The Pirate Bay has long been the favored whipping boy of anti-piracy advocates everywhere. Attempts to block it have been made in many countries, and it is one of the sites that draws the most attention – and ire – in pro-SOPA/PIPA rhetoric. The Pirate Bay, so the argument goes, is exactly the kind of site SOPA and PIPA are designed to protect the entertainment industry from.

The people who run The Pirate Bay say they aren’t worried, though. In an interview with TorrentFreak they admit to having some concerns, but not for The Pirate Bay itself. They are worried “for democratic reasons.” The Pirate Bay has shown itself more than capable of circumventing whatever attempts at censorship are thrown at it. In fact, they have taken recent steps to ensure that the site will be even harder to block than it already is. Late last week they announced that they would stop hosting .torrent files and switch to Magnet links, which have the advantage of being harder to block and requiring less server storage space and bandwidth. The Magnet link switch means that anyone could host a mirror of the site with sufficiently large USB thumb drive.

What really concerns The Pirate Bay about SOPA/PIPA is what it means about the political power of the entertainment industry in the United States. They accuse the politicians in support of the bills of being “totally paid off, stupid or copyright holders.” Moreover, they point out that with this legislation the US is proposing to regulate what happens outside America’s borders, as the websites primarily targeted by SOPA/PIPA are largely hosted overseas.

The Pirate Bay emphasized the global nature of the internet, and the fact that it “can’t be run in one single country.” Apart from just fighting SOPA and PIPA themselves, “we must also take away the possibility for a single country to rule over the global infrastructure.”

[Source: TorrentFreak]