PirateBay Opens a New Blog Platform

The PirateBay has a long history of fighting for the freedom of the internet users. Through many trials and colossal fights with the Swedish authorities and media companies, the Pirates have always prevailed. The PirateBay remains on of the best and biggest torrent tracker on the net.

Now, they delve deeper - PirateBay has announced a new Blogging platform, called BayWords. Registering is free, and the Pirates say that: "Many blogs are being shut down for uncomfortable thoughts and ideas. We will not do that. Our goal is to protect freedom of speech and your thoughts. As long as you don’t break any Swedish laws in your blog, we will defend it".

The platform is based on Wordpress MU, and only 100 MB are allocated for each user. Hardly enough for the heavy bloggers. On the other hand, if you want anonymity, BayWords might be a place for you. The Pirates also promise improvements later on.

It will be interesting to see what kind of blogs will emerge there, and if this becomes an interesting niche blogging platform, or just remains a gimmick.

The Pirate Bay Interrogations - Transcripts

The Swedish authorities are all over The Pirate Bay, but these guys don't seem to flinch.

First, they promised the site will keep on working, no matter what. And now it seems the Swedish prosecutor can't accuse them with anything more than "assisting copyright infringement", which is a relatively small accusation.

TorrentFreak posted the transcripts from the interrogation of the Pirate Bay people. Here they are.

Aside from a lot of "no comments" there are funny things, like this bit:

Interrogator: How can one translate the word tracker? (Note: same in Swedish)

A: It is not possible to translate.

Or this:

I: This has been a police investigation for a long time. The prosecutor’s case is one of copyright infringement, assisting in copyright infringement and conspiracy to commit copyright infringement. What is your position on this?

T: That he is wrong. That if we are guilty, then Google is guilty too.

I: You mean you can compare Google to The Pirate Bay?

T: Almost.

I: What the difference between them?

T: Well... One difference is that you can upload torrents on The Pirate Bay, but it’s really the same thing because if you have a site with copyrighted material, you can add the link to be indexed on Google. It’s the same level as both sites are handling user-generated material. We don’t have any views on what the content is, we just provide a search engine.

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Hopefully, this will all clear out soon, and the good guys of the Bay will continue doing their stuff.