Is internet piracy making a comeback, me hearties?

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In our recent episode on China's social credit system, I made a passing reference to the golden age of digital piracy.

Rick Falkfinger started the first pirate party in Sweden in 2006. By the 2009 EU elections, this seemingly niche political movement was the most popular party among under-30s in Sweden.

And another group of Swedes was running the most notorious piracy site of them all, the Pirate Bay. At the time, peer-to-peer file sharing made up more than half of all upload traffic on the internet.

Then, of course, streaming came along, and the golden age of piracy seemed to be over.

And yet it now seems to be on the rise again. Producer Adair Shepard has been looking into the rise, fall, and potential return of digital piracy.

G'day, Adair. Hello, Matt.
I'm very excited to talk about this. I've got a question for you first of all.

Would you steal a car? is the question. I don't know.

What do you remember about this era? What do you remember about the peak of piracy?

Look, what I remember is that the video, you know, VHS and DVD production companies really, really were very upset about it.

And they were very convinced that putting a sort of rocky, grungy thing at the start of every single DVD would convince you to like DVDs more and want to buy them. It's catchy.

Sure, yeah, it's catchy. Really annoying, but yeah, really.
Really annoying.

I mean, the thing that always made me laugh was back when they were VHS tapes, there used to be like an announcement at the start that said, by watching this announcement, you know that this is a genuine video, a genuine non-pirated tape.

And I'm like, yeah, but this is really annoying. I just want to watch the movie.
So maybe I'll just get a pirated version so I don't have to watch this stupid thing.

Why were the Swedes such a big deal in the world of piracy? Well, they really were, right?

Because like we talked about good old Rick and the Pirate Party and that started in Sweden and then the Pirate Bay, which was the biggest piracy site, started in Sweden.

And I spent a lot of time while I was researching this episode watching videos of, you know, very pale, nerdy Swedish men,

which is not an insult. I'd fit in very well with them.
Yes, yes. Yeah.
In Sweden, they invested in broadband like really early in the 90s.

And so all these guys, people grew up on the internet and grew up with like this open source idea of the internet where everything was copying, everything was sharing stuff.

At first, on kind of a small scale, it wasn't a massive issue, but that was just the way everything was shared because there was no other option. So, Peter Sunda was one of the founders of Pirate Bay.

He talks about like when things started to change, and he saw this one video in particular that really disturbed him.

Jackie and I are on a mission to stop piracy. If this were a movie, we could be on the bag guys ourselves.

But this is the real world. We need your help.
Why you buy pirate and movie and music? You support criminals. Now these criminals are counterfeiting other things like electronics and medicine.

Hey, Asher, demand the real thing. Help us stop piracy.
That's culminating.

Awesome. Very exciting.
They got the big dogs involved. Well, yeah, first of all, that video involved Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jackie Chan riding on motorcycles on the freeway with no helmets.

So, you know, they were kind of breaking the rules a little bit. But it's interesting that they're talking about you're supporting criminals because that potentially was the case with pirated DVDs.

But was that really the case with, you know, movies being sent online that people were just sort of ripping off legitimate DVDs and then sharing online, were those people then going on to counterfeit medicines?

I don't know that they were. And also, pirate is just such a cool name.
Yeah, I know. And so they're like, okay, we got to make anti-piracy cool.

We got to get on motorbikes with Jackie Chan and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So they felt really demonized. They were being called criminals.

And the thing that really epitomized that in Sweden was a lobby group that formed in 2001 called the Anti-Piracy Bureau.

And so all these young people in response, they created the Piracy Bureau. Okay, yeah.
The Pirate Bay was a project of the Piracy Bureau.

The Piracy Bureau. That's very good.
Yes, the Piracy Bureau, which is great. Okay, so they set up the Pirate Bay.

And for people who don't know, the Pirate Bay was sort of a pretty lo-fi kind of a website where it was basically a search engine where you could download torrent files, sort of a directory that would point you in the direction of other people who had the file that you were after.

And you would download little pieces of it from other people's computers. There were all these like sites, you know, the Pirate Wake Bay definitely wasn't the first site for piracy.

Napster famously come before and there was like other ones that I've never heard of. Nutella, e-donkey 2000, Kazar.
Oh, I remember Kazar. Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I never used it.

Yeah, yeah, of course. I don't know.

They were like, these sites suck. because you're downloading a file hosted on just one person's computer and it's pretty slow.
Yes.

This new new BitTorrent technology basically, it lets you download from multiple places at once. And once you start downloading it, you also start sharing it.
Yeah, yeah. And yeah, you're right.

The pirate bay wasn't hosting any of these files. It was just a directory that linked you to these.
Yeah.

So it meant that, you know, I could click download on a movie and I would download a tiny fraction of it from your computer, a tiny fraction of it from a thousand different computers.

And so it meant that you didn't have have to be uploading huge amounts of stuff in order for the sharing to work. It was sort of a

sharing system

in the very most literal way. Yeah.
And they were right. Like BitTorrent was a game changer in the early to late 2000s.

There were some researchers that said that BitTorrent accounted for 60 to 80% of all uploads in Europe. Yep.
I buy that. Yeah.
I was like, that seems massive.

Well, what else was happening on the internet?

I mean, YouTube wasn't a massive thing until sort of the later part of the 2000s, and the internet just wasn't really fast enough to stream things.

And so, basically, the only way that you could pass video around was by sending it in tiny little pieces and then watching it once it was all downloaded. Yeah, interesting.

Well, I was just thinking, like, the thing about this topic is, like, you were probably like conscious during all of this. I feel like this is showing my age a little bit.
I've never known.

It's not that long ago. I was like reading about this like it was a period piece.

But, like, it's not that long ago.

Brutal idea.

But the Pirate Bay, their own stats said that their traffic accounted for 60 to 65% of all BitTorrent traffic in like 2011. Right.

So they claimed that at one point the Pirate Bay accounted for 50% of all internet traffic, which I don't buy. I'm like, I was trying to make that maths work and I don't think that's a problem.

Yeah, no, that doesn't sound right. But yeah, it was definitely a big problem.
And a lot of people were quite angry.

And soon the founders of Pirate Bay, so that was Peter Sunda and then also two other guys, they started getting emails from Hollywood, from copyright holders.

And I've got one of the letters that they got. Let's see how scary this letter is.
On your website, The Pirate Bay, you are offering several fonts for free download. Yes.

So this is from a font company.

Oh, okay, right.

I thought this was, you know, Warner Brothers Studios apparently seemingly going after them over fonts.

I just want to point out these fonts that they're apparently offering people for free outrageously included Helvetica. Yeah.
I don't know the Trump Medieval. What's that?

I'm going to have to look into what Trump Medieval is as a font. Well, if you look at their response.
Oh, crikey. Oh,

very funny. So this is a letter that is being sent back to Linotype, which is the font company that is obviously trying to get them to stop sharing the fonts on their website.

It is written with every single word in a different font, obviously, of all the fonts that they are offering. It says, Dear friends at Linotype, this is indeed a concerning situation.

To our knowledge, the site you refer to and the activities taking place does not violate Swedish law. The site and the tracker is merely a way of connecting people, kind of like what Nokia does.

The actual data is stored on the individual

on the individual users' computers. If horrible crimes of bloody murder and such are being committed as we speak, it is them who are the criminals.

One would not prosecute Nokia because Torrance use their phones. Terrorists, I think that says, but it's very difficult.
That might be Trump Medieval. Yeah, it could be Trump Medieval.

So, this was like the response that they gave to everyone. They're not hosting any copyrighted material.
They're not doing anything wrong. And they were often a lot ruder than this email.

And so that's why this is the only one I'm going to show you. Yeah, fair enough.
Okay.

They were getting takedown notices from DreamWorks, Microsoft, Warner Brothers, all of the major studios, and they were just not backing down, the site was staying up. And so in May 2006,

something did happen.

I got a phone call from someone that there was a lot of policemen there. So I went there with a cab and the police actually stopped the cab with lights flashing and all.

And they wanted to know who I was. And I kept asking, who are you? And they, who are you? And after a bit of who are you?

They finally, yeah we're police officers we're here on investigations the obvious goal of the police was to get the pirate bay offline after a bit of who are youing that's my favourite part of that yeah

so there's a clip from the docker good copy bad copy and yeah on the 31st of may 2006 the website servers in stockholm were raided and seized by the swedish government and all of the founders were arrested pirate bay was then down for three days which is the longest pirate bay has ever ever been down because the site is very small.

It's just a directory. And so at one point, the most downloaded file on Pirate Bay was a backup of the site itself.

So people could just sort of share it anywhere that they wanted to. That's very interesting.
Yeah, exactly. This was a massive deal.

And it got so much publicity that it did the opposite of what they wanted. And traffic to Pirate Bay went up.

Yeah, I mean, that's the funny thing with all of these things was that they were really drawing attention to these websites by raiding them, by putting them in the news. Exactly.

Then people wouldn't necessarily have known that this website exists.

Suddenly, you had the news saying these people are in trouble because their website allows you to download literally every movie ever made for free.

And people are going to go, best advertising ever. And then they go, despite the best efforts of the police, the website has not been taken down.
Oh, okay.

Click. Incredible.
Yeah. There was this really high-profile trial.
It was the first court case to ever be broadcast live on Swedish radio.

So for three weeks, for like seven to eight hours a day, it was broadcast. Rick was there.
He was handing out cookies made from pirated recipes.

They were found guilty. Okay, the City Court of Stockholm has today given judgment in the so-called Pirate Bay case.
And the court has found that the four prosecuted persons are guilty.

They were fined the equivalent of 4.8 million Australian dollars, which of course they did not have because it was not a profitable website. There was no ads.
No. They like appealed.

Some of them fled the country, but eventually they all went to jail. And through all of this time, the Pirate Bay stayed up.
At one point in the span of two months, it's moved seven times.

They tried a lot of different things to move the servers to different places. And one of them, they tried buying a micro-nation to host the servers.
Now. Yes.

Can Can I jump in because I think I know the micro-nation. Yes.
Was it Sea Land? It was. You know about Sea Land.
Tell me about Sea Land. Oh, I definitely know about Sea Land.

I'm a big fan of Sea Land.

Amazing. During World War II, one of the things that the British did was they built these kind of big concrete edifices that they could drag out into the ocean and then sink to the bottom.

But they were so big that they could sit on the bottom and then you could use the top of them as as like an anti-aircraft firing platform.

So, basically, they were dropping forts out into the North Sea. Oh, okay.

They were kind of very hastily constructed concrete islands sitting on sandbeds out in the North Sea that would allow them to try and shoot down German planes before they made it over the British coast.

And so, they dropped a whole bunch of them out there in the North Sea, and one of them they dropped outside of British territorial waters.

And so in the 1970s, this Irish fellow by the name of Paddy Roy Bates, it might have been in the 60s. 60s, yeah.
67, I want to say? Yes. Yeah, okay.

He basically went out there and claimed it as an independent country, this tiny little platform out in the middle of the North Sea

and claimed it as the nation of sea land. Very invented name.
Yes. And then sort of thusly began a many decades-long process of the British trying to say, actually, actually, you're part of us.

I think he did a bit of pirate radio broadcasting from it. Yeah, I think so.
Yeah, and probably the reason I know about it is because the Pirate Bay got involved with them.

So tell us what the Pirate Bay wanted from them. Well, yeah, in 2006, the Prince of Sealand, so his son, put it up for sale.
And the Pirate Bay decided they were going to raise money in a fundraiser.

And in two days, they raised $25,000, which is not enough to buy a micronation.

They didn't buy it. Ah, I remember that they were going to.
I was like, oh, that's such a clever idea, but okay, so they didn't. It didn't work out.
Yeah.

I think we might need to do another one of these episodes about Sea Land because this is only just scratching the surface of Sea Land. There was actually, at one point, there was like a deadly battle.

There was like a tussle for the control of Sea Land that may have involved guns. There was...
fire.

There was...

Yeah, yeah, no, there's a, there's the saga of Sea Land

was extraordinary. And I believe there was hostages taken and that kind of thing.

Let's just put put a pin in that. I'll prepare an episode on Sea Land.
Please do. Please do.
And we can talk about that soon. So they didn't buy Sea Land.
They didn't buy Sea Land.

They managed to chug along for a long time. In fact, they kind of still exist.
Is that right? They still exist. They still haven't been taken down.

The technology hasn't been updated since 2004. And they've been like, it's a terrible website.
Yeah. And it's very slow.

But in 2024, it was still one of the biggest torrenting sites on the internet just because people know it and it's never been able to be taken down. Tremendous.

Obviously, at least in my understanding, it felt like people went off the idea of pirating things because it became so much easier to access things just via streaming sites.

I remember during the golden age of digital piracy, people were angry at the fact that TV shows would come out in the US

and we would have to wait in Australia for days or weeks before we could watch them here. DVD series would come out in the US and then they wouldn't come out in Australia for a long time.

There was a whole bunch of really serious frustrations and annoyances that people in Australia had with the way that particularly TV shows were distributed in Australia that drove a lot of people to piracy.

But streaming services really kind of addressed a lot of those problems where Australians were suddenly able to access you know, the biggest TV shows in the world at the same time as the Americans were.

And so that made a lot of people more happy to pay a small amount of money for streaming. So yeah, you're 100% right.

In 2015, 43% of all internet users had consumed at least one item illegally in the past three months. So nearly half, yeah.
Amazing. Yes.
And was it almost always Game of Thrones?

Yes, we were by far the biggest torrenters of Game of Thrones. And then by 2019, that was down to 16%.
So that's like a massive drop in four years.

But we're now hearing news that apparently people are pirating again. Yeah.
How many streaming services do you pay for? More than I should. Look, it'd be probably four or five, maybe.

I have to do an audit of that crikey.

I mean, that's going up towards the amount of money that people used to have to pay for satellite TV. It's an extraordinary amount of cash each week these days.

On average, Australians pay for 3.2 services. And so that's like $50 per month, $600 per year.
And that's gone up over the last few years. When Netflix first came to Australia, it was $9

a month, which is like the equivalent of $11 after inflation. And now to get an ad-free version of Netflix, you have to pay $20.

Interesting. And then the other part is there is like 15 services now available in Australia.
Wow. These studios used to make a lot of money in DVD sales.

There's all these examples of these films that like didn't make amazing money at the box office, but got it back in DVD sales. Yeah, yeah.

And they lost that and they were just licensing to streaming services. And so everyone was like, well, if we could have that direct, then we would finally have that backup, right? Yes.

That's kind of what everyone is saying that is driving people back to piracy. I've got a graph for you.

In 2015, it's basically saying that 49% of people in this survey had downloaded or streamed illegally movies or films in the last three months. That then dropped rapidly to 2018, it was only 21%.

And then it's been hovering around there. Now it's up at 28%.

And there seems to be, yeah, a gradual increase of people doing this. Yeah, very gradual.
And like, that's kind of what you're seeing everywhere in the world.

In Sweden and Europe, too, it's a similar kind of 3%, 5% bump since 2019. So there's a definite trend there, but it's like super gradual.

And also like the last few years probably make a difference, right? This is like up until 2023.

And there was one survey that I found, so from Muzo, that said that website visits to piracy sites have gone from 130 billion in 2020 to 216 billion in 2024, which seems like a massive jump. Yeah.

The interesting thing that this chart indicates to me is that a big amount of the increase is coming from people unlawfully streaming live sport. Yes.

Which was something that people really couldn't do before. But obviously people are increasingly finding ways to do that.
And so that seems to be a big contributor to the amount of increase in piracy.

Yeah. well people talking about say you follow a European soccer team.
Yeah, there's all these different competitions and every single one has a different streaming service that you're paying for.

You're following it across all of these different services and you're just trying to watch like one team. Yeah, interesting.

But one thing I thought was interesting was with music, it seems like the effect isn't quite as dramatic because Spotify doesn't have that fracturing. Like you can have one thing.

Obviously, there's a lot of problems with Spotify. There definitely are.
But you can have one service. It's not like every music studio has their own streaming service.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's interesting. Everything is on every single one of the music streaming services.
Hey, Adair. So we were talking about Game of Thrones.

I have in my hand the first book in the Game of Thrones series, in the Song of Ice and Fire series by George R. R.
Martin. Oh, okay.

And if you look at it, I think, if I'm not mistaken, the font of this text is Trump Medieval.

Oh my god. We've come full circle.
We're back to Trump Medieval.

Ade, thank you so much. Very interesting.
Thank you. Thank you very much.

Just before we go, I want to give Cara Jensen-McKinnon, our supervisor cruiser, just a quick call. Hello, Cara.
Hello.

I just had a quick look at the If You're Listening inbox this morning, and well, I don't know what I expected, but

there's a lot of emails about two particular jokes in last last week's episode about Taiwan.

I know.

So one of them was referring to the Diabolo guy turned special agent as Diabolo 7. That was mine.
Flawless. Well, I thought so.
I thought we couldn't do better. And then you wrote the

Taiwan is Girt By She joke.

And I think

it's amazing. And I think that the response from people indicates that they like that one better.
So I just wanted to congratulate you. Well, thank you.

A very impressive joke and well worth congratulating.

Thanks so much. Look, hopefully, there's a raise coming my way because there's plenty more where that came from.
Well, that's the thing I'm worried about.

This week we're going to do an episode on humanoid robots. Do you think that we can top it? I haven't written a better joke than either of those just yet.
I feel like we'll get there.

We'll get something. Stay tuned.
Stay tuned. Bye.
Bye. That's Carrie Jensen McKinnon there.
We'll be back on Thursday with an episode about humanoid robots and whether we should even be bothering.

See you then.