The Pirate Bay has been hunted in many countries around the world. Not for illegal activities but being persecuted for beliefs of freedom of information. Today, a new chapter is written in the history of the movement, as well as the history of the internets.

A week ago we could reveal that The Pirate Bay was accessed via Norway and Catalonya. The move was to ensure that these countries and regions will get attention to the issues at hand. Today we can reveal that we have been invited by the leader of the republic of Korea, to fight our battles from their network.

This is truly an ironic situation. We have been fighting for a free world, and our opponents are mostly huge corporations from the United States of America, a place where freedom and freedom of speech is said to be held high. At the same time, companies from that country is chasing a competitor from other countries, bribing police and lawmakers, threatening political parties and physically hunting people from our crew. And to our help comes a government famous in our part of the world for locking people up for their thoughts and forbidding access to information.

We believe that being offered our virtual asylum in Korea is a first step of this country's changing view of access to information. It's a country opening up and one thing is sure, they do not care about threats like others do. In that way, TPB and Korea might have a special bond. We will do our best to influence the Korean leaders to also let their own population use our service, and to make sure that we can help improve the situation in any way we can. When someone is reaching out to make things better, it's also ones duty to grab their hand.

Current score: 0

He is now facing extradition to the US. He has no ties to that country and has not operated his website in the US. It doesn't really matter if he's committed a crime in giving out links on his websites (we of course do not see this as something illegal, but actually protected as legal by lots of european laws), another country should not be able to demand him extradited to follow his laws.

We would never allow a person that was unfaithful to his or her partner to be extradited to a dictatorship such as Saudi Arabia to be punished for that crime. But as soon as COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT is the alleged "crime", anything goes. It's insane and needs to be stopped!

Anyone that cares about democracy, peoples right to a fair trial and that money should not buy you benefits in the legal system, should support Richard now. It's an important case. Next time it could be you!

Then we got rid of the torrents.

Now? Now we've gotten rid of the servers. Slowly and steadily we are getting rid of our earthly form and ascending into the next stage, the cloud.

The cloud, or Brahman as the hindus call it, is the All, surrounding everything. It is everywhere; immaterial, yet very real.

If there is data, there is The Pirate Bay.

Our data flows around in thousands of clouds, in deeply encrypted forms, ready to be used when necessary. Earth bound nodes that transform the data are as deeply encrypted and reboot into a deadlock if not used for 8 hours.

All attempts to attack The Pirate Bay from now on is an attack on everything and nothing. The site that you're at will still be here, for as long as we want it to. Only in a higher form of being. A reality to us. A ghost to those who wish to harm us.

Adapt or be forever forgotten beneath the veils of maya.

It's as expected since we have scandinavian roots. It's called being home blind - we will forever be ignored for our work where our origins are.

There are several prizes we should have got already. Of course the Peace Prize for bringing people together, that's the obvious one. The one for Economy is another given - we've managed to take away money from the equation of information distribution.

But the one that really bugs us here at the HQ is the chemistry prize. Noone has ever come close to getting our type of chemistry across the world, or managed to get people so pissed as we've done.

Giving the Peace Prize to the EU was a big joke. It shows that noone can take this prize seriously anymore. We have an idea that we want your input on: Should we revive our Polar Pirate Prize and create the worlds best award ceremony?

Put your answers and suggestions in the comments below!

(Oh and next year, if we don't win at least one of the nobel prizes... we'll just exclude Scandinavia from being able to access TPB. Maybe then they'll understand how much we mean to keep the peace at home...)

A 9 years and runnin', MC Winston, I hold the rum
You want me to up a torrent and it's done
Since I'm stereotyped to kill and destruct
Is one of the main reasons, I don't give a fuck

Chances are usually not good
Cause I freeze with my hands on a hot hood
And gettin' jacked by the you-know-who
When in a black and white the capacity is two

We're not alone, we're 100 more brothers, sisters and whatnots
Now wearin' my dyes 'cause I'm not stupid, motherfuckers
They're out to take our heads for we said they're in the past
Point blank, they can kiss my one eyed azz

I didn't stutter when I said, 'Fuck Tha Police'
Cause it's hard for a pirate to get peace
Now it's broken and can't be fixed
Cause police and little devil pirates don't mix

So now I'm creepin' through the fall
Runnin' like a team, well, see, I might have slayed y'all
So for now pack the rum and hold it in the air
Cause The Pirate Bay has a 9 years of runnin'

Into this news, some fugitives are on the run
MPAA sources tell us that the gang are headed
straight to their home base, The Bay
Lend me a mutherfuckin' ear, so I can tell you why

Runnin' with my brothers and sisters, headed for the home base
With a steady pace on the face that we just raced
The road ahead goes on and on
The birthday post is gettin' longer than the mutherfuckin' marathon

Runnin' on but never runnin' out
Stayin' wired and if I get tired, I can still try out
Hitchhikin' if that's what it gotta do
Cause there's always someone to pick up a pirate

Confused, yo but Winona's a pirate with nuthin' to lose
One of the few who's been accused and abused
Of the crime of poisonin' young minds
But you don't know shit 'til you been in my shoes

And Winona is back from the T P B
Droppin' some shit that's S E E D(ed)
So fuck the P O L I C E
And any motherfucker that disagrees

Stuck and runnin' hard, hauling ass
Cause I'm a pirate known for havin' a notorious past
My mind was slick, my temper was too quick
Now the MPAA's all over my dick

Got us tick and runnin' just to find the gun that started the clock
That's when the W jumped off the startin' block
A 9 years from home and yo, it's a long stretch
A little sprintin' motherfucker that they won't catch

Yeah, back to The Bay again
Yo, it's either that or the Federal Pen
Cause pirates been runnin' since beginning of time
Takin' a minute to tell you what's on my mutherfuckin' mind

Runnin' like I just don't care
The Bay's 50 miles but yo, I'ma get there
Archin' my back and on a straight rough
Just like Usain Bolt, I'm ballin' the fuck out

From city to city, I'm a menace as I pass by
Rippin' up shit just so you can remember
I'm a straight up pirate that's done in, seedin' and comin'
Straight at yo' ass, so far a 9 years and runnin'

Runnin' like a pirate, I hate to lose
Show us on the news but we hate to be abused
I know it was a setup, so now I'm gonna get up
Even if the MPAA wants me to shut up

But I've got 10 000 pirates strong
They got everybody singin' my 'We're all The Pirate Bay' song
And while they treat my gang like dirt
Their whole fuckin' family is torrenting our shit

So I'ma run 'til I can't run no more
Cause it's time for MC Winston to settle the score
I got a urge to kick down doors
At my grave like a slave even if the Win calls

Clouds are dark and pirates are hidin'
Dick-tricklin' at the sunny, motherfucker's are ridin'
Started with ten and yo, one couldn't take it
So now there's a hundred 'cause we cant be subtracted

The number's even, now I'm leavin'
We're never gettin' took by a suit with a weave in
Them and their troops are right behind me
But they're so fuckin' stupid, they'll never find me

One more year to go through the dark streets
Runnin' like a motherfucker on my own two feet
But you know I never stumble or lag last
I'm almost home, so I better haul ass

Tearin' up everything in sight
It's a little crazy motherfucker dodging the searchlight
Now that chase, the shit, is done and
100 motherfuckers goin' crazy with a 9 years of runnin'

And just as he got arrested, Sweden just happened to donate $59 million to Cambodia. Just a coincidence of course... or?

Today we pause and occupy ourselves with some of these heavy words.

The first are injustice and corruption. The injustice of a legal system that protects the unlawful privileges of the few and wealthy, while unleashing its blind wrath at the many, the innocent and the poor. The corruption of a legal system that turns its blind eye to bullying from multinationals and their mercenaries towards ourselves and to national threats from the US government towards Sweden (WTO blacklisting). We know of MPAAs bullying, we know of the bought policemen (Jim Keyzer), we know of hired hacker attacks against us. And we know of the injustice and the corruption of the machinery that this year sentenced 3 friends of all of ours to jail for aiding in crimes with no criminals.

But we are no longer amazed by this. The state of these affairs is since long known to all of us. We are no longer in shock when we see the wickedness of multinational corporations, of politicians and of the so-called people of justice.

But we're still surprised to see them not ashamed. And from this naivety of ours comes hope. We still hope that shame is something they have not left behind them. We still hope that they have not disgraced themselves so many times that they have become immune to it.

And from this hope comes another of those heavy words, with which we today must occupy ourselves. Duty. Our duty. It is said that the duty of youth is to challenge corruption, but this goes for all of us. And this duty is a great one. It tries our loyalty to conscience and our energy and will. Today our duty is to reach out to help Peter "brokep" Sunde; a legend that has done so much for our freedom and who because of this has been unjustly convicted.

Together we can show the importance of Peter Sunde and The Pirate Bay to so many of us – an importance that reaches beyond sharing of torrents. Together we can show the strength of the many to the few, the powerful, the rich and the corrupt. With 10.000 names on this petition we act with strength. With 50.000 we can have the Swedish government feel and act upon the shame that should be theirs.

Click here to sign the petition!

Support your local freedom movement! Every single country in Europe has a party or organisation working hard on getting the peoples voices across. They should get some love and some funding right now for fighting even more. Don't forget them!

Right now about 10% of our traffic comes from these competiting search engines. With that ban in place that means that our traffic numbers probably will increase. Users will go directly to us instead and use our search instead. We'll grow even more massive. It's really hard to compete with Google, but if they can't index media search engines like us, we'll be the dominant player in the end.

So from the bottom of our hearts, THANK YOU RIAA, this is great news for us! For once, we support your efforts in something! Let's make sure that TPB keeps on growing together!

Hugs'n'kisses from your pals at The Pirate Bay - soon to be the biggest media search engine in the world!

We are not a company. We do not create headphones. We do not have any deal with any company to create headphones or anything like that. We've seen some pictures of these alleged headphones from us - and they look great since they have a cool logo. But they have nothing officially to do with us. And that's fine. They aren't saying it neither, it's the media that is.

This might confuse some people: we're pirates but we still have good taste. Wearing pirate headphones is way to obvious for us. We wear our shirts underneath our sweaters (let's just say it's cold where we live). Headphones don't fit underneath our helmets when we drive our super fast motorbikes neither. And who needs headphones when we teleport music into our brains using much newer technology anyhow, doh...

We have no issue of people using anything regarding TPB. The logo, the name, do whatever you want. You can claim to be us. If you're an asshole, we'll tell the world you're one. But it's your right to be that asshole, we won't sue you over it.

We will however never stop being amazed at how media is selling companies semi-working PR campaigns as facts without talking to anyone who's being mentioned in it as a partner. Well played marketers, you know how much the media hates doing factual research. Well played.

(PS, we hope someone will make a 3d copy of the headphones for the physibles section. The only original pirate headphones are copies.)

Six years ago on this day, the 31st of May, the Swedish police raided our facilities. They worked hard and long and tried stealing all of our servers, all of our backups and all of our admins. As usual, they did not succeed. After our opponents dropped their victory in their press releases (that were written 4 days before the raid, weird huh?) we got the site back online in no time. After three days the site was running almost like before - we could have been faster but we had to do alot of interviews and we had to drink some rum.

Today, six years after the raid the site is STILL ONLINE!

oh, and we've grown a bit. From 2.5 million peers at the time of the raid to 30-40 million peers. From 1 million registered users to 5.7 million. We used to be ranked just among the top 500 websites in the world - now we're top 60. And when we write that _we_ are growing, we mean the community. It's awesome to see the support the community show us. Even in our bad moments, we get your support. We're really happy that you do this, every fan letter we get, every time someone say something nice to us, we really understand that we do something important, something that is more important than ourselves.

We haven't done everything right. We're amateurs in a lot of fields. But we're experts in having fun and making a lot of file sharing happening. And we keep on improving on the areas we find our flaws. And you guys help us out. Thank you so much!

To celebrate today, we encourage you to keep on sharing. Keep on uploading, downloading, swapping bits of information. Let today be the pirates independence day! Today we celebrate the victories we've had and the victories that will come. Today we celebrate that we're united in our efforts. Keep on waving that black flag!

We've noticed at least 3 sites that are tricking users to buying access or similar. We do not condone this behaviour, The Pirate Bay is a free service!

If you've ended up on this page, we've re-hijacked you from the scam site (or you're a regular reader of our blog, but since we're writing boring stuff mostly, we think the first option applies). We'd want to encourage you to look for a reliable source on where to find a good proxy that works for you. The people at TorrentFreak usually have a good list of updated proxies. And if you can reach our original page, you should use that. It's always the safest thing to do.

Take care and don't get tricked. There's a war going on. It's the mafiaa against the people. Let's make sure that the people win.

Today news was out that the UK high court has decided that TPB is "massively infringing on copyright". The facts that no copyright is being infringed upon here at the site was not a welcome fact, so that was ignored apparantly.

Noone from TPB was invited to the court case, which would be normal to do in a democracy. This is not the first time this happens, it's been the same in most countries we're censored in. We have no right to speak since we're not rich.

Five ISPs got sued by the record companies to force them to block us. This is particularily interesting since music released and promoted exclusively here on TPB is currently in the brittish top charts. We are simply competitors that they just managed to squeeze out of their market, in a maffiesque way.

As usual there are easy ways to circumvent the block. Use a VPN service to be anonymous and get an uncensored internet access, you should do this anyhow. Or use TOR, I2P or some other darknet with access to the internets. Change your DNS settings with OpenDNS. Or use googles DNS servers... we could go on...

But don't forget that we can't allow this shit to happen. Next time they're coming for something else. And yes, there will be a next time if we don't stop them. Write to your ISP and tell them to appeal the case. Write to your local MPs and tell them that this is not allowed. Make sure your voice is heard. Remember, we're all the pirate bay, and we must stand united against the censorship from our opponents!

Athens, Greece - Political power in Athens, Greece, today signed an agreement with representatives for The Pirate Bay (TPB) about exclusive usage of the greek airspace at 8000-9000ft.

- This might come as a shock for many but we believe that we need to both raise money to pay our debts as well as encourage creativity in new technology. Greece wants to become a leader in LOSS, says Lucas Papadams, the new and crisply elected Prime Minister of Greece.

LOSS that he is referring to is not the state of finances in the country but rather Low Orbit Server Stations, a new technology recently invented by TPB. Being a leader for a long time in other types of LOSS, TPB has been working hard on making LOSS a viable solution for achieving 100% uptime for their services.

- Greece is one of few countries that understands the value of LOSSes. We have been talking to them ever since we came up with the solution seeing that we have equal needs of being able to find financially sustainable solutions for our projects, says Win B. Stones, head of R&D at TPB.

The agreement gives TPB a 5 year license to use and re-distribute usage of the airspace at 8000-9000 ft as well as unlimited usage of the radio space between 2350 to 24150 MHz. Due to the financial situation of both parties TPB will pay the costs with digital goods, sorely needed by the citizens of Greece.

One of the technical things we always optimize is where to put our front machines. They are the ones that re-direct your traffic to a secret location. We have now decided to try to build something extraordinary.

With the development of GPS controlled drones, far-reaching cheap radio equipment and tiny new computers like the Raspberry Pi, we're going to experiment with sending out some small drones that will float some kilometers up in the air. This way our machines will have to be shut down with aeroplanes in order to shut down the system. A real act of war.

We're just starting so we haven't figured everything out yet. But we can't limit ourselves to hosting things just on land anymore. These Low Orbit Server Stations (LOSS) are just the first attempt. With modern radio transmitters we can get over 100Mbps per node up to 50km away. For the proxy system we're building, that's more than enough.

But when time comes we will host in all parts of the galaxy, being true to our slogan of being the galaxy's most resilient system. And all of the parts we'll use to build that system on will be downloadable.