Google ranking TPB (and others) lower

Google just sent out a press release saying that they will lower file sharing systems rankings in their search engine and instead favour our competitors (the old corrupt media industry that is). Since we're getting lots of e-mails from interested journalists about this, we'll just post our thoughts about this here instead.

First you need to know that a very low amount of our traffic actually comes from search engines such as google. If you think about it, you'll understand why - we're competitors. TPB is a search engine just as Google. We only specialize in different methods and links.

The thing we don't like with this is that a corrupt industry is deciding what another industry has to do. They're dictating terms. It's really ironic: an industry that makes funny movies about dictators, where the dictator is essentially calling the USA a dictatorship, is trying to dictate terms where they have no place to do so....

TL,DR: Hollywood fucked up again, thanks.

UK block of TPB? Haven't really noticed.

Just read the story on BBC that the P2P traffic in the UK is back to the normal amounts after the block of TPB was instated.

We never really noticed a blockade. Traffic from the UK looks the same to us, we only keep track of which countries traffic comes from, not ISP or something else (hey, we like privacy so we don't log stuff, only meta data about data). The only thing we noticed were comments on blog posts and lots of journalists e-mailing us more about UK than other things for once (like why we're blocked in Saudi, china and other countries that also do not enjoy democracy). We never bothered to reply, so journalists wrote what they wanted us to say. In a few days everything was back to normal for everyone.

We did however notice that this guy from the record companies (you know, our competitors in the distribution industry) is saying we went from a ranking in the top 50 to 282 in his small country. We're only interesting in being ranked 1337 - which we are. These ranking systems (like Alexa) are guestimating traffic. The information comes from people that aren't tech savvy, like users of explorer or people that actually installed their toolbars (whyyy?!). The majority of our users would not do that. And we've seen that we have more traffic than most sites we've compared e-penis' with even though they are ranked 50-100 positions over us in these charts. Put simply, they're not relaly accurate.

And speaking of these guestimates. They're not only guessing how much traffic we have, but also what and how much is being shared and so on. We've never given out that information - we never even stored it. When we've done measurements ourselves we kind of laugh at how crappy other peoples estimates are. People that charge millions to guestimate will not give their clients a number that is against their interests... so look at these numbers with sober eyes and look at what is in the earnings for the people that hand out these numbers.

Our guestimate however is that these companies that are fighting us, P2P, the internets, call it what you want, will go belly up soon. Let's see who's more accurate in their guessing (hint: we already know we won). We'd say "fuck you" but it's not really needed - you already fucked yourselves.

Sign for Peter!

All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in single words: freedom, justice, duty, mercy. This also goes for things of darkness; single heavy words: slavery, injustice, corruption, cruelty.

Today we pause and occupy ourselves with some of these heavy words.

The first are injustice and corruption. The injustice of a legal system that protects the unlawful privileges of the few and wealthy, while unleashing its blind wrath at the many, the innocent and the poor. The corruption of a legal system that turns its blind eye to bullying from multinationals and their mercenaries towards ourselves and to national threats from the US government towards Sweden (WTO blacklisting). We know of MPAAs bullying, we know of the bought policemen (Jim Keyzer), we know of hired hacker attacks against us. And we know of the injustice and the corruption of the machinery that this year sentenced 3 friends of all of ours to jail for aiding in crimes with no criminals.

But we are no longer amazed by this. The state of these affairs is since long known to all of us. We are no longer in shock when we see the wickedness of multinational corporations, of politicians and of the so-called people of justice.

But we're still surprised to see them not ashamed. And from this naivety of ours comes hope. We still hope that shame is something they have not left behind them. We still hope that they have not disgraced themselves so many times that they have become immune to it.

And from this hope comes another of those heavy words, with which we today must occupy ourselves. Duty. Our duty. It is said that the duty of youth is to challenge corruption, but this goes for all of us. And this duty is a great one. It tries our loyalty to conscience and our energy and will. Today our duty is to reach out to help Peter "brokep" Sunde; a legend that has done so much for our freedom and who because of this has been unjustly convicted.

Together we can show the importance of Peter Sunde and The Pirate Bay to so many of us – an importance that reaches beyond sharing of torrents. Together we can show the strength of the many to the few, the powerful, the rich and the corrupt. With 10.000 names on this petition we act with strength. With 50.000 we can have the Swedish government feel and act upon the shame that should be theirs.

Click here to sign the petition!

#Acta is dead in the EU!

So many people have been fighting for such a long time! We're super happy to hear that ACTA was finally dismissed by the European Parlament today. It's a good day for the internets but the fight is not over!

Support your local freedom movement! Every single country in Europe has a party or organisation working hard on getting the peoples voices across. They should get some love and some funding right now for fighting even more. Don't forget them!

Thanks for the help!

Our competitors at the Recording Industry Assholes of America is trying to make sure that the search engines that compete with us have to stop linking back to us. This is really great news!

Right now about 10% of our traffic comes from these competiting search engines. With that ban in place that means that our traffic numbers probably will increase. Users will go directly to us instead and use our search instead. We'll grow even more massive. It's really hard to compete with Google, but if they can't index media search engines like us, we'll be the dominant player in the end.

So from the bottom of our hearts, THANK YOU RIAA, this is great news for us! For once, we support your efforts in something! Let's make sure that TPB keeps on growing together!

Hugs'n'kisses from your pals at The Pirate Bay - soon to be the biggest media search engine in the world!

We're not selling any headphones

Read in the news today that we're launching a brand of headphones. Surprise to us, since this is not correct.

We are not a company. We do not create headphones. We do not have any deal with any company to create headphones or anything like that. We've seen some pictures of these alleged headphones from us - and they look great since they have a cool logo. But they have nothing officially to do with us. And that's fine. They aren't saying it neither, it's the media that is.

This might confuse some people: we're pirates but we still have good taste. Wearing pirate headphones is way to obvious for us. We wear our shirts underneath our sweaters (let's just say it's cold where we live). Headphones don't fit underneath our helmets when we drive our super fast motorbikes neither. And who needs headphones when we teleport music into our brains using much newer technology anyhow, doh...

We have no issue of people using anything regarding TPB. The logo, the name, do whatever you want. You can claim to be us. If you're an asshole, we'll tell the world you're one. But it's your right to be that asshole, we won't sue you over it.

We will however never stop being amazed at how media is selling companies semi-working PR campaigns as facts without talking to anyone who's being mentioned in it as a partner. Well played marketers, you know how much the media hates doing factual research. Well played.

(PS, we hope someone will make a 3d copy of the headphones for the physibles section. The only original pirate headphones are copies.)

Happy Independence Day!

Today we celebrate!

Six years ago on this day, the 31st of May, the Swedish police raided our facilities. They worked hard and long and tried stealing all of our servers, all of our backups and all of our admins. As usual, they did not succeed. After our opponents dropped their victory in their press releases (that were written 4 days before the raid, weird huh?) we got the site back online in no time. After three days the site was running almost like before - we could have been faster but we had to do alot of interviews and we had to drink some rum.

Today, six years after the raid the site is STILL ONLINE!

oh, and we've grown a bit. From 2.5 million peers at the time of the raid to 30-40 million peers. From 1 million registered users to 5.7 million. We used to be ranked just among the top 500 websites in the world - now we're top 60. And when we write that _we_ are growing, we mean the community. It's awesome to see the support the community show us. Even in our bad moments, we get your support. We're really happy that you do this, every fan letter we get, every time someone say something nice to us, we really understand that we do something important, something that is more important than ourselves.

We haven't done everything right. We're amateurs in a lot of fields. But we're experts in having fun and making a lot of file sharing happening. And we keep on improving on the areas we find our flaws. And you guys help us out. Thank you so much!

To celebrate today, we encourage you to keep on sharing. Keep on uploading, downloading, swapping bits of information. Let today be the pirates independence day! Today we celebrate the victories we've had and the victories that will come. Today we celebrate that we're united in our efforts. Keep on waving that black flag!

Not all proxies are Ok!

A lot of proxies in support of TPB are popping up, which is a good thing. But not all of these proxies are nice!

We've noticed at least 3 sites that are tricking users to buying access or similar. We do not condone this behaviour, The Pirate Bay is a free service!

If you've ended up on this page, we've re-hijacked you from the scam site (or you're a regular reader of our blog, but since we're writing boring stuff mostly, we think the first option applies). We'd want to encourage you to look for a reliable source on where to find a good proxy that works for you. The people at TorrentFreak usually have a good list of updated proxies. And if you can reach our original page, you should use that. It's always the safest thing to do.

Take care and don't get tricked. There's a war going on. It's the mafiaa against the people. Let's make sure that the people win.

TPB gets censored in the UK

The Western countries of the world all complaints about the censorship in Iran, China, Saudi Arabia and so on. But they are really the worst culprits themselves, having double morals in doing an even worse thing themselves.

Today news was out that the UK high court has decided that TPB is "massively infringing on copyright". The facts that no copyright is being infringed upon here at the site was not a welcome fact, so that was ignored apparantly.

Noone from TPB was invited to the court case, which would be normal to do in a democracy. This is not the first time this happens, it's been the same in most countries we're censored in. We have no right to speak since we're not rich.

Five ISPs got sued by the record companies to force them to block us. This is particularily interesting since music released and promoted exclusively here on TPB is currently in the brittish top charts. We are simply competitors that they just managed to squeeze out of their market, in a maffiesque way.

As usual there are easy ways to circumvent the block. Use a VPN service to be anonymous and get an uncensored internet access, you should do this anyhow. Or use TOR, I2P or some other darknet with access to the internets. Change your DNS settings with OpenDNS. Or use googles DNS servers... we could go on...

But don't forget that we can't allow this shit to happen. Next time they're coming for something else. And yes, there will be a next time if we don't stop them. Write to your ISP and tell them to appeal the case. Write to your local MPs and tell them that this is not allowed. Make sure your voice is heard. Remember, we're all the pirate bay, and we must stand united against the censorship from our opponents!

Greece sells airspace to TPB

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE.

Athens, Greece - Political power in Athens, Greece, today signed an agreement with representatives for The Pirate Bay (TPB) about exclusive usage of the greek airspace at 8000-9000ft.

- This might come as a shock for many but we believe that we need to both raise money to pay our debts as well as encourage creativity in new technology. Greece wants to become a leader in LOSS, says Lucas Papadams, the new and crisply elected Prime Minister of Greece.

LOSS that he is referring to is not the state of finances in the country but rather Low Orbit Server Stations, a new technology recently invented by TPB. Being a leader for a long time in other types of LOSS, TPB has been working hard on making LOSS a viable solution for achieving 100% uptime for their services.

- Greece is one of few countries that understands the value of LOSSes. We have been talking to them ever since we came up with the solution seeing that we have equal needs of being able to find financially sustainable solutions for our projects, says Win B. Stones, head of R&D at TPB.

The agreement gives TPB a 5 year license to use and re-distribute usage of the airspace at 8000-9000 ft as well as unlimited usage of the radio space between 2350 to 24150 MHz. Due to the financial situation of both parties TPB will pay the costs with digital goods, sorely needed by the citizens of Greece.