You might have heard about the legal case going on and on with The Pirate Bay for years already. Basically the music industry and other retarded cokeheads of the likes claim that the services The Pirate Bay are offering are illegal.

What exactly is The Pirate Bay offering?

They once actually served as a BitTorrent tracker, search engine and indexing service. They got rid of the BitTorrent tracker sooner or later because they got aware of the retarded people living on this planet deeming it illegal. So what are they left with? A search engine and indexing service. Sounds familiar. Something like Google, Yahoo and Bing? Pretty much, yes, except only for the BitTorrent network. How is that illegal you ask? Well, beats me. But apparently even judges agree.

In case you are wondering how the classical BitTorrent network operates, here's a quick outline:

• BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer network for data transfers (files like music, videos, pictures, etc.)
• If you want to download a certain file, you download a *.torrent file that contains hashes of pieces of the actual file you want. A hash essentially is nothing but a calculated number from that piece of a file, to verify its integrity and to find the file. Keep in mind that you can not recreate the file from these hashes.
• The *.torrent file also contains a list of so called BitTorrent trackers, which are servers you will connect to, essentially ask them "Who has this file?" but also tell them whether you have a file to offer. They enable a communication between the peers, so the peers can find each other and initiate a transfer between themselves.

Okay, now let's assume we have a file that is shared and it contains by law content that is not allowed to be freely shared (like for example a ripped music album). Whoever puts this file up has to create the *.torrent file for it. So that person calculates hashes from the files, adds a BitTorrent tracker to the file and done.

This *.torrent file, containing nothing but legal metadata, will be put up on a site now, for example on The Pirate Bay. So The Pirate Bay offers this *.torrent file, with a description of the files it supposedly contains metadata for and people are free to download this *.torrent file. This is not illegal. Anybody who claims it is, is a retard and did not understand how this system works.

If anybody downloads this *.torrent file of said music album now and adds it to their BitTorrent client, the BitTorrent client will contact the specified BitTorrent trackers and they will reply a list of people who currently want or offer the file. Now, depending on the country you are residing in but also depending on your moral values, none, one or both of these actions can be considered illegal:

• Downloading the actual files from a peer (getting the music album)
• Uploading the actual files to a peer (sharing/giving the music album)

What did The Pirate Bay do in all this? Effectively the following:

• Telling you about the file: Music album
• Offering hashes for said file (Remember: calculated numbers, not possible to recreate the file from)
• Telling you which BitTorrent tracker to ask about peers
• If specified as a BitTorrent tracker itself: telling you which peers are getting and sharing the file (This is now obsolete as The Pirate Bay no longer operates a BitTorrent tracker themselves)

All of that is considered metadata. None of that is illegal.

Still, on April 17th, 2009 the operators of The Pirate Bay were found guilty of "assistance to copyright infringement" in Sweden and sentenced to one year in prison and payment of a fine of 30 million SEK (roughly 4.4 million USD (as of writing of this article)).

This didn't stop The Pirate Bay from operating however. It still operates as of today and the music industry is still trying really hard to get them down. Since by now they realized they can't take them down from the very source instead they try censoring access to The Pirate Bay.

So far access to The Pirate Bay has been "blocked" in: Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Italy, Malaysia, the Netherlands, the People's Republic of China and the United Kingdom. Several other countries had temporary blockades or legal cases about blocking the site. More are probably to come.

The quality from these blockades usually reach from mostly simple Domain Name System (DNS) blockades to Internet Protocol (IP) blockades. Both of them are very easy to go around and people wanting to access The Pirate Bay as well as The Pirate Bay themselves offer tons of ways to go around them. In the end all these blockades cause is free advertising for The Pirate Bay and BitTorrent plus getting people aware what kind of MAFIAA is operating within our governments and courts resulting in membership boosts for the Pirate Party.

One of the worst organizations, trying the hardest to block The Pirate Bay is BREIN (Bescherming Rechten Entertainment Industrie Nederland) in the Netherlands. They don't even stop at just blocking The Pirate Bay by forcing the country's Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to apply a blockade but instead they also want to stop every proxy that is being set up to go around said blockades.

But they even go further. After successfully getting court orders to force closure of a proxy provided by the Dutch Pirate Party as well as a proxy provided by Greenhost they even demand a gag on the Dutch Pirate Party to stop operating any kind of proxy service as well as stop explanation on how to use them or set them up.

Yes. The censorship is getting worse and worse. Stop discussing. Stop offering proxy services. The question how long before VPNs and proxy services become illegal is very valid.

BREIN, you can not win this. Stop fighting.

For every IP address that gets blocked The Pirate Bay will have a new one ready within minutes.

This is a futile game, already lost by BREIN. But since they apparently don't have a BRAIN, they don't see it. As long as there is one person on the Internet who does not agree, content can not be censored. And such people will fortunately always exist.

With that said, have a link to a list of The Pirate Bay proxies, generously provided by Pirate Reverse: http://about.piratereverse.info/proxy/list.html

And also a guide on how you can help and set up your own Pirate Bay proxy: http://about.piratereverse.info/proxy/index.html