The Pirate Bay Overview
Arguably the most popular torrent search engine on the planet today – and certainly the most resilient – The Pirate Bay was started by three Swedes back in 2009.
Originally conceived of as a relatively simple and straightforward project that would make finding obscure torrents a little easier, TPB (as The Pirate Bay has become known as) grew like a weed.
Almost overnight thousands and thousands of people were using PirateBay to not only find torrents that they wanted to download, but also upload and share torrents with the rest of the “warm” as well.
Before 2009 was over TPB was seeing a ton of traffic. The three Swedes that built the platform expanded into a small team, later taking on more volunteers around the world, and the infrastructure that would become ThePirateBay we know and love today was established.
Interestingly enough, the three founders of The Pirate Bay Peter Sunde, Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij showed exactly how serious they were about making information freely available around the world when they were arrested, convicted, and sentenced to a year in prison (and a significant find) for sharing and distributing copyrighted content and conducting copyright infringement.
That didn’t slow any of them down.
In fact, it may have even entrenched the views that these three original pirates had about the importance of their mission.
It may even be the catalyst behind why ThePirateBay is so impossible to kill these days. There’s nothing better than sticking a thumb in the eye of the authorities that tried – and continue to try – to shut down your life’s work and your life’s mission.
As long as TPB is still around (and it’s starting to look like the only things that could survive a nuclear Armageddon would be cockroaches and The Pirate Bay) there’s still going to be at least one little corner of the internet that remains completely and totally free.
Torrents – How Do They Work?
The way that torrents work is really pretty simple and straightforward.
Unlike a traditional download online, where you click a link in the entire file is downloaded from a single source to your computer, torrents instead break up the “heavy lifting” into tiny packets.
Those individual packets are organized through the tormenting network, and everyone that elects to “seed” those packets voluntarily distributes at least part – and sometimes all – of the files an individual is downloading.
The cool thing here is that this distribution of the workload really minimizes the amount of effort anyone individual upload has to be responsible for, but it also builds a lot of resiliency and a lot of redundancy into the torrent platform as well.
Where the authorities could shut down a single source website, or eliminate a single download from the internet, it’s impossible to stop the entire swarm that is seeding individual packets for a torrent.
There’s just too many moving pieces, and anytime you strike down one seeder another one can jump right into the torrent string, cover all the packets that they were going to distribute, and keep the download rocking and rolling.
Another huge advantage of breaking down the distribution of files this way is that you can get significantly faster speeds than you would have been able to otherwise.
You’re no longer bottlenecked by the single source of a file. Instead multiple users share the packets that they have across their individual connections, and because everyone is pulling in the same direction for these downloads the speeds you’ll enjoy are terrific.
Of course, another huge reason that ThePirateBay became as popular as it is today is because this decentralized sharing of files is perfect for spreading copyrighted material that has been cracked, ripped, or otherwise stripped of DRM to be distributed freely all over the world.
Some people get a little queasy at the idea of downloading movies, music, TV shows, and other electronic files. Others, though – especially those that make up the majority of the pirating community – do not have those moral quandaries.
These folks recognize that digital files have no physical scarcity whatsoever. It costs nothing extra to reproduce a digital copy of a movie, a digital copy of a song, or a digital copy of a book – whether that’s one time or one million times.
Because of this “gray hat” kind of community the torrent world has actually become one of the most important libraries in human history.
Now old movies, old music, and old manuscripts – as well as old pieces of software and so much more – that would have been lost to the sands of time years (if not decades) ago are now kept alive and well.
Trying to find a single organization that would be able to build this kind of library, let alone pay for data management, data storage, data security, and then make all of this information easily accessible is near an impossibility.
The people on the other side of the copyright fence might not look at things this way. But over here, with the people that created and use PirateBay, platforms like this one look a whole lot more like a modern-day version of the Library of Alexandria.
Only now, thanks to the decentralized nature of torrenting, we don’t have to worry about losing all of that knowledge, all of that information, and all of that wisdom to history should something go sideways.
A Quick History of Online Pirating
To the surprise of absolutely no one, the first few original online “pirates” were most interested in finding a way to share adult entertainment.
The earliest pirates – online pirates, anyway – grew up with the earliest version of the internet. We are talking about an internet that was almost impossible to search the way we do now (nothing like The Pirate Bay existed then).
USENET groups and similar “message boards” and later chat rooms had to be found manually or with a specific invitation, and that was really the only way to get into the world of piracy at first.
Later, though – especially around the time that Napster became stable and reliable (2002 or so) – software really came to the forefront of how internet pirates would interact with one another and with the content that they were after.
Napster changed the game completely.
For one thing, Napster introduced a whole world of not so technically savvy people to peer to peer file sharing (the bedrock of torrenting). This alone totally transformed the way that people thought about downloading files – as well as what kind of files they could pull off and through the internet.
Secondly (and maybe even more importantly), Napster introduced new online pirates to the idea of having a single repository to find, search for, and share new torrents and peer-to-peer files through.
This revolutionized everything.
Now instead of having to have backdoor invites, a friend of a friend of a connection, or just hope to randomly stumble upon a cash of torrents and peer-to-peer files it was possible to search for something you wanted to download, find a whole bunch of options available, and then begin downloading (via a peer-to-peer network) with extreme speed.
Obviously, security Napster left more than a little bit to be desired.
There were a ton of videos (particularly adult entertainment videos) that were nothing more than Trojan horses, keystroke loggers, and other viruses designed to take over computers, steal personal and private information, and generally just cause mayhem – and that was rampant on Napster in the early days.
Part of that environment, though, led to the creation of ThePirateBay as well.
The three Swedish fellows that built TPB from the ground up were passionate users of the Napster software, but were sick and tired of getting duped and fooled into downloading files that were incorrect, that were malicious in nature, or that were otherwise incomplete or corrupted.
That early experience showed these builders what they didn’t want their project to become as much as it showed what their project could create.
The end result was TPB, a single source search engine for torrents all over the world (and across pretty much every imaginable content category) with a built-in ranking and commenting system that increased safety and security in a big way.
Pirate Bay has come a long way in the 20 years or so since it’s been around. The foundation and the bedrock that this platform is built on, though, hasn’t changed even a little bit – and will never change, for that matter.
What Makes Pirate Bay So Resilient?
One of the most impressive thing about The Pirate Bay is its resiliency.
Almost from day one TPB has been under attack.
More than 20 different countries around the world have tried to ban or scrub PirateBay from the internet. An untold amount of movie stars, musicians, song writers, authors, and producers – as well as content creators and publishers across every industry imaginable – have all tried to do the same.
The Pirate Bay still stands.
It’s likely that the authorities are never going to leave The Pirate Bay alone.
Authoritarians are going to continue to try and control the flow of information. They’re going to try and make sure that the general public can’t access anything and everything they want to – whenever they want to – and they generally despise the idea of a decentralization of info and entertainment online, too.
That said, the founders and the current team responsible for leading (and improving upon) The Pirate Bay are never going to stop finding ways to stay just a step or two “in front of the fuzz”.
Pirate Bay helped to usher in the usage of magnet links in the torrenting world. They helped to popularize establishing multiple proxy websites of these kinds of platforms to avoid total linkage bans.
They’ve found ways to not only survive attacks and onslaughts from regulators, police, and government agents – as well as other groups of pirates, hackers, and crackers that would love to steal the top spot as the preferred destination for all torrenting needs.
TPB weathers these storms like no other group or platform probably could.
Litigation, market oversaturation, general pressure, and even outright blockades have not been enough to bring TPB under.
It’s hard to imagine there’s anything that could scrub ThePirateBay from the internet for very long. It’s likely that an iteration of The Pirate Bay is going to be around for as long as peer-to-peer downloads are a thing.
Interestingly enough, this platform has been able to survive (and thrive, really) even as competitors have folded by the wayside at almost breakneck pace.
The landscape for torrent platforms is nothing today like it was even just 20, 15, or even 10 years ago.
A lot of old “standards” in the torrenting world have decided to wave the white flag and give up for one reason or another. Many of the competitors that used to try and outdo or outfox Pirate Bay haven’t been in operation themselves for a decade or so.
There’s a reason for that.
There’s a reason that only TPB has been able to stand tall in these rocky seas all pirates must sail online, riding wave after wave without ever looking even a little bit worse for wear along the way.
Some of it has to do with the technology that PirateBay has helped to pioneer, technology that allows them to significantly decentralize their own operations the same way that peer-to-peer and torrent downloads are decentralized themselves.
Some of it has to do with the general embracing decentralized currencies, a dependent on donations and advertising, and a general community first approach when it comes to funding their operations.
The bulk of it, though, has to do with the rock solid foundation that Pirate Bay was built on – the foundation that we mentioned a moment ago.
This platform is created for a reason 20 years ago, and that reason is just as valid today – and will be just as valid tomorrow – as it was back then.
Information should be free.
People should have the ability to get the information that they want without having to fear reprisal from ANYONE.
The Pirate Bay puts control and power over information back in the hands of the global population.
It’s a game changer in every single sense of the word.
How to Use The Pirate Bay
One of the best things about this torrent platform is that it makes finding exactly what you are looking for about as simple and as straightforward a process as can be.
For starters, the whole platform is built around a powerful, flexible, and foolishly fast torrent search engine.
Punch in the keywords for the kinds of torrents that you are looking for, hit the search button, and let The Pirate Bay handle the rest of the heavy lifting of finding that information – and those torrents – for you.
It’s really that simple and that straightforward.
If you’ve ever used a major search engine before (and if you are online today you have), the TPB search engine works exactly the same way.
Even better, though, is that PirateBay makes it even easier to drill down and find exactly what you are looking for without any hassle, without any headache, and without any mix up.
Individual categories can be selected to help you refine your searches, corralling your keyword string to just the kind of content you are after.
Want to find a movie that shares the same title with a popular novel, and don’t want to have your TPB searches flooded with books that you don’t want to download?
All you have to do is select the MOVIES category – though you can drill even further down by choosing what kind and what quality of download you are looking for (and so much more).
You’re not going to find this kind of granular level of control a lot of other places.
Of course, the people behind Pirate Bay recognize that not every piece of content and not every torrent that they index will fit nicely into one or two specific categories.
For this kind of content they have an OTHER category, a sort of catchall bucket that all different kinds of torrents get dumped into – including e-books, comics, pictures, and more.
You’ll be amazed at just how much (and all the different kinds of) content finds its way into the OTHER category.
If you’re not looking for anything in particular you can also just search by category, looking for the most recent, the most popular, and the most heavily seeded torrents available in that section.
This is a great way to figure out if a new movie you’ve been hoping to get your hands on has finally been released in digital (or, at the very least, that it’s been ripped by other pirates and distributed well before that digital release came around).
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg!
At the end of the day, it’s the search capabilities (as well as the community) of Pirate Bay that really helped to separate this platform from the rest of the pack.
There are others out there to be sure. Some of them almost as old as PirateBay, even.
But none of them have the usability, the trustworthiness, or the credibility with the pirate community that ThePirateBay has.
Truth be told, you have to be at least a little bit crazy to even think about using other torrent search platforms before checking TPB first.
VPNs and Pirating
VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) are services that allow you to browse the web anonymously – so long as the VPN service itself doesn’t maintain records – and that can be a powerful tool when you are pirating via TPB.
Traditionally (when you browse the web without a VPN active, anyway), every single site you visit and every single piece of content that you download or stream is recorded somewhere along the line.
Either recorded in your web browser history, recorded with the cookies you pick up from different sites, or recorded directly with your ISP (internet service provider).
Somewhere, some way, someone is recording everything you do online.
With a VPN active, though, you essentially create an encrypted tunnel for all of your online traffic to go through.
After signing up for and initializing your VPN software you are going to be able to use the web – and even torrent – the same way that you use to, only this time you’ll enjoy complete and to end security, protection, and anonymity.
Everything you do on your computer gets funneled through the VPN. That information is encrypted, transported to the VPN servers, decrypted, and then that information interacts with the website server that you are communicating with.
That works both ways, too!
This means that it’s impossible to trace or track any of the information you send or download online, but it also means that all of your online activity – the sites you browse included – are hidden, secured, and anonymized as well.
That’s pretty useful when you want to download files that authorities would rather that you weren’t downloading to begin with.
Thinking about downloading a brand-new digital release movie without paying the $20 or so that it costs?
Want to get your hands on a super high quality digital version of your favorite album without ponying up the price tag?
Looking to add to your e-book library with new titles but aren’t at all eager about spending the money on a hardback, paperback, or even digital copy?
You can do all of that – and more – safely and reliably on The Pirate Bay when you have a VPN protecting you from start to finish.
Never again do you have to worry about media companies or your ISP sending you threatening emails or letters, telling you that they are tracking your internet activity or that they are even going to shut down your internet connection if further violations occur.
Instead you’ll be able to do pretty much anything and everything you want to through your VPN behind a shield of total anonymity.
Finding the right VPN is a huge piece of the puzzle to using these kinds of services safely, though. And not all of them are created equally.
Invest the time, energy, and resources into finding the right VPN to use with The Pirate Bay and you’ll be a lot happier.
Do You Need a VPN to Pirate?
Though you don’t technically need a VPN to pirate, even on Pirate Bay, it’s really not a bad idea to have a solution like this running in the background to offer you just an extra level of protection.
To begin with, a VPN allows you to search and access Pirate Bay without ever having to alert anyone – authorities and your ISP included – that you are visiting this website.
Obviously, the kind of content shared on this website (or at least linked to, anyway) has a lot to do with the illicit and sometimes even legal underworld of online piracy.
Anytime you visit The Pirate Bay without a VPN rocking and rolling you’re basically throwing up a red flag that you are – at minimum – interested in finding (and maybe even downloading) content for free that you would have otherwise had to pay for.
Secondly, a VPN guarantees that all of your torrent traffic – the torrents that you download (leach) and the torrents that you upload (seed) – is completely anonymous, secure, and protected as well.
You won’t have to worry about getting cease and desist letters. You won’t have to worry about your internet connection being throttled because of these types of downloads. And you won’t have to worry about your connection being shut off completely, either.
Maybe more importantly, though, you won’t have to worry about anyone connecting to the same files you’re sharing across this peer-to-peer network getting a hold of personally identifying information from you directly.
Your IP address, your physical location, and every other bit of info about you, your computer, and your location are obfuscated and anonymized through the VPN itself.
Sure, you can still grab torrent and magnet link downloads directly from The Pirate Bay without having to use a VPN if that’s something you don’t want to spring for.
It’s just that the overall experience of using ThePirateBay (and torrents in general) with a VPN is so much better – and so much safer – that it really is a bit of a no-brainer. Particularly with how affordable many of the best VPN solutions are right now.
How to Find a Quality VPN
If you are going to be using a VPN with The Pirate Bay it’s important that you find a quality service that you can trust and rely on.
Here are just a few things to focus on when your searching for choices:
Security
Nothing is more important when getting a VPN to do a bit of online piracy through than making sure it's got tons of security features. You want end to end encryption at the very minimum, but you also want anonymizing tools, you want a guarantee that no data/traffic logs are tracked, and you want any other protection you can get as well. Security is not something you can compromise on when it comes to VPNs.
Speed
Speed is another big piece of the puzzle when shopping around for a piracy focused VPN. Your raw internet speed is going to see a little bit of hit no matter what kind of VPN you choose. That’s then nature of the beast when you’re tunneling your traffic through a VPN rather than a direct connection. Still, if you want fast and snappy downloads from torrents found on TPB you want speed to be as high as possible.
Servers
The more servers a VPN has the better your odds of enjoy secure and speedy torrent downloads are. Server locations around the world allow the VPN to prioritize your traffic based on where it’s coming from (and where it’s going), boosting your performance without dropping safety along the way.
Square those three things away when you are looking for a new VPN and you’ll have nothing to worry about when you use ThePirateBay!
Why Use ThePirateBay?
There are only about a million and one different reasons to use PirateBay, including (but not limited to):
Content
Free Content! – The number reason, hands down, that people like ThePirateBay is because it’s an effortless way to find free content that you would have had to pay for somewhere else. You can share and download anything (and we mean anything) online here, and there’s a ton of content being added on an almost daily basis. Best of all, TPB doesn’t charge a penny for you to use the platform, either.
Reliable
Safe and Reliable – The community that has been built on PirateBay is unlike anything you’re going to find elsewhere. Torrent creators are allowed (and encouraged) to anonymize themselves when they add new torrents to this search platform, but they are also encouraged to use usernames that are easily identifiable by other users. This builds a lot of trust over time. Comments are also enabled on torrents, letting end-users that have downloaded those specific files give you a better idea of whether or not it’s safe to do so.
Effortless
Effortless to Use – Other torrent search platforms have tried to do what The Pirate Bay does and fallen flat on their face, largely in part because they try to overcomplicate the process. The developers behind PirateBay have stated multiple times that they try to do what Google does – and that’s simplify, streamline, and minimize everything on TPB to make the experience that much easier.
Accessible
Always On and Accessible – Things to the 24/7 nature of the internet, as well as the general resiliency of The Pirate Bay and all of the proxies/mirror sites up and running, you can find a TPB site up and running anytime (day or night) to get the content you need right then and there. The endless accessibility and always on nature of this platform is a huge bonus.
All in all, there are just a ton of different reasons to use this platform over all the others out there today.
What Are Pirate Bay Backups and Mirrors?
After The Pirate Bay was attacked (especially after the 2006 rate) and temporarily brought off-line the leadership team and developers look for new solutions that would help decentralize their platform the same way that torrents were.
A couple of new proposals were put forward, but the most exciting (and the one that’s proven to be the most reliable) has been the decision to create mirror sites and proxies in bunches.
These mirrors and these proxies are carbon copies of the Pirate Bay, all running independently and separately from one another, but all of them offering the same functionality, the same search database, and the same overall usefulness.
This redundancy means that if any individual Pirate Bay site is brought down (even temporarily) there’s only about a handful of other mirror and proxy options ready to go right then and there – and a whole bunch of other replacements soon to rollout as well.
A set of like this is kind of like the mythical hydra.
Authorities and regulators may be able to cut a single head off of ThePirateBay, but two more are going to pop up where that original one was and to “the beast” is only going to grow bigger and stronger because of it.
The bottom line is that you aren’t ever going to have to worry about PirateBay disappearing anytime soon (or anytime in the future, for that matter).
The only way The Pirate Bay disappears once and for all is if EVERY mirror is brought down and not replaced, EVERY proxy banned from the web, and every one of The Pirate Bay team deciding not to continue carrying this torch any longer.
I likely does all that sound?
Not very likely at all!
How Do I Download from the PirateBay?
Grabbing torrents from ThePirateBay is about as easy as it gets.
That said, first time pirates just beginning to sail the online seas might not be sure of how to get rocking and rolling with this platform. Hopefully this quick guide helps out.
First, you’ll need a torrent downloading software. There are a ton of options – the best ones available free of charge – and you’ll need to do a little research to find one that works for you.
Second, you need to think about getting a VPN.
VPNs can give you a layer of protection and anonymity that “regular” online browsing and downloading cannot. They are cheap, fast, and secure – but may or may not be necessary, depending on your risk tolerance and how you torrent in the first place.
Third, you need to pop over to The Pirate Bay and search for the files you want to download.
You can search by keyword, exact title, category, or even just browse some of the most recent or most popular torrents, too.
After all that is done, and you’ve found the file you want to grab, you have a couple of options as well.
You can click the download torrent button, downloading a file to your computer – a tiny file – that provides all the info that your torrent software needs to find the torrent and start grabbing packets from anyone seeding.
Or you can grab the magnet file, which works a little faster, is a little more reliable, and can have your download up and running in no time flat.
And that’s it – now you’re off to the races!
Tips and Tricks for Using The Pirate Bay
If you’re serious about making the most of all TPB has to offer, it’s a good idea to keep these tips and tricks in your back pocket:
Top
Top 100 Lists Are Your Friend – The Top 100 Lists on TPB shine a light on the most popular 100 torrents over a given stretch of time, highlighting files that have been downloaded more than anything else – a good indication that they are legit, safe, and what people are after right now.
VPN
Use the Power of a VPN – A VPN isn’t exactly as “must have” when it comes to downloading torrents, but it’s pretty close. With a VPN you’re able to browse anonymously, you’re able to download anonymously, and you’re able to protect and secure your online activity (even when you’re not on TPB).
Activity
Be Smart with Your Download Activity – There’s going to be a real temptation to want to download anything and everything that’s on TPB as soon as you first poke around. There’s just so much content – all of it free – that even trying to pick which downloads you want to prioritize can become a bit of a problem. We’d advise, though, that you take things a little slower at first. You want to get a feel for how the platform works, but you also don’t want to bring unwanted attention to yourself (especially if you’re not running a VPN yet).
Anonymity
Stay Anonymous – The online community of users on TPB is a big part of its success. Getting to know certain uploaders for the type of content they share (and the quality) helps sifting through all the different torrents really easy. That said, try to keep as much anonymity on the platform as you can. The less you share your real world identity the better off you’ll be!
Feedback
Give Feedback – If you come across a torrent that was really fast, high quality, and safe it’s important to leave feedback letting fellow Pirate Bay members know. If you come across a real dud, something misnamed, or even something malicious (which doesn’t happen much, but does happen) then you’ll want to leave that feedback for sure as well.
Is ThePirateBay Free?
As a full peer to peer platform, The Pirate Bay is – and always will be – available 100% free of charge (without any strings attached).
There’s no payment necessary to use the search engine. There’s no payment required to download or upload files. You’re never going to be asked for your payment information (or any other private information, for that matter).
At the same time, those that wish to financially support Pirate Bay are able to do so by donating money through a couple of different channels. Crypto currencies are accepted (almost all of the major ones, anyway), making it easy to donate your funds to this platform anonymously.
Outside of The Pirate Bay, though, you might want to spend a little bit of money on a VPN just to give yourself an extra layer of protection you wouldn’t have had otherwise. TPB doesn’t condone or endorse downloading copyrighted material, but they aren’t going to stop you from doing so if you wish, either.
A VPN is inexpensive, safe, and secure and a bit of a “no-brainer” kind of extra add-on for people that want to use The Pirate Bay often. For less than the price of a single movie a month you’ll be able to download hundreds of gigabytes – terabytes – of content without any strings attached.
Not bad, right?
How to Know If a Torrent is “Alive” on TPB
You’ll know that a torrent is still alive and available download on Pirate Bay just by checking how many seeders and leachers it has at any one given point in time.
As long as there is at least one seeder for the file you are looking for (and they have 100% file completion for that upload) you can consider the torrent to be alive and should be able to download it without any trouble.
Obviously, more seeders mean that a file is both more popular and going to download faster because so many people are going to be sending you individual packets at the same time.
Torrents with hundreds of even thousands of seeders rolling are going to speed the torrenting process up significantly!
Which Torrent File Should I Download?
One of the challenges that a lot of people have using The Pirate Bay for the first time is figuring out which of the many torrent files available they should grab first.
It’s not at all uncommon to have hundreds of results return when you search for a piece of content on Pirate Bay. All of those results are going to be individual torrent files with individual packets that need to be downloaded, and settling on the right one – and letting that file download to completion – is critically important.
The first thing you want to look for is whether or not a file has a lot of seeders.
You need at least one seeder for a file to be shared through the peer-to-peer network, but more seeders not only indicate that the file is “healthier” and that your download will move faster – but it also lets you know that the file is safe and reliable.
If hundreds of people that had already downloaded the file had a bad experience they wouldn’t be sharing with others!
After that, you’re going to want to have a closer look at whether or not there’s a colored skull icon next to the names of the upload or you want to download torrents from.
Different colors indicate different user levels, but a skull of any color is going to let you know that this is a VIP uploader, one of the more trusted members of the community, and somebody you know provides clean, reliable, and high-quality torrents on a regular basis.
The next thing you’ll want to do is check the size of the files themselves.
It’s not at all uncommon to find Blu-ray films that are hundreds of gigabytes in size, with the same film (almost the same quality) available for a couple of gigabytes – or even less.
You’ll have to decide how much of a trade-off you’re willing to make between overall quality and space-saving on your storage solution.
Finally, it’s not a bad idea to check the comments and confirm that the community has checked out that file to be legitimate, safe, and useful.
This is particularly important when you are grabbing software from The Pirate Bay.
You want to make sure that the key generators are safe, that the cracks are secure, and that the software is going to work the way you want it to when the download has finished.
It’s not uncommon for other users to troubleshoot any problems folks might have with these torrents down in the comments section, either.
You may come across tips, tricks, and even total walkthroughs in the comments – inside info not available anywhere else that you’d have overlooked if you didn’t stop in to check the comment area to begin with!
What Are All These Skulls on TPB?
As mentioned a moment ago, the skulls (early iconography from real-world pirates, like the kind you see on the famous Jolly Roger flag) next to usernames on The Pirate Bay indicate that a user is valuable to the community, shares high-quality torrents, and can trusted.
Pink and green level skulls let you know that a user is especially trusted. Pink skulls are the “entry-level” for this kind of indicator, with green skulls delineating a VIP (someone that’s been on Pirate Bay for quite a while and someone that the community has really come to trust as a resource).
This doesn’t mean that users without skulls cannot be trusted. That’s not what we’re suggesting at all!
It just means that the user hasn’t yet met the criteria from TPB staff to be a trusted member of the community. If they keep adding great torrents, check out as a safe provider, and are active in the community they will earn those colored skulls in no time flat.
How Do I Know If a Movie/Show Torrent is Good Quality?
The best indicator that a particular movie or television show torrent on Pirate Bay is of high quality is jumping into the comment section in seeing what people have to say.
If there aren’t any comments, though, you want to see if the uploader has put any screenshots of the content into their initial post. Those screenshots will let you know exactly what you can expect from the content that you are about to grab.
Let’s say, though, for the sake of argument, that there weren’t any comments and there weren’t any screenshots for movie you want to get.
This is when you want to look to the file name and the file info.
Uploaders (uploaders of any quality, anyway) are going to be crystal clear about the quality of the torrents that they upload. Movies will let you know if they are high definition or standard definition, what the resolution is, and usually what the compression settings were when the file was ripped or converted.
You also learn about the source material that the file was made from. Some files are going to be pulled directly from Blu-ray discs, others are going to be web downloads from digital libraries, and others still might be pulled from video cameras that captured films while still in the theater.
At the end of the day, though, it’s not hard to find out about the quality of the files available on The Pirate Bay before you download them.
How Do I Know If a Torrent is Safe to Grab?
The comment section is going to be your best friend when it comes to figuring out whether or not a particular torrent is safe to grab.
Commenters always (ALWAYS) let users know if the file that they downloaded themselves was legitimate and safe – or if it wasn’t legit and is a ticking time bomb.
As a member of The Pirate Bay, it’s not a bad idea to leave these kinds of comments behind yourself so that other people can have confidence grabbing the same downloads that you have already.
Short of that, though, you want to look for a high number of people seeding a particular torrent. That means that there are a lot of people that have completed the download and are sharing it for others – something that probably not going to happen if a file is corrupt or malicious.
Can Non-Copyright Material Be Downloaded on TPB?
Yes, non-copyrighted material can be shared freely and widely all over The Pirate Bay.
A lot of artists and content creators put their stuff on TPB just for publicity and marketing purposes, hoping to get their content out in front of as many people as possible.
Some take the position that piracy is going to happen no matter what, and that most pirates wouldn’t have purchased what they have on offer anyway so it’s not like they are losing sales.
They just want to get their material in the hands of as wide an audience as they can, hoping that maybe later down the line these pirates will decide to pay and support for their content when they can.
Noncopyrighted material, independent created material, and pretty much anything else of a digital nature can be shared across the peer-to-peer torrenting network on TPB.
Is ThePirateBay Usage Legal?
No small amount of internet users that would otherwise love to jump on The Pirate Bay are nervous about doing so for fear of breaking the law the second they punch the address into their browser.
You should know, however, that there’s absolutely nothing – NOTHING – illegal or illicit about peer to peer networks, peer-to-peer downloading, or torrenting in general.
These file transfer services are completely legit and completely legal, and have been recognized as such by multiple courts and legal systems all over the world.
At the same time, copyright laws are bent (or outright broken) by individual users that share material they do not have the legal authority for. Whether that bothers you or not is only something you can determine for yourself.
Some people get queasy about the idea of downloading a single song from the internet. Others have hundreds of terabytes (hard drives upon hard drives) filled top to bottom with their favorite media – never having paid a penny for even a bit of it.
When it comes right down to it, though, you’ll probably want to get your hands on a VPN to protect yourself if you even think about grabbing “gray area” content from The Pirate Bay.
You get the peace of mind you need to know that your online activity is fully anonymous with this approach.
Can I Use The Pirate Bay from My Mobile Device?
Yes, ever since early 2014 Pirate Bay has been fully accessible on mobile devices – and the experience has gotten better and better over time.
TPB does not have an “official” mobile application for Android or Apple devices right now. And it’s unlikely that either of those two app stores would ever allow for one to be put up on their platform in the first place.
That being said, the entirety of the Pirate Bay network (all the proxies and all the mirrors included) are designed around mobile and responsive web principles.
You’ll be able to enjoy the entire TPB experience from your mobile device – including grabbing torrent downloads and magnet links to be opened by your mobile torrenting software – without any headache and without any hassle.
Benefits of Using Pirate Bay
A lot of Stuff
Tons of Free Stuff – The biggest benefit of jumping on The Pirate Bay is accessing all of the free stuff available, with more of it being added each and every minute of each and every day.
You’ll find a huge community of uploaders that are dedicated to sharing as much media as they can, all 100% free of charge.
Downloads
Fast Downloads – As a decentralized peer-to-peer sharing platform you can expect lightning fast downloads as standard, with download speeds increasing in relationship to the amount of people seeding content at the same time.
On top of that, you don’t have to worry about downloads failing in the middle any longer. You can pause downloads at any time and resume them at any time – including weeks or months later down the line – and not suffer any effects.
Straightforward
Simple and Straightforward Search Process – The Pirate Bay has become the popular, most resilient, and most useful search platform for the torrenting world because of how simple and straightforward it is to use.
You won’t ever feel like you have to fight TPB to find and download what you’re after.
Are BitTorrent Clients Free?
You might assume that since VPNs are not free (and often will cost you an arm and a leg), BitTorrent clients require some form of payment as well. The best answer is that some are and some aren’t.
However, The Pirate Bay has always been and always will be about providing free service and so several free BitTorrent Clients are both used frequently on The Pirate Bay and are suggestions from Pirate Bay.
- Vuze
- BitTorrent
- qBitTorrent
- Transmission
These BitTorrent Clients are free, as is the use of The Pirate Bay, however, some of the software developers behind these things have to make a living as well and there are always ways that you can donate to their cause. Not only are you helping them put dinner on the table but you’re also helping them produce more content.
Producing more content is a win-win for everyone.
VPNs are Huge If You Want to Download Safely (and Secretly)
While you don’t necessarily need a VPN to make the most of The Pirate Bay – and a VPN definitely isn’t required to download anything – it does increase your safety, your security, and your overall anonymity.
Speed isn’t going to take that much of a hit when you choose a quality VPN, either.
With how affordable these services are these days you’d have to be at least a little bit crazy not to consider grabbing one before you start filling up hard drives with The Pirate Bay content.