Torrent Trackers and Copyright Law
Why All Legal Threats Directed to 'The Pirate Bay' website Are Void
The Pirate Bay's webmasters don't fear legal threats from software houses and music corporations, as Bittorrent technology frees torrent trackers from legal consequences.
The Pirate Bay organization website allows users from all around the world to download copyrighted files absolutely free of charge. While many -- big software houses and music corporations included -- argue that this behavior is illicit, not everybody knows that the site is acting in full respect for the law.
How Bittorrent Technology and Torrent Trackers Work
The site enables to search through a vast database of hosted torrent files, which are being uploaded by its users. A torrent is a small text file, usually no more than 10 Kilobytes in size, containing a list of resource identifiers and control information (checksum). With the help of a Bittorrent client, users can utilize .torrent files to download any sort of data directly from other peers.
By uploading and providing a torrent search engine, a tracker doesn't therefore host copyrighted data, but merely pointers to it -- in other terms, while users are breaking the law by using their service, the site itself isn't.
Even if 'technically' legal, though, this service allows millions of users to illegally download copyrighted material. For this reason, countless software houses and other companies have taken legal action against the site owners over the course of the years. Companies such as Microsoft, Apple and Sony Entertainment have repeatedly mailed the owners requesting immediate removal of torrent files pointing to their copyrighted material.
The Pirate Bay May 2006 Police Incursion
According to the article "The Piratebay Is Down: Raided by the Swedish Police" appeared on torrent-related news site Torrentfreak.com, on May 31, 2006 a police raid against The Pirate Bay took place. Three of the people running the site were interrogated, along with the site legal consultant. Much of the electronic equipment and the site servers were also confiscated, resulting in the site becoming unreachable for the following three days.
As a response to the incursion, the Piratpartiet, a Swedish political party striving to reform intellectual property-related laws, organized a non-violent mass protest in the cities of Stockholm and Gothenburg, totaling almost 1000 protesters.
Webmaster Responses and Attitude towards Legal Threats
A typical webmaster response to software houses' legal threats would involve ridiculing of the sender, publication of the letter exchange on a dedicated section of the site so to deter other companies from protesting, and the use of legal references such as Lag (1998:112) om ansvar för elektroniska anslagstavlor or sentence NJA I 1996 from the Swedish Supreme Court.
Mikael Viborg, the site's legal consultant, asserts in fact that The Pirate Bay acts are fully legal under Swedish law, where the website servers are located. Unless a Supreme European Court sentence will ever state otherwise, the owners are indeed acting in full respect for Swedish and European law, and all requests to remove the allegedly illegal files are completely void.
Since a Supreme European Court decision on a matter of such proportions would -- according to the site attorney -- typically involve a bureaucratic iter lasting five to seven years, legal threats directed to the site don't seem to represent a menace at present and for many years to come.
References
'Legal Threats' section of thepiratebay.org website
Legout, Urvoy-Keller, Michiardi, "Rarest First and Choke Algorithms Are Enough"
