Piratabays

The trial was a circus. Lawyers for the defense argued that copyright law was obsolete. The prosecution presented evidence of millions of illegal downloads. When the verdict came down—guilty, with prison sentences and a fine of $3.5 million—the world expected the site to go dark.

The founders—known by their pseudonyms Anakata, TiAMO, and Brokep—believed that the internet was a space for free culture, unencumbered by the "artificial scarcity" created by the music and film industries. They launched The Pirate Bay (the original spelling) as a BitTorrent tracker. Unlike direct download sites, Piratabays didn't host copyrighted files on its own servers. Instead, it hosted —small metadata files that told your BitTorrent client where to find the actual data on other users' computers. piratabays

In a move that defined the resilience of Piratabays, the site remained online during the trial, during the appeals, and during the prison sentences. The servers, famously, had been moved to a secret location. While the 2009 trial was legal theater, the 2014 raid was physical. Swedish police stormed a data center in Nacka, near Stockholm. They seized servers, hard drives, and routers. For 24 hours, Piratabays was actually dead. The trial was a circus