56:52.920 is that you’re not the ones getting sentenced. 00:56:52.920 --> 00:56:59.400 You don’t have this – you don’t have – you can’t force someone to go to prison. 00:56:59.400 --> 00:57:04.760 There’s no human emotion that says I want to be locked in, so in Sweden at least, and 00:57:04.760 --> 00:57:09.849 – it’s totally up to the – it’s the state that gets sentenced to put you in prison, 00:57:09.849 --> 00:57:15.670 not you as a person, so like, technically state has the responsibility of locking you 00:57:15.670 --> 00:57:16.670 up. 00:57:16.670 --> 00:57:19.490 You don’t have to help whatsoever, which also means that it’s not illegal in Sweden 00:57:19.490 --> 00:57:23.340 to actually escape from prison because it’s a human trait that you don’t want to be 00:57:23.340 --> 00:57:26.960 locked up, so it’s the state that is forced to keep you in. 00:57:26.960 --> 00:57:29.500 It’s not your job to be in prison. 00:57:29.500 --> 00:57:34.810 No one wants to be locked up, so you can’t force someone to change to be inhumane against 00:57:34.810 --> 00:57:35.880 themselves. 00:57:35.880 --> 00:57:37.670 That’s just bizarre. 00:57:37.670 --> 00:57:41.000 I didn’t want to help them. 00:57:41.000 --> 00:57:46.270 I travelled all over Europe with my normal passport. 00:57:46.270 --> 00:57:49.530 I didn’t get arrested even though I was on the Interpol Most Wanted list. 00:57:49.530 --> 00:57:53.920 I got kind of upset about that because there’s actual criminals that do exactly the same 00:57:53.920 --> 00:57:55.910 and don’t get caught and that kind of pisses me off. 00:57:55.910 --> 00:57:59.000 Like, the thing is, Interpol is really crap at arresting people. 00:57:59.000 --> 00:58:00.000 Seriously. 00:58:00.000 --> 00:58:03.549 That’s the problem that someone should actually deal with and having experience in that field, 00:58:03.549 --> 00:58:06.000 I know how badly they suck. 00:58:06.000 --> 00:58:10.369 JACK: [MUSIC] Sweden did try to stop them. 00:58:10.369 --> 00:58:15.940 They mandated that all ISPs not do business with The Pirate Bay which was the first time 00:58:15.940 --> 00:58:18.210 that Sweden has ever made such a mandate. 00:58:18.210 --> 00:58:23.410 Can you imagine a government telling all ISPs to not do business with a certain company? 00:58:23.410 --> 00:58:24.530 It’s really incredible. 00:58:24.530 --> 00:58:28.849 PETER: I think from a standpoint of the companies, they were kind of relieved probably that they 00:58:28.849 --> 00:58:36.980 didn’t have to offer that, but I think Pirate Bay had already left Sweden quite a long while 00:58:36.980 --> 00:58:43.890 ago because of – basically we owed money to every Swedish ISP anyhow because we didn’t 00:58:43.890 --> 00:58:45.460 pay the bandwidth bills, right? 00:58:45.460 --> 00:58:50.810 So, kind of left and did the other things which were other countries and other places 00:58:50.810 --> 00:58:54.730 which were more interesting to mess with as well. 00:58:54.730 --> 00:58:59.589 Also, a lot of the decisions on where to move Pirate Bay and what to do was also to influence 00:58:59.589 --> 00:59:05.930 the political discourse in those countries, so we decided to let The Pirate Party host 00:59:05.930 --> 00:59:13.400 Pirate Bay because we wanted it to be a political statement from them saying we are a political 00:59:13.400 --> 00:59:18.099 party and we’re running a site that we think is a political project here. 00:59:18.099 --> 00:59:22.160 Are you going to censor a political party for standing up to the ideologists which would 00:59:22.160 --> 00:59:24.810 be illegal in most countries? 00:59:24.810 --> 00:59:26.660 JACK: Ah, yes; The Pirate Party. 00:59:26.660 --> 00:59:31.020 So, this is a political party in Sweden which basically has three core values; they want 00:59:31.020 --> 00:59:35.589 transparent government, more privacy for people, and they want to revise the patent or copyright 00:59:35.589 --> 00:59:36.589 system. 00:59:36.589 --> 00:59:40.770 Now, this Pirate Party was establishing itself independently from The Pirate Bay. 00:59:40.770 --> 00:59:45.119 There was no affiliation actually, but The Pirate Party just wasn’t getting much airtime 00:59:45.119 --> 00:59:48.250 or taken seriously until The Pirate Bay court case. 00:59:48.250 --> 00:59:51.930 Suddenly, the guy behind The Pirate Party was being interviewed everywhere to get his 00:59:51.930 --> 00:59:56.500 opinion on what’s happening, and thus The Pirate Party became more known. 00:59:56.500 --> 00:59:59.930 But to add to that, The Pirate Bay [01:00:00] was winning the hearts of people everywhere. 00:59:59.930 --> 01:00:04.730 PETER: After the court case when we lost, there was – the biggest newspaper in Sweden 01:00:04.730 --> 01:00:09.599 had this typical poll on the front page of a newspaper saying was it right or wrong that 01:00:09.599 --> 01:00:10.820 they got convicted? 01:00:10.820 --> 01:00:14.550 99% said it was wrong that we got convicted. 01:00:14.550 --> 01:00:20.020 It was very obviously that we had the full support of the public. 01:00:20.020 --> 01:00:23.920 JACK: So, if you have a bunch of people all pumped up and excited about The Pirate Bay, 01:00:23.920 --> 01:00:26.830 The Pirate Party became their natural home. 01:00:26.830 --> 01:00:30.289 People started voting for The Pirate Party in elections. 01:00:30.289 --> 01:00:35.359 In the 2009 elections, The Pirate Party actually got 7% of the vote. 01:00:35.359 --> 01:00:39.589 It was a growing movement in Sweden but there were also Pirate Parties springing up in other 01:00:39.589 --> 01:00:40.810 countries, too. 01:00:40.810 --> 01:00:45.650 So for a while they tried hosting The Pirate Bay at The Pirate Party’s data center in 01:00:45.650 --> 01:00:47.990 order to try to gain some sort of protection. 01:00:47.990 --> 01:00:53.990 PETER: It would be political censorship disconnecting them because if you disconnect Pirate Bay, 01:00:53.990 --> 01:00:58.740 you also disconnect the political party’s website and access to the internet which is 01:00:58.740 --> 01:01:00.490 illegal in most countries. 01:01:00.490 --> 01:01:08.109 So, it was a big gamble for them and I think it was also important that they did that and 01:01:08.109 --> 01:01:13.230 it was kind of funny as well, I think, especially the whole idea was actually – The Pirate 01:01:13.230 --> 01:01:20.700 Party was elected to the European parliament which is kind of a big thing as well, so we 01:01:20.700 --> 01:01:25.579 had this idea that we could maybe run Pirate Bay’s – basically the front end of Pirate 01:01:25.579 --> 01:01:33.609 Bay, the load balancer part would run inside the European Union parliament as for the lols, 01:01:33.609 --> 01:01:35.660 basically, because it would be funny. 01:01:35.660 --> 01:01:39.470 JACK: That’s the interesting thing about The Pirate Bay, is how they were able to shape 01:01:39.470 --> 01:01:42.931 political discourse about copyright and patents. 01:01:42.931 --> 01:01:45.079 I mean, they weren’t hiding or running from anyone. 01:01:45.079 --> 01:01:49.470 No, they were taking their flag and running it with full force right into the center of 01:01:49.470 --> 01:01:50.799 European parliament. 01:01:50.799 --> 01:01:53.349 It’s just incredible. 01:01:53.349 --> 01:01:55.309 What Disney did next was kind of funny. 01:01:55.309 --> 01:01:59.890 First, listen to this anti-piracy message which you had to watch just before you could 01:01:59.890 --> 01:02:01.070 watch one of their DVDs. 01:02:01.070 --> 01:02:02.839 HOST: [MUSIC] In every great Disney DVD, know the heroes and the villains. 01:02:02.839 --> 01:02:03.839 But with pirated DVD copies, there are only ever villains. 01:02:03.839 --> 01:02:17.109 DVD piracy is a crime and needs to be stopped. 01:02:17.109 --> 01:02:22.770 The inferior quality of these pirated DVDs will spoil your enjoyment of watching the 01:02:22.770 --> 01:02:23.770 film. 01:02:23.770 --> 01:02:29.000 JACK: But in the same breath, one of Disney’s blockbuster films was Pirates of the Caribbean. 01:02:29.000 --> 01:02:33.490 PETER: They realized from Hollywood that calling us pirates were not effective in terms of 01:02:33.490 --> 01:02:35.099 getting people to not like us. 01:02:35.099 --> 01:02:41.240 It was kind of funny, so they changed their whole concept of how to attack The Pirate 01:02:41.240 --> 01:02:43.890 Bay, saying we were like a cult. 01:02:43.890 --> 01:02:49.210 It was kinda funny because they were – in every single interview with the lawyers in 01:02:49.210 --> 01:02:53.579 Europe for Hollywood, like the lobbyists and lawyers that work for Hollywood in Europe, 01:02:53.579 --> 01:02:57.849 they were always saying like, this kopimist cult, kopimist cult all the time. 01:02:57.849 --> 01:03:01.970 I’ve always had this idea that if someone calls you something, then you make that cool. 01:03:01.970 --> 01:03:07.520 Found out by researching a little bit that actually in Sweden, you can start your own 01:03:07.520 --> 01:03:08.520 religion. 01:03:08.520 --> 01:03:09.520 It’s fifty euros. 01:03:09.520 --> 01:03:13.890 Then you can register basically whatever you want as a religion. 01:03:13.890 --> 01:03:17.770 It would be an official religion recognized by the state. 01:03:17.770 --> 01:03:24.300 So, we had some friends and then we talked about this, and then we registered the Church 01:03:24.300 --> 01:03:27.240 of Kopimism in Sweden. 01:03:27.240 --> 01:03:33.460 I believe that we started, as I mentioned to you, we start life with being a copy of 01:03:33.460 --> 01:03:34.460 our parents. 01:03:34.460 --> 01:03:39.760 Our DNA is copied and remixed into a new human being and all of – everything we learn is 01:03:39.760 --> 01:03:46.510 from a book that we copy the information out of, so it’s like – and kind of the idea 01:03:46.510 --> 01:03:54.510 of kopimism is this whole concept of instead of – the Mormon church, they have this thing 01:03:54.510 --> 01:03:57.200 that everyone who’s a Mormon is also a priest. 01:03:57.200 --> 01:04:00.859 So, I came up with this idea at like, 2:00 AM in the middle of the night, a little bit 01:04:00.859 --> 01:04:05.140 tired, and I was thinking what if everyone is a priest in the kopimist society and we 01:04:05.140 --> 01:04:08.710 can have priest-to-priest communication which is basically file-sharing. 01:04:08.710 --> 01:04:15.619 That would actually be protected as a religious service and it would be a confession which 01:04:15.619 --> 01:04:20.390 is actually illegal to listen in on, which means that if you find someone actually file-sharing 01:04:20.390 --> 01:04:24.680 and let’s say that they’re a kopimist and they were talking to their priest, you 01:04:24.680 --> 01:04:29.569 would have violated their religious right which is four years of prison minimum in most 01:04:29.569 --> 01:04:30.970 European countries. 01:04:30.970 --> 01:04:33.980 It was just really funny. 01:04:33.980 --> 01:04:38.470 It’s actually a recognized religion in Sweden. 01:04:38.470 --> 01:04:42.940 It’s like, 30,000 members, something like that, that are kopimists. 01:04:42.940 --> 01:04:47.400 JACK: The media companies were getting really frustrated and were feeling like they couldn’t 01:04:47.400 --> 01:04:49.160 go after The Pirate Bay directly. 01:04:49.160 --> 01:04:54.500 So, they came up with an indirect way of tackling the problem; they pressured Google to take 01:04:54.500 --> 01:04:59.000 down links to content that was on The Pirate Bay, [01:05:00] like links to torrents and 01:04:59.000 --> 01:05:02.920 stuff, and Google took down direct links to torrents on The Pirate Bay but they kept up 01:05:02.920 --> 01:05:06.270 a link to The Pirate Bay in their search engine. 01:05:06.270 --> 01:05:10.570 Then the media companies pressured Facebook to remove all links to The Pirate Bay, and 01:05:10.570 --> 01:05:14.770 a lot of people on Facebook were sharing links to certain songs and videos that were on the 01:05:14.770 --> 01:05:15.770 site. 01:05:15.770 --> 01:05:19.849 PETER: Yeah, but that’s the thing; Pirate Bay – kind of proud of it. 01:05:19.849 --> 01:05:24.470 It’s like, a few things I’m really proud of and one thing is that we’re – been 01:05:24.470 --> 01:05:29.510 the most-censored website in the world and it’s always for different reasons. 01:05:29.510 --> 01:05:33.890 Pirate Bay was censored – one of the first countries that censored Pirate Bay was China 01:05:33.890 --> 01:05:36.920 because of – they didn’t like the freedom of speech aspect of Pirate Bay. 01:05:36.920 --> 01:05:40.279 It was not really into the pirating. 01:05:40.279 --> 01:05:44.859 It would also be very ironic if China complained about piracy, but – so they just banned 01:05:44.859 --> 01:05:49.260 Pirate Bay for freedom of speech problems. 01:05:49.260 --> 01:05:54.980 When Facebook started blocking Pirate Bay links, it was probably among the first things 01:05:54.980 --> 01:05:56.329 that they ever blocked. 01:05:56.329 --> 01:06:00.280 It’s interesting that you would still be able to talk about the KKK and promoting the 01:06:00.280 --> 01:06:05.740 KKK but you are not allowed to send a link to your home video that you shared using torrents. 01:06:05.740 --> 01:06:11.369 We’ve always been at the forefront of censorship rather than anything else. 01:06:11.369 --> 01:06:19.810 That’s for good and bad because a lot of these – a lot of countries or systems, they 01:06:19.810 --> 01:06:23.970 kind of use the whole idea that oh, we should block The Pirate Bay because people can illegally 01:06:23.970 --> 01:06:27.869 download something and then they can go to some court case and – court somewhere and 01:06:27.869 --> 01:06:30.760 they say oh, that sounds reasonable. 01:06:30.760 --> 01:06:35.080 Then they have kind of a precedent that oh, then we have a blocking system in place. 01:06:35.080 --> 01:06:37.980 Then we just add the next, the next, the next thing. 01:06:37.980 --> 01:06:45.859 We’ve kind of been abused quite a lot to bring out filters and block lists. 01:06:45.859 --> 01:06:50.430 In Denmark, for instance, Pirate Bay was one of the first websites that also got blocked 01:06:50.430 --> 01:06:51.500 because of piracy. 01:06:51.500 --> 01:06:56.690 When they had the – they forced the internet providers to block Pirate Bay and DNS. 01:06:56.690 --> 01:06:59.490 So all of a sudden they had the DNS blocking system in place. 01:06:59.490 --> 01:07:04.829 JACK: Whoa, hold on a second; the whole country of Denmark blocked The Pirate Bay using a 01:07:04.829 --> 01:07:05.829 DNS block list? 01:07:05.829 --> 01:07:08.270 Hold on, let me look this up. 01:07:08.270 --> 01:07:13.930 Okay, yeah, it looks like there was a district court in Denmark which said the largest ISP 01:07:13.930 --> 01:07:18.780 in Denmark was assisting its customers in conducting copyright infringement and was 01:07:18.780 --> 01:07:21.010 ordered to block access to the site. 01:07:21.010 --> 01:07:26.801 So, the largest ISP in Denmark put in place a DNS block so users couldn’t get to The 01:07:26.801 --> 01:07:27.930 Pirate Bay. 01:07:27.930 --> 01:07:31.279 Now, this is really fascinating to me. 01:07:31.279 --> 01:07:35.690 So first, a DNS is how URLs get resolved to IP addresses. 01:07:35.690 --> 01:07:39.849 So like, when you type in google.com into your browser, your computer and all the routers 01:07:39.849 --> 01:07:44.119 in the world have no idea where you’re trying to access so before it can do anything, it 01:07:44.119 --> 01:07:49.030 first asks a DNS server hey, what’s the IP address for google.com? 01:07:49.030 --> 01:07:53.869 Then the DNS server responds with that IP and from there, now your computer and all 01:07:53.869 --> 01:07:57.119 the routers know how to route that traffic properly. 01:07:57.119 --> 01:08:01.720 But in this case, the DNS server was saying no, I have no idea what the IP address is 01:08:01.720 --> 01:08:05.990 for The Pirate Bay, which meant users couldn’t get to the site. 01:08:05.990 --> 01:08:12.440 So, what’s fascinating to me here is I don’t think ISPs should be blocking content that 01:08:12.440 --> 01:08:14.930 you’re specifically asking for. 01:08:14.930 --> 01:08:18.199 You give money to an ISP so that they can give you internet access. 01:08:18.199 --> 01:08:19.279 That’s their job. 01:08:19.279 --> 01:08:23.900 That’s what you’re buying, a connection to the internet, but now this ISP is saying 01:08:23.900 --> 01:08:29.020 well, actually, there are certain websites that you can’t go to if you use us. 01:08:29.020 --> 01:08:32.230 To me, that’s a gross overreach of control. 01:08:32.230 --> 01:08:36.580 The internet should be open and once you get on it, you should be freely allowed to go 01:08:36.580 --> 01:08:37.790 wherever you want. 01:08:37.790 --> 01:08:44.120 But here is a Danish ISP controlling where you can or can’t go, and to top it all off, 01:08:44.120 --> 01:08:46.230 this was a government order. 01:08:46.230 --> 01:08:50.620 When a government mandates that you’re not allowed to visit a certain website, that’s 01:08:50.620 --> 01:08:55.210 the opposite of freedom because this can easily be abused. 01:08:55.210 --> 01:09:00.109 Look at North Korea or China and how they block users from going to so many foreign 01:09:00.109 --> 01:09:01.109 websites. 01:09:01.109 --> 01:09:04.920 Those governments want to control the news and facts and only let you go to websites 01:09:04.920 --> 01:09:06.779 that they can control these things. 01:09:06.779 --> 01:09:11.880 So, once a block list is put in place, it’s pretty easy for the government to then say 01:09:11.880 --> 01:09:17.430 oh yeah, let’s also block this and block that, too. 01:09:17.430 --> 01:09:21.920 Before you know it, your government is controlling way too much of what you’re allowed to see 01:09:21.920 --> 01:09:23.609 and not see. 01:09:23.609 --> 01:09:28.480 Before I get off this tangent here, there are twenty-nine countries in the world who 01:09:28.480 --> 01:09:30.859 have blocked The Pirate Bay. 01:09:30.859 --> 01:09:32.980 Lots of countries in Europe block access. 01:09:32.980 --> 01:09:39.060 Australia, China, Russia, even Iran, and most of them have blocked it at an ISP level, completely 01:09:39.060 --> 01:09:44.109 blocking users from going to certain IPs, so even if you had a DNS server that resolved 01:09:44.109 --> 01:09:50.000 the IP, the ISPs in these countries will still not route traffic to The Pirate Bay in any 01:09:50.000 --> 01:09:51.000 way. 01:09:51.000 --> 01:09:55.880 We should all agree it’s wrong when governments take away our internet whether it’s hitting 01:09:55.880 --> 01:10:01.170 a full kill switch, taking out the [01:10:00] entire internet, or just blocking one site. 01:10:01.170 --> 01:10:05.580 Anyway, in May of 2009, The Pirate Bay suffered another takedown. 01:10:05.580 --> 01:10:10.180 In order for them to be up, they need a hosting provider and an ISP, or internet connection. 01:10:10.180 --> 01:10:15.219 Well, the media industry found out what ISPs that The Pirate Bay was using and slapped 01:10:15.219 --> 01:10:19.770 them with some pretty serious lawsuits, saying if they continued to provide internet connectivity 01:10:19.770 --> 01:10:23.820 to The Pirate Bay, there will be a bunch of legal trouble coming their way. 01:10:23.820 --> 01:10:28.460 So, three of the ISPs that The Pirate Bay were using all disconnected The Pirate Bay 01:10:28.460 --> 01:10:32.130 from the internet, resulting in the site going down. 01:10:32.130 --> 01:10:34.450 PETER: [MUSIC] Yeah, that happened quite a lot. 01:10:34.450 --> 01:10:40.500 Again, it’s like the people making advertising on Pirate Bay; they got called by these record 01:10:40.500 --> 01:10:44.750 companies and so on, said we’re gonna sue you for aiding with copyright infringement 01:10:44.750 --> 01:10:48.960 if you don’t stop paying them for advertising or taking the advertising down. 01:10:48.960 --> 01:10:52.330 They called the internet provider saying if you don’t take them down we’re gonna sue 01:10:52.330 --> 01:10:54.960 you for copyright infringement, all of these things. 01:10:54.960 --> 01:10:59.770 A lot of these companies were of course kind of afraid of that, so that’s why it became 01:10:59.770 --> 01:11:03.460 really important to run your own internet provider and that’s – and all of the projects 01:11:03.460 --> 01:11:09.690 I do today as well, we also run the internet providers because it’s critical infrastructure 01:11:09.690 --> 01:11:10.690 to have. 01:11:10.690 --> 01:11:12.020 That’s the lesson from that. 01:11:12.020 --> 01:11:13.100 JACK: Oh, right. 01:11:13.100 --> 01:11:18.150 Sure, that’s the obvious solution; if every ISP in Sweden has mandated to not do business 01:11:18.150 --> 01:11:23.060 with you and ISPs in other countries keep pulling the plug, then yeah, it makes sense. 01:11:23.060 --> 01:11:25.040 Why not make your own ISP? 01:11:25.040 --> 01:11:28.480 This way you can’t get the plug pulled out from the internet anymore. 01:11:28.480 --> 01:11:32.840 They weren’t making their own ISP in Sweden; they would make them in multiple countries 01:11:32.840 --> 01:11:33.840 all over the world. 01:11:33.840 --> 01:11:39.710 PETER: Every time Pirate Bay was – got a new internet connection somewhere, there was 01:11:39.710 --> 01:11:43.810 also three or four backups waiting that we staged before. 01:11:43.810 --> 01:11:48.980 The idea was they will work for one or two or three days at least, then we take one or 01:11:48.980 --> 01:11:53.330 two or three days to get another one, so it was always one more than one backup all the 01:11:53.330 --> 01:11:54.330 time. 01:11:54.330 --> 01:12:00.400 [MUSIC] It was just – it was very easy to move around because of the way it was set 01:12:00.400 --> 01:12:02.900 up, technically. 01:12:02.900 --> 01:12:06.930 Every time there was a consequence somewhere, so you go to a new country, they will have 01:12:06.930 --> 01:12:10.440 to have some law in place, they will have to have the police, to have understanding, 01:12:10.440 --> 01:12:12.460 and they have to raise the question. 01:12:12.460 --> 01:12:17.800 For us, it was also important that it becomes a political topic in those countries so we 01:12:17.800 --> 01:12:21.770 moved to Italy, we moved to Ukraine, we moved to Russia, we moved to all of these countries. 01:12:21.770 --> 01:12:25.690 JACK: They were getting good at finding ways to host this site all over the world, and 01:12:25.690 --> 01:12:29.790 when one place would take them down, they’d be back up pretty quick with a new site. 01:12:29.790 --> 01:12:32.360 At one point they were hosting the site in Mexico. 01:12:32.360 --> 01:12:37.000 PETER: The Mexican mob wanted to – they wanted us to pay money; otherwise they would 01:12:37.000 --> 01:12:39.170 cut out the power. 01:12:39.170 --> 01:12:42.500 So we got power cuts a few times because we didn’t pay the Mexicans. 01:12:42.500 --> 01:12:45.110 Yeah, so we’ve been – even power cuts. 01:12:45.110 --> 01:12:49.500 JACK: One place they really wanted to get their site hosted at was in North Korea. 01:12:49.500 --> 01:12:53.270 PETER: Sweden has a weird relationship with North Korea. 01:12:53.270 --> 01:12:56.631 They went to Sweden which was kind of socialist and they started doing this thing that they 01:12:56.631 --> 01:13:01.690 – they basically tricked Sweden into thinking that they are actually super rich and they 01:13:01.690 --> 01:13:07.130 got a credit from Sweden and bought a lot of Volvo trucks and everything from Sweden; 01:13:07.130 --> 01:13:08.130 tractors and so on. 01:13:08.130 --> 01:13:14.550 So, Sweden got scammed by North Korea big time, like huge. 01:13:14.550 --> 01:13:17.790 Ever since then, North Korea actually has an embassy in Stockholm. 01:13:17.790 --> 01:13:22.600 It’s the only embassy North Korea has in Europe, is in Stockholm, and Sweden is one 01:13:22.600 --> 01:13:25.820 of very few countries that actually has an embassy in North Korea. 01:13:25.820 --> 01:13:32.060 So, one time we actually – on the first of April Fool’s, we actually said that we 01:13:32.060 --> 01:13:35.460 were going to host Pirate Bay in North Korea as a joke. 01:13:35.460 --> 01:13:36.920 It was just kinda funny. 01:13:36.920 --> 01:13:40.320 I knew that if you called the North Korean embassy, they will always say no comment to 01:13:40.320 --> 01:13:43.720 whatever you ask them, which for most journalists means that there’s something to this. 01:13:43.720 --> 01:13:47.690 JACK: So, they did their April Fool’s joke saying they’re moving their servers to North 01:13:47.690 --> 01:13:49.740 Korea, but it was all just talk. 01:13:49.740 --> 01:13:51.430 Nothing actually happened. 01:13:51.430 --> 01:13:56.220 But then, a few years later, it actually did happen, kind of. 01:13:56.220 --> 01:14:01.210 It’s a technical and geeky prank that they did, but I’ll try to explain it. 01:14:01.210 --> 01:14:04.050 To start, the people in North Korea just don’t have internet connectivity. 01:14:04.050 --> 01:14:05.830 That’s just not a thing. 01:14:05.830 --> 01:14:09.230 The government has an information monopoly over people there and they’re just not allowed 01:14:09.230 --> 01:14:14.340 to go online to see opposing views, but North Korea is connected to the internet. 01:14:14.340 --> 01:14:18.540 It’s probably reserved for official business only, so in order to route traffic to and 01:14:18.540 --> 01:14:23.760 from North Korea, the backbone of the internet, which is the BGP routing protocol, has a map 01:14:23.760 --> 01:14:26.090 of where North Korean traffic should go. 01:14:26.090 --> 01:14:30.739 Well, someone, and I don’t know if it was one of these Pirate Bay guys or a friend of 01:14:30.739 --> 01:14:36.400 The Pirate Bay, they found an insecure internet backbone router which allowed them to get 01:14:36.400 --> 01:14:39.920 into it and make configuration changes. 01:14:39.920 --> 01:14:44.750 As they looked at this router, they saw that this router was broadcasting the BGP routes 01:14:44.750 --> 01:14:49.900 for North Korea, so The Pirate Bay guys were able to reconfigure this router and point 01:14:49.900 --> 01:14:55.929 the traffic to their router and their servers which meant if you trace the packets, it looked 01:14:55.929 --> 01:15:01.780 like The Pirate Bay was being [01:15:00] hosted in North Korea which is such a hilarious joke. 01:15:01.780 --> 01:15:05.380 PETER: Since no one figured out for over a week, we just sent out a press release saying 01:15:05.380 --> 01:15:10.850 it’s obvious that we have the same mutual enemy in the United States and North Korea 01:15:10.850 --> 01:15:16.719 loves us because we’re for messing with the US economy and common enemies and so on. 01:15:16.719 --> 01:15:22.840 Then we just had pictures taken from the North Korean embassy in Stockholm and all of these 01:15:22.840 --> 01:15:27.190 things, and we were kind of – it was extremely funny. 01:15:27.190 --> 01:15:31.310 JACK: Well, at the same time, North Korea’s internet was down, right? 01:15:31.310 --> 01:15:32.310 PETER: Oh, yeah. 01:15:32.310 --> 01:15:33.410 It’s so sad. 01:15:33.410 --> 01:15:37.469 None of the North Korean citizens can use the internet for like, a week. 01:15:37.469 --> 01:15:41.110 It was the worst thing ever that we’ve done, I think. 01:15:41.110 --> 01:15:45.600 Our all three people that have access to internet, they were out – without working internet 01:15:45.600 --> 01:15:47.310 for those – that week. 01:15:47.310 --> 01:15:50.330 I feel it was – it’s an okay trade-off. 01:15:50.330 --> 01:15:55.889 Seriously, it was an okay – the trolling was very – it was one of the best trollings 01:15:55.889 --> 01:16:01.110 ever done on a technical level, on a network scale, I think. 01:16:01.110 --> 01:16:05.350 I really enjoyed the whole thing, especially when people like – the most clever people 01:16:05.350 --> 01:16:08.650 really have a hard time understanding how this went down. 01:16:08.650 --> 01:16:13.430 I think it was almost a week before they figured out in the end. 01:16:13.430 --> 01:16:15.810 Then we got kicked out of that network. 01:16:15.810 --> 01:16:17.310 The router was – got patched. 01:16:17.310 --> 01:16:21.940 They put up filters and realized fuck, we’re – that was not good. 01:16:21.940 --> 01:16:25.110 JACK: Another thing they tried to do was buy their own country. 01:16:25.110 --> 01:16:31.290 PETER: So, I’m a little bit obsessed with nations and micronations and how a country 01:16:31.290 --> 01:16:37.280 is formed and why a border is totally straight in some countries and how all of these very 01:16:37.280 --> 01:16:39.230 arbitrary decisions are made. 01:16:39.230 --> 01:16:44.850 There’s this weird old platform outside of England which is called Sealand or – a 01:16:44.850 --> 01:16:49.820 few people took it ages ago and said that this is the nation Sealand. 01:16:49.820 --> 01:16:55.980 JACK: Okay, so the nation of Sealand has a population of two and that’s on a busy day. 01:16:55.980 --> 01:17:00.390 I don’t think it occupies any land at all; it’s on the sea in the middle of the English 01:17:00.390 --> 01:17:04.140 Channel, and it’s just two pillars and a platform connecting them. 01:17:04.140 --> 01:17:08.929 It’s an old military fort but sometime ago it was taken over by a pirate radio broadcaster 01:17:08.929 --> 01:17:11.480 who tried to turn it into his own country. 01:17:11.480 --> 01:17:16.710 PETER: The people of Sealand or running Sealand, this family, got kind of old and they wanted 01:17:16.710 --> 01:17:17.720 to sell the country. 01:17:17.720 --> 01:17:22.420 [MUSIC] We were thinking that sounds like a great thing for Pirate Bay to buy and then 01:17:22.420 --> 01:17:24.500 make our own laws. 01:17:24.500 --> 01:17:27.130 This would be – like, for the lols, a super funny thing. 01:17:27.130 --> 01:17:35.420 So, we just put up a web page called buysealand.com and we linked it on the front page of Pirate 01:17:35.420 --> 01:17:38.500 Bay and said let’s buy our own nation. 01:17:38.500 --> 01:17:41.850 I think this was done under the influence of a lot of alcohol. 01:17:41.850 --> 01:17:47.380 Maybe two or three days later, still drunk, I saw the prince of Sealand talking to Larry 01:17:47.380 --> 01:17:53.480 King on CNN with one of the heads of Disney about the problems it would be if Pirate Bay 01:17:53.480 --> 01:17:58.670 actually got to buy Sealand, because they were taking this seriously. 01:17:58.670 --> 01:18:03.770 I think we raised $50,000 in two, three days. 01:18:03.770 --> 01:18:07.480 Then they said oh, we want six billion dollars or something like that. 01:18:07.480 --> 01:18:13.830 So, we always said we’re gonna do something good with the money if we can’t buy Sealand. 01:18:13.830 --> 01:18:18.050 That was also the first time we had money and all of a sudden we started fighting internally 01:18:18.050 --> 01:18:22.670 about that, so I ended up buying a lot of rainforest in Brazil to get rid of the money. 01:18:22.670 --> 01:18:25.240 Then Fredrik and Gottfrid hated me for that afterwards. 01:18:25.240 --> 01:18:29.300 I probably got scammed, but hopefully not. 01:18:29.300 --> 01:18:35.020 JACK: In July 2010, a hacker from Argentina hacked into The Pirate Bay and exposed a bunch 01:18:35.020 --> 01:18:36.350 of user details. 01:18:36.350 --> 01:18:40.920 It looks like he got into the admin panel which gave him full control of the website. 01:18:40.920 --> 01:18:44.800 The Pirate Bay guys took the site down to do some upgrades and saw that this data leak 01:18:44.800 --> 01:18:49.330 was going on, so they decided to rewrite some of the back end code and resolve this problem. 01:18:49.330 --> 01:18:50.380 Then they came back up. 01:18:50.380 --> 01:18:53.450 PETER: This is around the time I stopped working with Pirate Bay, I think. 01:18:53.450 --> 01:19:00.050 I can’t remember exactly when I left but I think it’s like 2010, 11, 09, something 01:19:00.050 --> 01:19:01.050 like that. 01:19:01.050 --> 01:19:04.520 It was quite a long while ago. 01:19:04.520 --> 01:19:06.199 But yeah, there’s… 01:19:06.199 --> 01:19:09.750 JACK: Okay, so why’d you leave? 01:19:09.750 --> 01:19:12.500 PETER: I worked – I had a full-time job. 01:19:12.500 --> 01:19:15.420 I worked eight times – eight hours per day at least. 01:19:15.420 --> 01:19:18.889 Maybe ten hours per day on my normal job. 01:19:18.889 --> 01:19:25.880 Then The Pirate Bay took eight hours per day; people calling, a lot of journalists called 01:19:25.880 --> 01:19:26.880 every single day. 01:19:26.880 --> 01:19:29.540 It was like, hours and hours and hours I was talking to journalists. 01:19:29.540 --> 01:19:35.210 I found it really important to talk to these people because they liked the story of David 01:19:35.210 --> 01:19:40.750 versus Goliath which meant that we could always talk about the important things for me which 01:19:40.750 --> 01:19:46.500 was the unfair internet where we don’t have equal access, we have walled gardens, we have 01:19:46.500 --> 01:19:50.460 paywalls, people that can afford things and people that can’t. 01:19:50.460 --> 01:19:54.330 I wanted to actually do something about it. 01:19:54.330 --> 01:19:57.671 I wanted to find something else to do than just working on the same thing [01:20:00] 01:19:57.671 --> 01:20:04.840 because maybe this is also something very Scandinavian, but we have this tradition of 01:20:04.840 --> 01:20:09.090 kicking out the old and bringing in something new. 01:20:09.090 --> 01:20:12.940 When we started Pirate Bay and we realized this is gonna – it started taking off or 01:20:12.940 --> 01:20:17.719 whatever you want to call it, we had an agreement that we will close down Pirate Bay on our 01:20:17.719 --> 01:20:25.090 tenth anniversary because if we decide in the beginning that we’re not gonna let anyone 01:20:25.090 --> 01:20:28.910 shut us down, but when we’re ten years old, we’re gonna just close the site. 01:20:28.910 --> 01:20:29.910 We win. 01:20:29.910 --> 01:20:31.940 That would have been epic. 01:20:31.940 --> 01:20:33.610 I really wanted to do that. 01:20:33.610 --> 01:20:36.020 Ended up Pirate Bay didn’t do that. 01:20:36.020 --> 01:20:39.170 I’m still kind of upset about it. 01:20:39.170 --> 01:20:45.540 But for me, it’s really been really important to find another angle of attacking important 01:20:45.540 --> 01:20:55.280 questions, like reevaluate new tools, new views of the same problems in society. 01:20:55.280 --> 01:21:01.770 I left Pirate Bay because it was kind of the same thing going on and on and on again; same 01:21:01.770 --> 01:21:06.280 questions, same kind of opponents, and I wanted to mix it up. 01:21:06.280 --> 01:21:12.219 So, I created a payment system for how to create – or get paid for doing things on 01:21:12.219 --> 01:21:17.260 the internet which is called Flattr that I rather wanted to focus on instead of Pirate 01:21:17.260 --> 01:21:20.739 Bay, so I left to work on that instead. 01:21:20.739 --> 01:21:29.220 Also, I really hated working with Gottfrid and Fredrik ‘cause I think they were assholes. 01:21:29.220 --> 01:21:31.730 Total objectively, they are assholes. 01:21:31.730 --> 01:21:34.550 Also subjectively, they are assholes. 01:21:34.550 --> 01:21:37.770 They probably agree but it’s – I’m the asshole. 01:21:37.770 --> 01:21:40.210 We don’t like each other that much, any of us. 01:21:40.210 --> 01:21:45.110 It gets kind of tired working with people for too long when you don’t like each other, 01:21:45.110 --> 01:21:49.180 even though that’s been kind of important that we can focus on the things we did agree 01:21:49.180 --> 01:21:51.239 on. 01:21:51.239 --> 01:21:54.730 I think that was very effective but it’s also really annoying being associated with 01:21:54.730 --> 01:21:57.530 people you don’t like. 01:21:57.530 --> 01:22:03.590 JACK: [MUSIC] The trial for their appeal came around and the courts decided they were guilty 01:22:03.590 --> 01:22:08.920 again, this time shortening their prison sentence by a few months but increasing their fines. 01:22:08.920 --> 01:22:10.580 PETER: It’s not a fine. 01:22:10.580 --> 01:22:11.920 We never got fines. 01:22:11.920 --> 01:22:13.580 That’s an American thing, yeah. 01:22:13.580 --> 01:22:17.770 JACK: I don’t want to say restitution; it’s a penalty of some kind. 01:22:17.770 --> 01:22:19.120 I don’t know what it’s called. 01:22:19.120 --> 01:22:23.380 PETER: They forced us having a license agreement but the interesting thing is that’s a clever 01:22:23.380 --> 01:22:29.179 move of the opponents because if we got fines, they would be – money we would have to pay 01:22:29.179 --> 01:22:30.840 to the state. 01:22:30.840 --> 01:22:37.920 In Sweden, that would expire after ten years, so then we would not have debts in – forever, 01:22:37.920 --> 01:22:46.030 but if it’s personal debt based on a deal with the record companies, it will be forever. 01:22:46.030 --> 01:22:50.360 That was their – it’s a life sentence. 01:22:50.360 --> 01:22:54.860 Fines would have been better. 01:22:54.860 --> 01:23:00.420 JACK: [MUSIC] Peter appealed again which means he didn’t immediately have to go to prison 01:23:00.420 --> 01:23:03.270 and was free to go home and even travel. 01:23:03.270 --> 01:23:05.130 This would be his last appeal, though. 01:23:05.130 --> 01:23:09.909 After this, whatever the courts decided, he’d have to comply or as he puts it, the state 01:23:09.909 --> 01:23:12.940 would have to come get him and force him to comply. 01:23:12.940 --> 01:23:17.560 In the meantime, The Pirate Bay continued to stay up, becoming more and more resilient 01:23:17.560 --> 01:23:18.890 over time. 01:23:18.890 --> 01:23:23.860 Another thing that happened at some point was that they got their BGP route sink-holed. 01:23:23.860 --> 01:23:27.110 This is a routing protocol used across the internet. 01:23:27.110 --> 01:23:31.989 Millions of routers around the world all speak this same protocol to know how to transmit 01:23:31.989 --> 01:23:33.690 packets everywhere. 01:23:33.690 --> 01:23:40.610 Somehow, in a coordinated move, major backbone providers stopped forwarding traffic destined 01:23:40.610 --> 01:23:42.030 to The Pirate Bay. 01:23:42.030 --> 01:23:47.040 Again, this is another astonishing, incredible thing to do. 01:23:47.040 --> 01:23:50.850 The job of a router is to get packets where they need to go. 01:23:50.850 --> 01:23:53.920 Its job is not to block or filter traffic. 01:23:53.920 --> 01:23:58.310 A firewall’s job is to block traffic, but not only that; they were blocking The Pirate 01:23:58.310 --> 01:24:00.150 Bay’s BGP routes. 01:24:00.150 --> 01:24:02.440 BGP is like a map of the internet. 01:24:02.440 --> 01:24:08.139 It’s a protocol, a standard, and it shouldn’t have blocks at that level. 01:24:08.139 --> 01:24:12.770 It would be like if your GPS suddenly stopped showing you certain locations because the 01:24:12.770 --> 01:24:15.610 GPS provider didn’t want you going there. 01:24:15.610 --> 01:24:20.640 It’s just crazy to think that a GPS provider would ever restrict people from seeing certain 01:24:20.640 --> 01:24:22.920 parts of the map, right? 01:24:22.920 --> 01:24:27.500 It’s just wrong to do that and that’s similar to what it’s like when these BGP 01:24:27.500 --> 01:24:30.679 routes get blocked, which is almost completely unheard of. 01:24:30.679 --> 01:24:34.330 I bet all my network engineers who are listening right now have never heard of an internet 01:24:34.330 --> 01:24:39.050 backbone provider having a naughty list that sinkholes certain BGP routes. 01:24:39.050 --> 01:24:43.639 Again, it’s going way too far for an ISP to do that. 01:24:43.639 --> 01:24:47.880 But if we back up for a second and look at this, they’ve been taken down at all points 01:24:47.880 --> 01:24:48.910 of the network. 01:24:48.910 --> 01:24:53.140 The endpoint is where their servers are that are hosted, and this has been raided and seized, 01:24:53.140 --> 01:24:56.140 and ISPs have disconnected them many times. 01:24:56.140 --> 01:25:00.320 The midpoint is the BGP [01:25:00] routing table which is sink-holing them, and the other 01:25:00.320 --> 01:25:05.199 endpoint is that users are getting blocked by their ISPs and DNS servers. 01:25:05.199 --> 01:25:09.350 Users who got blocked could still access the site using Tor or VPN to get around these 01:25:09.350 --> 01:25:12.891 roadblocks because the site was still up and operational. 01:25:12.891 --> 01:25:16.750 It’s kind of funny that when these roadblocks would force people to use a VPN, it just made 01:25:16.750 --> 01:25:19.380 it harder for media giants to find them. 01:25:19.380 --> 01:25:26.150 [MUSIC] In 2012, the final appeal was set to take place but the supreme court of Sweden 01:25:26.150 --> 01:25:31.810 refused to hear the appeal which meant the previous sentence and verdict was upheld. 01:25:31.810 --> 01:25:37.050 This meant it was time for Peter, Fredrik, and Gottfrid to all serve their prison time. 01:25:37.050 --> 01:25:41.960 I think by then, Fredrik and Gottfrid had moved to some southeast Asian countries, making 01:25:41.960 --> 01:25:43.940 it harder for the police to find them. 01:25:43.940 --> 01:25:48.080 But what’s interesting is immediately after the appeal concluded, The Pirate Bay switched 01:25:48.080 --> 01:25:49.080 domains. 01:25:49.080 --> 01:25:56.080 See, this whole time it was hosted at thepiratebay.org but the .org top-level domain is run by an 01:25:56.080 --> 01:26:00.940 American company so in theory, now that the last appeal went through, the US authorities 01:26:00.940 --> 01:26:08.080 could issue a seizure of the .org domain, so they switched it to thepiratebay.se, and 01:26:08.080 --> 01:26:10.820 .se is a Swedish top-level domain. 01:26:10.820 --> 01:26:15.340 Anyway, as you can imagine, even though Peter was sentenced to almost a year in prison, 01:26:15.340 --> 01:26:16.940 he didn’t voluntarily go. 01:26:16.940 --> 01:26:23.090 PETER: No, I decided to run for office, as any criminal would do. 01:26:23.090 --> 01:26:30.880 I’m a Finnish citizen and we’re like the kids – kid brother to Sweden. 01:26:30.880 --> 01:26:34.690 A lot of people in Finland are upset that they still have to learn Swedish in school. 01:26:34.690 --> 01:26:40.310 There’s a quite big movement from the nationalist movement of Finland that they hate immigrants 01:26:40.310 --> 01:26:41.950 and they hate Swedish people. 01:26:41.950 --> 01:26:43.840 It very often intertwines. 01:26:43.840 --> 01:26:50.449 So, I ran in Finland, saying like if you hate Sweden, you should vote for me because I – if 01:26:50.449 --> 01:26:56.420 I get into the European Union parliament, I get diplomatic immunity which means I don’t 01:26:56.420 --> 01:26:59.420 have to go to prison which means that Sweden would be really upset. 01:26:59.420 --> 01:27:01.950 JACK: Well, did you really feel that way? 01:27:01.950 --> 01:27:04.530 Did you feel animosity towards Swedish people? 01:27:04.530 --> 01:27:10.410 PETER: No, but for me as a left-wing person, a socialist, I think it was super funny to 01:27:10.410 --> 01:27:16.690 take the racist votes because they had to decide are you gonna vote for just a racist 01:27:16.690 --> 01:27:21.469 or for one who really – it would really be annoying to Sweden which you probably hate 01:27:21.469 --> 01:27:24.160 a little bit more than just normal immigrants. 01:27:24.160 --> 01:27:29.050 That’s kind of like the Finnish situation, a little bit. 01:27:29.050 --> 01:27:38.010 So, I kind of stole votes from people I don’t like and made a joke out of it because it 01:27:38.010 --> 01:27:39.869 was an absurd situation that I should go to prison. 01:27:39.869 --> 01:27:43.650 It was absurd that I got listed on the Interpol list. 01:27:43.650 --> 01:27:47.080 So, I just made a joke out of it. 01:27:47.080 --> 01:27:54.050 Kind of funny that if you – if I actually got into European Union parliament, I would 01:27:54.050 --> 01:27:57.530 have gotten diplomatic immunity and they couldn’t have arrested me. 01:27:57.530 --> 01:28:03.050 The case would be so old after I would have been in office that it would have been expired. 01:28:03.050 --> 01:28:06.250 So, it was kind of a hack. 01:28:06.250 --> 01:28:10.100 You talk a lot about hacks but it’s a different level of hack. 01:28:10.100 --> 01:28:14.780 It’s a political kind of social engineering stunt. 01:28:14.780 --> 01:28:18.790 I just found it too funny not to actually attempt it. 01:28:18.790 --> 01:28:20.940 So, that was kind of the thing. 01:28:20.940 --> 01:28:24.380 It didn’t work out; I didn’t get enough votes but it wasn’t too far away, actually, 01:28:24.380 --> 01:28:25.380 from getting enough votes. 01:28:25.380 --> 01:28:28.840 Then, of course, I went to prison after that. 01:28:28.840 --> 01:28:33.199 [MUSIC] They arrested me like, two days after the election. 01:28:33.199 --> 01:28:40.390 JACK: It sounds like all three of you were in prison around the same time, but The Pirate 01:28:40.390 --> 01:28:42.320 Bay was up at the same time. 01:28:42.320 --> 01:28:44.120 PETER: Yeah, yeah. 01:28:44.120 --> 01:28:45.120 Imagine. 01:28:45.120 --> 01:28:47.710 JACK: How did that happen? 01:28:47.710 --> 01:28:50.700 PETER: Have you seen 2001? 01:28:50.700 --> 01:28:51.700 JACK: A Space Odyssey? 01:28:51.700 --> 01:28:53.700 Yeah. PETER: Yeah. 01:28:53.700 --> 01:28:54.700 Do you remember Hal 9000? 01:28:54.700 --> 01:28:55.700 JACK: Yes. 01:28:55.700 --> 01:28:59.880 PETER: He’s the guy running Pirate Bay. 01:28:59.880 --> 01:29:07.840 It’s some sort of autonomous machine, you know? 01:29:07.840 --> 01:29:09.780 That happens. 01:29:09.780 --> 01:29:14.650 I’ve been sued later on. 01:29:14.650 --> 01:29:18.670 The most ironic lawsuit is actually going on in Finland where they said that I must 01:29:18.670 --> 01:29:23.030 be responsible for Pirate Bay still to this day because when I left, I didn’t shut off 01:29:23.030 --> 01:29:27.290 the machines and they could potentially still be running and they would be the machines 01:29:27.290 --> 01:29:32.090 still responsible for copyright infringement. 01:29:32.090 --> 01:29:38.050 But basically I think that it would be impossible to shut down The Pirate Bay. 01:29:38.050 --> 01:29:41.440 It’s like, has its own life. 01:29:41.440 --> 01:29:43.699 It’s kind of mythical. 01:29:43.699 --> 01:29:46.530 Yeah. It’s way beyond us. 01:29:46.530 --> 01:29:51.170 I don’t believe in any religion but I think that The Pirate Bay is some sort of supernatural 01:29:51.170 --> 01:29:54.480 being now. 01:29:54.480 --> 01:30:00.409 Then I ended up in high-security prison with like, [01:30:00] serial killers and biker 01:30:00.409 --> 01:30:04.360 gang leaders and so on which was an interesting period. 01:30:04.360 --> 01:30:09.150 JACK: Yeah, that’s one way to describe it. 01:30:09.150 --> 01:30:12.900 PETER: But it is fucking interesting, man. 01:30:12.900 --> 01:30:16.870 When would you ever hang out with people like that, that you actually know are criminal? 01:30:16.870 --> 01:30:21.150 A lot of – you probably hang out with criminals that you don’t know are criminals, but these 01:30:21.150 --> 01:30:23.750 are obviously criminals. 01:30:23.750 --> 01:30:30.440 They’ve ended up there for obvious reasons and you probably have heard about a few of 01:30:30.440 --> 01:30:34.360 them if you live in the same country. 01:30:34.360 --> 01:30:36.340 You know, you’re not enemies. 01:30:36.340 --> 01:30:37.369 They’re not your enemy. 01:30:37.369 --> 01:30:39.260 The only enemies – you have the same enemy. 01:30:39.260 --> 01:30:44.060 It’s like, the prison wardens are, the guards, and then the system is kind of your enemy. 01:30:44.060 --> 01:30:47.960 It’s like a boys club, more or less. 01:30:47.960 --> 01:30:49.570 You’re not afraid of them. 01:30:49.570 --> 01:30:51.200 You’re more interested. 01:30:51.200 --> 01:30:55.200 If you’re not gonna mess with them, they’re not gonna mess with you and there’s no point 01:30:55.200 --> 01:30:56.200 in doing that. 01:30:56.200 --> 01:31:01.120 Everyone just wants to go out and get time passed and get along. 01:31:01.120 --> 01:31:05.900 So, I’ve learned a lot, quite a lot, actually, especially how to not smuggle drugs. 01:31:05.900 --> 01:31:07.530 That’s been the biggest lesson. 01:31:07.530 --> 01:31:11.360 Like, I know how to not to do things. 01:31:11.360 --> 01:31:15.600 JACK: [MUSIC] Once they got out of prison, the takedown attempts didn’t stop. 01:31:15.600 --> 01:31:21.710 The Swedish court ruled to seize the domain since it was using the .se top-level domain. 01:31:21.710 --> 01:31:25.810 Sweden was able to take control of that but quickly after that, The Pirate Bay just came 01:31:25.810 --> 01:31:28.080 up with six other top-level domains. 01:31:28.080 --> 01:31:34.540 There were piratebay.gs, .la, .vg, .am, .mn, and .gd. 01:31:34.540 --> 01:31:38.560 This move was coined by some as Hydra Bay because when you cut off the head of The Pirate 01:31:38.560 --> 01:31:43.500 Bay, six more just grow right back. 01:31:43.500 --> 01:31:48.600 Peter got out of prison in 2014, served his punishment, and was no longer with The Pirate 01:31:48.600 --> 01:31:50.630 Bay, so he was just free to do whatever. 01:31:50.630 --> 01:31:54.400 But he still had to pay back those penalties that the courts put on him. 01:31:54.400 --> 01:32:00.610 PETER: Yeah, so it started with forty-something million Swedish and now I think it’s a little 01:32:00.610 --> 01:32:02.340 bit over 120 with interest. 01:32:02.340 --> 01:32:09.449 So, now the goal is to be the guy with the most amount of debt in Sweden ever, in history. 01:32:09.449 --> 01:32:18.420 North Korea has a debt to Sweden of two billion Swedish but I calculated in 2052, I think, 01:32:18.420 --> 01:32:21.680 my debt will be bigger than North Korea’s debt to Sweden. 01:32:21.680 --> 01:32:26.400 I’m thinking it’s easier to get the money from North Korea than from me. 01:32:26.400 --> 01:32:31.170 JACK: So, what’s my take on copyright and piracy? 01:32:31.170 --> 01:32:36.480 Well, it changes over time as new technologies come out and societal norms change. 01:32:36.480 --> 01:32:39.861 One of the things that the digital age has done is it’s taken the power away from the 01:32:39.861 --> 01:32:41.020 traditional gatekeepers. 01:32:41.020 --> 01:32:44.940 Like, in the past you used to have to get a record deal in order to get your music out 01:32:44.940 --> 01:32:48.040 there, but now you can just publish your music directly to Spotify or YouTube. 01:32:48.040 --> 01:32:49.130 You want to write a book? 01:32:49.130 --> 01:32:50.720 Well, you don’t need a publisher anymore. 01:32:50.720 --> 01:32:54.590 Amazon made it so you can publish any eBook you write for free and get it listed in the 01:32:54.590 --> 01:32:56.420 world’s biggest book store. 01:32:56.420 --> 01:33:00.710 Or you can create a movie and make it available to billions of people by just uploading it 01:33:00.710 --> 01:33:01.710 to YouTube. 01:33:01.710 --> 01:33:05.409 We’re now living in an era where artists are more empowered than ever. 01:33:05.409 --> 01:33:10.270 So yeah, I think the copyright system is antiquated and simply can’t work effectively on a global 01:33:10.270 --> 01:33:11.270 scale. 01:33:11.270 --> 01:33:15.510 The RIAA has failed to eliminate piracy and for the past two decades, they’ve spent 01:33:15.510 --> 01:33:20.889 millions of dollars annoying and enraging the artists’ fanbase. 01:33:20.889 --> 01:33:25.620 By suing them, we’ll never fix the problem by attacking fans, because it’s the fans 01:33:25.620 --> 01:33:29.210 that make the artists popular, and that’s what makes the artists money. 01:33:29.210 --> 01:33:33.790 If you eliminate piracy altogether, you also torpedo the ability for many artists to have 01:33:33.790 --> 01:33:38.670 breakout hits, because things just don’t spread very well when you require all listeners 01:33:38.670 --> 01:33:40.170 to be licensed properly. 01:33:40.170 --> 01:33:44.730 In fact, fans have spoken and they made it clear that they want convenience and are willing 01:33:44.730 --> 01:33:46.480 to pay a fair price for content. 01:33:46.480 --> 01:33:50.750 When it’s a lot easier to download a song versus going to the store and buying a CD, 01:33:50.750 --> 01:33:52.560 then people will download songs. 01:33:52.560 --> 01:33:57.000 Napster showed us how easy that can be, and then Apple’s iTunes turned downloading music 01:33:57.000 --> 01:34:00.880 into a very profitable business where you can download music for a price. 01:34:00.880 --> 01:34:04.320 Then Spotify made it even more convenient so that you don’t have to pay per song. 01:34:04.320 --> 01:34:07.810 Instead, you get unlimited access to all the music in their catalogue. 01:34:07.810 --> 01:34:12.120 While paying for Spotify is entirely optional, many people choose to do it. 01:34:12.120 --> 01:34:17.610 But I’m afraid we’re gonna see another uptick in pirated TV and movies soon. 01:34:17.610 --> 01:34:23.150 When cable companies were charging $70 a month for access to video content, Netflix came 01:34:23.150 --> 01:34:25.489 in, made it way cheaper and way more convenient. 01:34:25.489 --> 01:34:29.940 In fact, I think a lot of people who were pirating stopped because Netflix gave them 01:34:29.940 --> 01:34:33.630 the convenience they wanted at a fair price and Spotify was giving them the music they 01:34:33.630 --> 01:34:34.630 wanted. 01:34:34.630 --> 01:34:37.140 But now a lot more companies are jumping in with Netflix. 01:34:37.140 --> 01:34:42.389 You have Hulu, Amazon Prime, Disney +, HBO Max, CBS All Access, the NBC Peacock, and 01:34:42.389 --> 01:34:43.389 more. 01:34:43.389 --> 01:34:47.449 If you pay for all these, you’re looking at $80 a month which is how much cable TV 01:34:47.449 --> 01:34:52.150 cost when people started abandoning it, and it’s far more inconvenient to try to search 01:34:52.150 --> 01:34:55.210 in seven places for the show you want to watch. 01:34:55.210 --> 01:34:58.820 This is going to cause such a problem that people will [01:35:00] find it more convenient 01:34:58.820 --> 01:35:03.739 to just pirate shows because they could have all the shows they want in one app instead 01:35:03.739 --> 01:35:04.739 of seven. 01:35:04.739 --> 01:35:10.420 Oh, and Plex is that one app; all the movies you download can be played easily right there 01:35:10.420 --> 01:35:12.890 and you can also share the movies you downloaded with your friends. 01:35:12.890 --> 01:35:17.820 So, I really think that if the movie industry wants less piracy, they should respect the 01:35:17.820 --> 01:35:22.820 consumer more and deliver the content in a way that’s easy to use and isn’t too expensive. 01:35:22.820 --> 01:35:26.239 When they’re all competing like they are now and if that’s what’s causing the rise 01:35:26.239 --> 01:35:31.760 in piracy now, you have to wonder if they even care about piracy since they’re the 01:35:31.760 --> 01:35:36.119 reason why it’s going up and they’re also making a ton of money at the same time. 01:35:36.119 --> 01:35:40.100 But that’s just the big budget TV and movie studios. 01:35:40.100 --> 01:35:44.290 Those shows cost millions of dollars to make and have a crew of like, over a hundred people. 01:35:44.290 --> 01:35:49.690 Musicians and authors can create wonderful content with way fewer people on a much lower 01:35:49.690 --> 01:35:50.690 budget. 01:35:50.690 --> 01:35:55.220 I think with our current technological status, we should be focusing on how to inspire artists 01:35:55.220 --> 01:35:57.760 to create wonderful things for us to enjoy. 01:35:57.760 --> 01:36:01.500 How can we give them what they need so that they can enrich our lives more? 01:36:01.500 --> 01:36:06.380 My favorite music came out in my lifetime but look at any kid today and you’ve got 01:36:06.380 --> 01:36:09.930 to realize that their favorite music hasn’t even come out yet. 01:36:09.930 --> 01:36:15.250 We want new artists to make an impact on us and that should be our focus; movies, books, 01:36:15.250 --> 01:36:19.500 and music are considered intellectual property and intellectual property is the fabric of 01:36:19.500 --> 01:36:20.840 our culture. 01:36:20.840 --> 01:36:25.190 When a song is played by more people, the value of that artist just grows bigger, even 01:36:25.190 --> 01:36:26.980 if they give their content away free. 01:36:26.980 --> 01:36:30.500 The more a piece of intellectual property spreads, the better the creator does. 01:36:30.500 --> 01:36:31.500 Now they have a fanbase. 01:36:31.500 --> 01:36:32.920 Now they have influence. 01:36:32.920 --> 01:36:37.011 Now they have people’s attention, and that’s what this is all about; attention, because 01:36:37.011 --> 01:36:39.340 you can monetize attention. 01:36:39.340 --> 01:36:41.230 I don’t think what we have is a copyright problem. 01:36:41.230 --> 01:36:46.160 I think we have a marketing and middle man problem, because historically a label or production 01:36:46.160 --> 01:36:50.000 company would help market your stuff and distribute it and collect money for you. 01:36:50.000 --> 01:36:54.690 Major platforms like Amazon, YouTube, and Spotify help in some ways by being a place 01:36:54.690 --> 01:36:58.880 where you can get a lot of exposure and they’ll pay you for the content that gets consumed. 01:36:58.880 --> 01:37:03.420 Crowdfunding is very exciting to me like Kickstarter or Patreon or even Twitch because places like 01:37:03.420 --> 01:37:05.860 this allow fans to pay creators directly. 01:37:05.860 --> 01:37:09.430 It doesn’t matter if the creator is giving the content away free or not; when they make 01:37:09.430 --> 01:37:14.470 a significant impact on their fans, their fans will be there to help and fund them further. 01:37:14.470 --> 01:37:18.080 The thing is, when someone appreciates the impact you’ve made on their lives, they’ll 01:37:18.080 --> 01:37:20.199 want to pay for it if they can. 01:37:20.199 --> 01:37:23.750 Those who can’t can just be little marketers and help spread the word for the artists, 01:37:23.750 --> 01:37:25.449 making them even more popular. 01:37:25.449 --> 01:37:29.989 You simply can’t be a breakout artist if you make art exclusively for people who have 01:37:29.989 --> 01:37:32.650 enough disposable income to pay for it. 01:37:32.650 --> 01:37:36.370 You end up excluding way too many people in the world. 01:37:36.370 --> 01:37:39.599 People will always pay artists for things that they want but can’t make themselves 01:37:39.599 --> 01:37:43.790 and especially in this connected, digital society we live in. 01:37:43.790 --> 01:37:48.429 I think giving artists more tools to monetize their content is the best solution we have 01:37:48.429 --> 01:37:49.429 now. 01:37:49.429 --> 01:37:53.440 This way, even if the content is given away free or pirated, fans that love it can come 01:37:53.440 --> 01:37:54.790 and pay for it. 01:37:54.790 --> 01:37:58.920 The world is changing and it’s becoming more common now for fans to just give monthly 01:37:58.920 --> 01:38:03.380 donations to their favorite creators like on Patreon, or go chuck someone some money 01:38:03.380 --> 01:38:07.400 over on Kickstarter or buy merch from other creators they like. 01:38:07.400 --> 01:38:11.760 Artists who are onboard with this realize the more impact they make on their fans, the 01:38:11.760 --> 01:38:15.980 more their fans will pay, so they worry a lot less about piracy because they have that 01:38:15.980 --> 01:38:20.020 direct connection with their fans no matter how they consume the content. 01:38:20.020 --> 01:38:21.610 Are you still pirating these days? 01:38:21.610 --> 01:38:22.610 PETER: Of course. 01:38:22.610 --> 01:38:23.610 Aren’t you? 01:38:23.610 --> 01:38:24.720 JACK: I’m afraid to admit it, though. 01:38:24.720 --> 01:38:25.720 That’s the thing. 01:38:25.720 --> 01:38:29.770 How come you can be so open about it and not worried about being fined or something? 01:38:29.770 --> 01:38:35.290 PETER: Well, you think someone’s gonna – you can just claim to be a kopimist and ask them 01:38:35.290 --> 01:38:39.830 if they actually violated your religious rights when they found out that you were copying. 01:38:39.830 --> 01:38:43.070 You can also use the VPN, you know? 01:38:43.070 --> 01:38:47.360 But of course, there’s – pirating is the best way to find stuff. 01:38:47.360 --> 01:38:50.409 Yeah, that never changed. 01:38:50.409 --> 01:38:52.610 I still use Spotify and everything else. 01:38:52.610 --> 01:38:55.989 The irony of it all is people think that this is something which happened before, but Pirate 01:38:55.989 --> 01:38:58.230 Bay is bigger than ever in terms of numbers. 01:38:58.230 --> 01:39:02.190 It’s just that the rest of the internet grew faster than The Pirate Bay. 01:39:02.190 --> 01:39:03.770 It never went away. 01:39:03.770 --> 01:39:08.190 It’s like this – it’s Hal 9000 again. 01:39:08.190 --> 01:39:11.880 I think it’s been growing 2% per month forever. 01:39:11.880 --> 01:39:19.660 JACK: I think I just figured it out; so, Hal 9000 was in outer space and that could mean 01:39:19.660 --> 01:39:26.409 that you’ve got a satellite in space which hosts The Pirate Bay which – good luck going 01:39:26.409 --> 01:39:28.889 to outer space to stop that. 01:39:28.889 --> 01:39:32.060 It could just be going perpetually forever up there. 01:39:32.060 --> 01:39:36.260 PETER: Do you think Earth is not outer space? 01:39:36.260 --> 01:39:41.699 JACK: In order for a website to work, a lot of other systems and services also have to 01:39:41.699 --> 01:39:42.699 be working. 01:39:42.699 --> 01:39:47.909 The Pirate Bay has been attacked in almost every way possible but none of these attacks 01:39:47.909 --> 01:39:51.320 have been successful at taking them down permanently. 01:39:51.320 --> 01:39:55.780 The only thing left would be for someone like Microsoft or Google or Apple to block The 01:39:55.780 --> 01:39:59.340 Pirate Bay in their browsers [01:40:00] because they could. 01:39:59.340 --> 01:40:03.830 Google could put a rule in Chrome just blocking all traffic to The Pirate Bay so anyone who 01:40:03.830 --> 01:40:08.551 uses Chrome can’t get to the site, or Microsoft could put a block within Windows to not allow 01:40:08.551 --> 01:40:10.489 traffic to The Pirate Bay. 01:40:10.489 --> 01:40:16.040 But as far as I know, no browser or operating system has blocked websites because they’ve 01:40:16.040 --> 01:40:17.840 been on some naughty list. 01:40:17.840 --> 01:40:21.010 I think it would be a gross overreach for them to do that. 01:40:21.010 --> 01:40:24.989 When you buy an operating system or use a browser, you really don’t want them deciding 01:40:24.989 --> 01:40:27.250 where you can and can’t go. 01:40:27.250 --> 01:40:31.969 It’s one thing for them to block insecure sites or sites trying to exploit my computer, 01:40:31.969 --> 01:40:38.110 but it’s another thing for them to stop users from going to sites based on their ethics 01:40:38.110 --> 01:40:41.450 or what they deem okay or not. 01:40:41.450 --> 01:40:46.420 But it’s fascinating to me at least to see all the many ways that you can be kicked off 01:40:46.420 --> 01:40:50.250 the internet and how you can get around that and back on. 01:40:50.250 --> 01:40:55.660 The Pirate Bay is up and online right now and they even use thepiratebay.org as their 01:40:55.660 --> 01:40:56.900 address. 01:40:56.900 --> 01:41:01.300 But I don’t know the current state of the site, like where it’s hosted or who’s 01:41:01.300 --> 01:41:02.300 running it. 01:41:02.300 --> 01:41:06.860 But it’ll be interesting to see how many more years it continues to operate out there 01:41:06.860 --> 01:41:09.710 in space somewhere. 01:41:09.710 --> 01:41:18.580 (OUTRO): [OUTRO MUSIC] A big thank-you to Peter for sharing this story with us. 01:41:18.580 --> 01:41:19.840 You can find Peter on Twitter. 01:41:19.840 --> 01:41:22.540 His name there is @brokep. 01:41:22.540 --> 01:41:26.610 Peter started a company called Njalla which is a DNS privacy service. 01:41:26.610 --> 01:41:30.910 If you own a domain and want the utmost privacy, check out N-J-A-L.L-A. 01:41:30.910 --> 01:41:32.620 That’s Njalla. 01:41:32.620 --> 01:41:35.830 Hey, do you like this show? 01:41:35.830 --> 01:41:38.090 Is it something you want to hear more of? 01:41:38.090 --> 01:41:41.410 Well, consider donating to it through Patreon. 01:41:41.410 --> 01:41:46.030 Direct donations really do help the show and it just keeps things going really well, so 01:41:46.030 --> 01:41:51.170 please visit patreon.com/darknetdiaries and consider supporting the show. 01:41:51.170 --> 01:41:54.230 If you do, you’re gonna get some bonus episodes and an ad-free feed. 01:41:54.230 --> 01:41:55.230 So, thanks. 01:41:55.230 --> 01:41:58.130 This show is made by me, the super-leecher, Jack Rhysider. 01:41:58.130 --> 01:42:03.699 Editing help this episode by the right-clicking Damienne, and our theme music is by the double-tapped 01:42:03.699 --> 01:42:05.550 Breakmaster Cylinder. 01:42:05.550 --> 01:42:10.659 Even though Linux is actually pretty user-friendly, it’s just particular about what users it’s 01:42:10.659 --> 01:42:13.160 friendly with, this is Darknet Diaries. 01:42:13.160 --> 01:42:16.760 Oh, and stick around because at the end here I’ll play the full version of that sea shanty 01:42:16.760 --> 01:42:17.980 you heard at the beginning. 01:42:17.980 --> 01:43:53.900 It’s written by Dade or @0xdade on Twitter and performed by Tony Virelli.