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Exactly one year ago The Pirate Bay Four were sentenced to a year in prison, and on top of that each ordered to pay $905,000 in damages. The entertainment industries hoped that the ruling would set an example, but today The Pirate Bay is larger than ever before.


Millions of BitTorrent users all around the world followed the Pirate Bay trial with great interest last year. Many had hoped that the court would decide that operating a BitTorrent tracker was no offense and that the defendants would walk free.

The ten day trial started off with a small victory for the accused. On the second day the prosecutor announced that half of the charges against the four defendants had been dropped. The prosecutor couldn’t prove that the .torrent files that were submitted as evidence actually used

After months of waiting, the Ipredator anonymity service from the founders of The Pirate Bay has finally opened its doors to the public. For 5 euros a month users can now hide all their Internet traffic, including torrent downloads, from third party outfits who might want to spy on their downloading habits.


In the last year, pressure from the entertainment industries on ISPs and governments to crack down on copyright infringers has steadily increased, resulting in ISPs sending out mass copyright warnings. This, of course, is coupled with the looming specter of three-strikes legislation aimed at disconnecting copyright infringers.

File-sharers on the other hand haven’t been sitting still either, as many have chosen to negate these initiatives by going anonymous.

Users of BitTorrent and other file-sharing networks have increasingly turned to solutions that hide their identities from the outside world, rendering these new anti-piracy initiatives useless. The IPREDator service from the founders of The Pirate Bay opened up to the public this week, and is undoubtedly the most talked about