The Pirate Bay might not be known to some readers. It’s got it’s own Wikipedia here. To put it simply, it’s one of the largest BT sites on the net right now, based in Sweden. There’s a really good article published here about them; it’s 3 pages, but worth the read. The question is, are the dudes running TPB good guys or just thieves? The MPAA considers them the managers of a multi-million dollar loss to their enterprise, and recently, they pushed that to the limit, with the Swedish Police raid on the data center TPB was hosted at. (interesting to note the same day, the Swedish police site was hacked, and other government sites followed) TPB was down all of 4 days, with a mirror up in the Netherlands. That’s fast.

Of singular interest is the Piratbyrån organization, a political party with beliefs based around file sharing and freedom to exchange, well, not only ideas, but material. They had servers in the data center that got hit, and the resulting fights have been fierce. From the looks of things, Piratbyrån will be in Parliament next year, which could cause a stir.

Looks like Sweden is the place to live if you like file sharing.

Personally, I download alot of crap from torrent sites. Much of it is TV shows I could watch on conventional cable, but I avoid television. A lot of music finds it’s way to my HD as well. We, as file sharers, depend on sites like The Pirate Bay to continue operations in the face of the MPAA.

What’s your opinion?