Earlier this year I wrote a piece for English class named "A Pirate's Confession," which stated my views on software "piracy," and its relationship with the free and open-source movement. Since then, a landmark event has come into sight: The Pirate Bay Trial. I wish to address this trial from a "hacker's" point of view – one of (I hope) common sense.

The Pirate Bay is a website which indexes and facilitates the finding of torrent files. Torrent files can be used with programs such as μTorrent to find other people who are sharing some digital information (be it a document, disc image, or music file) that you want. The torrent program then communicates with the other users, and lets you gather chunks of the target files shared by the other users until you have gathered the full files. While doing this, you have the option to similarly share the chunks you have, helping perhaps another user who has the chunks you need but not the ones you have.

Since its invention, torrenting has been frowned upon because of its potential for dissemination of copyrighted material (aka “piracy” or filesharing”). This concern is definitely not baseless, and, for those whose objective it is to inhibit such sharing it is a huge concern. The cause for this is because of the nature of torrenting – connections between two individual computers are very hard to monitor, and in most cases, even protected by law against 3rd party tampering. Even the Internet service providers can't do much to stop torrenting because of the difficulty of identifying a stream of communication as torrenting, especially if it's encrypted. Therefore, the only way to prevent torrenting is to stop people from getting the torrent files themselves.

This is where The Pirate Bay comes in. It has taken up the pirates' flag and created an Internet repository of torrent files. It has since become one of the most popular torrent sites, and attracted the attention of the entertainment industries. After a “highly unsuccessful” police raid in 2006, the owners of The Pirate Bay have finally been "brought to justice": a suit by Swedish authorities supported by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI). The ruling was decided on the 17th of April, 2009, declaring the defendants guilty and sentencing them to a year in jail and a fine equivalent to 3.5 million USD.

Why? The charge was "promoting other people's infringements of copyright laws.” The opposition has a point – if the only resource they checked was the site's name. The Pirate Bay does not encourage copyright law infringement, and in fact in its user policy it explicitly states that “The responsibility lies upon the user to not spread malicious, false or illegal material using the tracker.” In other words, the users are free to do as they wish, on their own responsibility. However, the users are invisible to the outside, and are themselves protected by The Pirate Bay. Because it is the only possible target for the media organizations in this conflict (and perhaps because of its flamboyant grandstanding against the many cease-and-desist orders it received) The Pirate Bay has been charged and convicted.

Why not go after Google too? Google depends on user-made content (web-sites) and claims no responsibility over the content it indexes, yet its search returns a Pirate Bay torrent as the first result for “AC/DC torrent”.