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From the start, authorities in several countries came after the site and its founders, who ended up on trial in 2009 and went to prison until their release in 2015.īetween 2003 and now, though, you could still access The Pirate Bay through any of its many proxies and download warez. Ever since its founding in 2003, The Pirate Bay has never made any bones that it serves as a way to distribute copyrighted material. Going after a P2P system like torrenting is a lot tougher, though, and the fight against the biggest site of them all is a good example. However, once the music industry caught wind of it, they were quickly shut down, Napster in early 2001, and Kazaa later the same year. Roughly 20 years ago, if you wanted to download copyrighted material (often called warez) you could do so via direct download on music-focused sites like Napster or Kazaa-pirating movies wasn’t that big yet, then. However, if you distribute those same files across a network, it’s much harder to take down any illegally hosted files. If files are kept on a single server, then copyright watchdogs and law enforcement can very easily come after that server. Why Use Torrents for Piracy?īecause of its decentralized nature, torrenting is ideal for distributing copyrighted material. There’s also an unwritten rule that you need to seed for a while after getting the whole file, it’s just good manners. Its downside is that it’s usually a little slower than a direct download-though a healthy swarm is still pretty fast-and that it takes up more bandwidth as you need to upload as well as download.