1. 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...

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

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

4. 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.

5. 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).

6. 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

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.