The administrators of the illegal file-sharing site, The Pirate Bay, have spoken out for the first time since a police raid knocked the site offline.
A Pirate Bay administrator known only as “Mr 10100100000” explained that site administrators aren’t worried about the prolonged downtime.
“We were not that surprised by the raid. That is something that is a part of this game. We couldn’t care less really,” the administrator told TorrentFreak.
The Pirate Bay went offline on December 9 after Swedish police raided a hosting company in Stockholm. It hasn’t resurfaced since then, which has led some to speculate that the world’s largest file-sharing site could be gone forever.
“There has been a crackdown on a server room in Greater Stockholm. This is in connection with violations of copyright law,” said Paul Pintér, police national coordinator for IP enforcement.
Police are staying quiet on the exact location of the operation and the targets involved, but the fact that the national police IP chief is involved at this early stage suggests something sizable.
Police did say tracking the servers was not easy.
In September, the group behind The Pirate Bay revealed the clever combination of servers that was supposed to keep it from being shut down by police. The Pirate Bay owners use a network of virtual machines to mask traffic, splitting the traffic loads around the world so that the site doesn’t rely on a single server. When the raid happened, the backup was supposed to kick in, but it failed. Had the system worked properly, police would have been out of luck.
Police also secretly had help from Google.
Google’s crackdown of the popular torrent resources shows strict filtering of piracy-related items. When users begin to type the word “thepirate,” they won’t get auto-complete suggestions before hitting the enter button. The censorship of piracy-related searches started back in January 2011. The restrictions included keywords such as “BitTorrent,” “uTorrent,” “Megaupload,” “Rapidshare,” and “Mediafire.” There’s not enough room for infringing items such as music, videos, e-books and other digital files.
TorrentFreak, a website featuring scoops and latest news on BitTorrent protocol and other file sharing said, “By censoring parts of their search services, Google is sending out a strong signal that they are committed to combating online copyright infringement, and to a certain degree their efforts are effective.”
Most likely, the censorship has caused a decrease of the Google searches for “The Pirate Bay.” Interestingly, The Pirate Bay said Google’s censorship didn’t affect much of their traffic. “Any form of censorship is deemed null due to the previously gone record that even the most popular search engine doesn’t drive much traffic to the site.”
Website owners said Google is the biggest nark for law enforcement agencies across the globe. “Google’s name always pops up in police reports as the source of information received by police.”
The group behind The Pirate Bay said they don’t promise to bring the site back. They say that they have “taken this opportunity to give ourselves a break.”
Mr 10100100000 answered a question from TorrentFreak about whether the site will return. “Will we reboot? We don’t know yet,” he said. “But if and when we do, it’ll be with a bang.”
Like the group Anonymous, there are no leaders and no single person in charge.
“About 30 to 50 people from all over the world put forth their ideas, and whatever comes out of that is what will be the fate of The Pirate Bay, Mr 10100100000 said.
IsoHunt, one of Pirate Bay’s largest rivals, has since uploaded a clone of The Pirate Bay. An anti-piracy firm, which tracks the number of people downloading torrents, said there was a noticeable dip in downloads in the two days following the The Pirate Bay’s shutdown; however, downloads are already back up to the same level as before due to IsoHunt. They said officials are furious.
IsoHunt said, “If The Pirate Bay is revived, we will take down the clone.”
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