 | |
| Industry | Internet service provider |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | Stockholm, Sweden |
Key people | Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm |
| Products | Web hosting service |
| Website | www |
| Primary ASN | 33837 |
|---|---|
| Peering policy | Open |
PRQ is a Swedish Internet service provider and web hosting company created in 2004.
Based in Stockholm, PRQ was created by Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij, two founders of The Pirate Bay. [1]
Part of PRQ's business model is to host any customers regardless of how odd or controversial they may be. The New York Times wrote in 2008 that "The Pirate Bay guys have made a sport out of taunting all forms of authority, including the Swedish police, and PRQ has gone out of its way to be a host to sites that other companies would not touch." [2] The PRQ service has been described as "highly secure, no-questions-asked hosting services". The company holds almost no information about its clientele and is maintaining few if any of its own logs, according to a 2008 news report. [3] Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm are said to have amassed "considerable expertise in withstanding legal attacks". Svartholm is quoted to have said, "We do employ our own legal staff. We are used to this sort of situation" in a telephone interview. [3] Due to hosting The Pirate Bay, PRQ was target of a police raid. [4]
The co-founders have been criticized for hosting controversial websites, including web pages that promote paedophilia, [5] [6] [7] such as the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), a paedophile and pederasty advocacy organization. Local authorities and anti-paedophilia activists in Sweden have failed to persuade PRQ to close the sites. [8] The pair defended their decision, citing freedom of speech. [9]
The co-owners were also criticized for creating and hosting AMERICASDUMBESTSOLDIERS.COM, a website identifying deceased military personnel that invited visitors to rank how "dumb" the soldiers were based on the manner in which they died. [10]
Other criticism originates from the hosting of BitTorrent website The Pirate Bay, [11] WikiLeaks, [12] and the French far-right blog Fdesouche. [13]
On 1 October 2012, PRQ was raided and a number of sites which they provided hosting for were taken offline for alleged copyright infringement. [14]
Topsite is a term used by the warez scene to refer to underground, highly secretive, high-speed FTP servers used by release groups and couriers for distribution, storage and archiving of warez releases. Topsites have very high-bandwidth Internet connections, commonly supporting transfer speeds of hundreds to thousands of megabits per second; enough to transfer a full Blu-ray in seconds. Topsites also have very high storage capacity; a total of many terabytes is typical. Early on these warez sites were mainly distributing software such as games and applications after the release groups removed any protections. Now they are also a source of other copyright protected works such as movies and music. It is strictly prohibited for sites to charge for access to the content, due to decreased security, and sites found doing so are shunned by the topsite community.
Piratbyrån was a Swedish think tank established to support the free sharing of information, culture, and intellectual property. Piratbyrån provided a counterpoint to lobby groups such as the Swedish Anti-Piracy Bureau.
The stichting BREIN translates roughly as association for the Protection of the Rights of the Entertainment Industry of the Netherlands. BREIN is an association in which the Dutch recording industry and movie studios participate.
The Pirate Bay is an online index of digital content of entertainment media and software. Founded in 2003 by Swedish think tank Piratbyrån, The Pirate Bay allows visitors to search, download, and contribute magnet links and torrent files, which facilitate peer-to-peer, file sharing among users of the BitTorrent protocol.
This is a timeline of events in the history of networked file sharing.
Hans Fredrik Lennart Neij, alias TiAMO, is the co-founder of The Pirate Bay, and the Swedish Internet service provider and web hosting company PRQ. Neij was one of the defendants in The Pirate Bay Trial which began on 16 February 2009. He and other operators of The Pirate Bay were charged with assisting users in copyright infringing practices. His time during the aforementioned trial has been captured in the documentary film TPB AFK by Simon Klose.
Per Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, alias anakata, is a Swedish computer specialist, known as the former co-owner of the web hosting company PRQ and co-founder of the BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay together with Fredrik Neij and Peter Sunde.
Steal This Film is a film series documenting the movement against intellectual property directed by Jamie King, produced by The League of Noble Peers and released via the BitTorrent peer-to-peer protocol.
BayImg is an image hosting website founded in 2007 by The Pirate Bay, and pulled offline after a TPB server was compromised in 2014. BayImg provided a no-registration service that did not have any copyright license enforced on its images.
The Internet in Sweden was used by 94.0% of the population, the fourth highest usage rate in the world, behind only the Falkland Islands (96.9%), Iceland (96.0%), and Norway (95%) in 2015. Sweden ranks 18th and 5th highest in the world in terms of the percentage of its fixed and wireless broadband subscriptions. It has the second fastest average internet connection speed in the world.
Good Copy Bad Copy is a 2007 documentary film about copyright and culture in the context of Internet, peer-to-peer file sharing and other technological advances, directed by Andreas Johnsen, Ralf Christensen, and Henrik Moltke. It features interviews with many people with various perspectives on copyright, including copyright lawyers, producers, artists and filesharing service providers.
TorrentFreak (TF) is a blog dedicated to reporting the latest news and trends on the BitTorrent protocol and file sharing, as well as on copyright infringement and digital rights.
Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi, alias brokep, is a Swedish entrepreneur and politician. Sunde is of Norwegian and Finnish ancestry. He is best known for being a co-founder and ex-spokesperson of The Pirate Bay, a BitTorrent search engine. He is an equality advocate and has expressed concerns over issues of centralization of power to the European Union in his blog. Sunde also participates in the Pirate Party of Finland and describes himself as a socialist. As of April 2017, Sunde has been working on a new venture called Njalla, a privacy oriented domain name registrar.
The Pirate Bay raid took place on 31 May 2006 in Stockholm, when The Pirate Bay, a Swedish website that indexes torrent files, was raided by Swedish police, causing it to go offline for three days. Upon reopening, the site's number of visitors more than doubled, the increased popularity attributed to greater exposure through the media coverage, which is an example of the Streisand effect.
The Pirate Bay trial was a joint criminal and civil prosecution in Sweden of four individuals charged for promoting the copyright infringement of others with the torrent tracking website The Pirate Bay. The criminal charges were supported by a consortium of intellectual rights holders led by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), who filed individual civil compensation claims against the owners of The Pirate Bay.
OpenBitTorrent is an open BitTorrent tracker project for the BitTorrent protocol.
TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard is a 2013 Swedish documentary film directed and produced by Simon Klose. It focuses on the lives of the three founders of The Pirate Bay – Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, and Gottfrid Svartholm – and the Pirate Bay trial. Filming began sometime in 2008, and concluded on 28 February 2012.
Operation Payback was a coordinated, decentralized group of attacks on high-profile opponents of Internet piracy by Internet activists using the "Anonymous" moniker. Operation Payback started as retaliation to distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on torrent sites; piracy proponents then decided to launch DDoS attacks on piracy opponents. The initial reaction snowballed into a wave of attacks on major pro-copyright and anti-piracy organizations, law firms, and individuals.
BayFiles is a website and file hosting service created by two of the founders of The Pirate Bay.
A warg is a fictional demonic species of wolves created by J.R.R. Tolkien.