BREAKING NEWS: Global Gaming Factory X has acquired file-sharing site The Pirate Bay for SEK 60 million (USD 7.8 million). (More here)

”Distributing works of cultural benefit for the end user.” – Justification of the Piratee.

The Pirate Bay is the world’s largest bittorrent tracker. Bittorrent is a filesharing protocol that in a reliable way enables big and fast file transfers. Translation, The Pirate Bay is a search engine for torrents, which are downloadable files, P2P (Peer 2 Peer). The Pirate Bay was started by the Swedish anti copyright organization Piratbyrån in the late 2003, but since October 2004, separated and run by dedicated individuals.

You can find Audio such as music, audio books, sound clips, or even complete CD’s before they are released. There are Games on any console from PC to Mac, to XBOX 360 to Wii. Even videos in any format, from DVD-R’s, to .7 Gig copies of movies to watch from your computer, can be downloaded. Other items of interest include: software, comics, porn and other pictures, TV shows, and applications.

What should I look for when choosing my torrents?
Simply put, the more seeders and leechers, the better. Obviously the more seeders than leechers, the faster the downloads. I also suggest you look for aXXo listings.

The Pirate Bay is unique in its pirating. It has a top 100 list setup - you can easily find what’s hot. They generate the list based on the amount of seeders and leechers, and since the search engine is tracker based, it’s like a global calculation. Anything on this list is expected to be quality, unless it’s a cam-record from the movie theaters… Since the website is Swedish based, it offers dubs in many European languages. The website may be illegal in The United States for copyrighted materials. They get a ton of legal threats and seem to brush them all off. Then they post the threats, ridicule – scorn – and laugh, and seem to be avoiding any legal lawsuits. They have even survived a police raid that shut them down for three days, but this caused exposure, doubling their numbers the day they came back online. The reason they get off the hook so to speak is the fact all they do is index. They don't actually store any content, or transfer it to anyone. I also hear that the Europeans, in some nations, have a tax to cover pirated materials.

At time of this posting, there are 2,785,339 registered users, 10,689,632 peers (5,230,709 seeders + 5,458,923 leechers) in 1,247,243 torrents on tracker.

Privately run, they allow open tracking for private users. Commercial use is prohibited, and can be charged. Oh and did I mention that this entire service is free to private users? You can also upload your own torrents. One such famous individual goes by the username aXXo. He is the most popular, and has the best quality movies at .7 Gigs each. Sadly, he does not do DVD-R's. Anyway, there is rumor that he works for the movie industry, whether that’s under a rental company like Blockbuster or Hollywood Video, or something else, no one knows. However, he seems to release high quality movies a few weeks before they are even released onto DvD, suggesting he does work at a movie rental place. I suggest you search for his torrents, in any case.

Protection from viruses?
Yes. If there are a lot of seeders and leechers, especially the latter, you’re safe to assume it is virus free. Furthermore, pirates will always post comments on the torrent download page on each torrent. Read the comments if you’re scared, you’ll not only see virus warnings if there are any, but you’ll also see additional instructions on how to install a PC game – like what the serial key number is that will work.

Help, wtf is a torrent?
If you’re new to the torrent business, then you probably need to download a client that will help you download torrents. I suggest Azureus, it’s pretty user friendly, and also has some advanced features. Any client will do, however, because the great thing about torrents is the ability to have a continuous download that you can go offline, go back online, and begin where you left off. Torrents don’t download from A-Z, they download in any order of segments. So the bad thing is you can’t start watching your porn, or whatever it is you are impatient for, until it’s basically finished. Or, you’ll find the picture will stall every so often until it gets to the next portion of downloaded material. I watched season 4 of House when it was at 90% just because I was so impatient, and it wasn’t too bad, haha.

The Pirate Bay has also sparked baywords.com, which is a free speech blogging website. Anything goes, no censorship.

Material that seems offensive might be available.

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