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The Pirate Bay is the self-proclaimed "world's largest BitTorrent tracker" as of 2005. It was started by the Swedish anti copyright organization Piratbyrån in early 2004, but since October 2004 has been a separate organization run by dedicated individuals.
The server (which runs Hypercube Tracking Software) is located in Gothenburg, Sweden. On June 1, 2005, The Pirate Bay updated its website to version 2.0, in an effort to reduce bandwidth usage (which was reported to be at 2000 HTTP requests per second on each of four bit torrent trackers), as well as create a more friendly user interface for the frontend of the website.
Legal threats
The Pirate Bay is also known in the online piracy community as one of the more prominent organizations standing up to anti-piracy organizations such as the Motion Picture Association of America in a humorous manner, while dismissing their copyright complaints as not applying in Sweden. As of July 2005, new anti-piracy legislation was enacted in Sweden, but this did not affect The Pirate Bay because it only offers Torrent files, which do not technically contain copyrighted material. As of 2005, The Piratebay is rated as out of 79651 people in a Piracy forum, it is at average of 9.8/10.
On June 8, 2005, a hardcopy of a reply from The Pirate Bay to Web Sheriff in response to faxed legal threats was sold on Ebay for $255 (USD).
