While the battle continues around the Indian Ocean against Somali Pirates, another group of ‘pirates’ flying under a different flag fight for a completely different purpose...

These are the faces of the owners of “The world’s most resilient BitTorrent site”

Welcome to The Pirate Bay, where the message is ‘sharing is caring’

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol used for distributing large amounts of data. BitTorrent is one of the most common protocols for transferring large files, and it has been estimated that it accounted for roughly 27–55% of all internet traffic (depending on geographical location) as of February 2009.

How it works: A user who wishes to distribute a file first creates a small torrent descriptor file that is distributed by conventional means (web, email, etc).

The user then makes the file itself available through a BitTorrent node acting as a seed. Those with the torrent descriptor file can give it to their own BitTorrent nodes which, acting as peers download it by connecting to the seed and/or other peers

The file being distributed is divided into segments called pieces. As each peer receives a new piece of the file it becomes a source of that piece to other peers, relieving the seed from having to send a copy to every peer.

So where does the ‘pirate’ part come in?

While the technology itself is perfectly legal, and the bittorrent metafiles do not store copyrighted data, its connection with copyrighted material or otherwise illegal material makes the issuer of the bittorent file liable.

So where to from here?

The report will further explore the legality of using bittorrent files and the measures taken by certain government departments and ISP’s (internet service providers) in both support and opposition of this protocol.