Pirate Bay's first server is on display at the Technical Museum in Stockholm. Photograph: Scanpix Sweden/Reuters
An internet milestone has just been reached: Pirate Bay has passed its 10th anniversary. The iconic/notorious site (pick your adjective)celebrated with a party just outside Stockholm. Who knows, perhaps entertainment bosses were simultaneously weeping into their champagne and plotting new action against their favourite enemy. The filesharing hub is arguably the most famous of all sites providing access to torrent files and magnet links to allow peer-to-peer sharing. If that means nothing to you, it's like being able to swap those tapes you made of Radio 1 chart shows with anyone in the world.
While the dilemmas posed by filesharing are of course not new, the site has become emblematic of the two sides of the 21st-century data-sharing debate. In simple terms, there are two conflicting ideologies. For advocates of intellectual property, revenue and cultural value is created by restricting access to information. For internet freedom advocates, revenue and cultural value is created by opening up access to information. Obviously these two approaches are bound to clash with each other.
Given the last decade's copyright wars, it's amazing that Pirate Bay survived at all, not just because 10 is antediluvian in internet years. In the fight to retain control of the information flow, Pirate Bay has been the subject of site blocks, court cases, dramatic intercontinental manhunts and media controversy. Here in the UK, major ISPs were forced by an injunction in April 2012 to block access to the site.
It was the 2006 police raid on the Pirate Bay servers that was the "Stonewall moment" for digital-rights activists – when the state overstepped the mark and it was vital to fight back. The key realisation was that the internet isn't separate from society, and political action is necessary if key freedoms are to be defended.
The site itself can't be divorced from its cultural context, the hacktivist digital dissidence scene. Pirate Bay represents the punk music of the 21st century: while popular music is reduced to sugary talent-show fodder, online counterculture is noisy, rebellious and disruptive. The cool kids aren't writing lyrics, they are writing code. This is the heart of Pirate Bay's tenacity. It's no longer just about the service it provides, it's because Pirate Bay has come to symbolise web liberty for many.
This is well understood by the entertainment industry, and I've experienced it personally. Last year Music Week knew the BPI wanted to shut down the Pirate Bay proxy site that the Pirate party was running even before I received the BPI's letter.
This, to me, shows how empty the fight against Pirate Bay has become. The UK block only dented P2P for a matter of days. Politically, it's become evident governments are less willing to have digital policy hijacked by narrow corporate interests. In France the expensive Hadopi "three strikes" regime is being abandoned. Here, the Digital Economy Act's site-blocking provisions are to be dropped.
That's not to say there aren't significant challenges to digital rights. Activists warned that snooping on what people download would lend legitimacy to mass surveillance, that allowing site-blocking was a dangerous tool to give governments and that removing pirate-related search terms would lead to wider filtering. A suitable 10th-anniversary souvenir might be a "we told you so" T-shirt.
Those of us who were galvanised by the Pirate Bay crackdowns have moved on, focusing on the broader picture of internet surveillance, censorship and bridging the digital divide. Co-founder Peter Sunde called for the site to close, to allow something new to develop. If we can move on, so can others. It's time for the entertainment lobby to ditch attempts to clamp down on technological advances and abandon the tired pirate narrative.
Like it or not, Pirate Bay is a key part of internet history. So, let's join a rousing chorus of Happy Birthday. Oh wait, it's under copyright and the subject of a court case...
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