ThePirateBay.Org is one of the biggest if not the biggest bit torrent trackers around. What's a bit torrent tracker? Well, it's like Napster was only more decentralized. The idea is that you have a big file. You "seed" it and others "leech" off of you. They're called "leeches" or "peers". Once they get the entire file from you, they become a "seed" and now other peers pull bits of the file from you and the other guy. In fact, peers can pull bits of a file from a person who isn't even seeding it yet.
Make sense so far?
Hopefully it does.
Now, the tracker is essentially an address book that tells your bit torrent application where the files are on the Internet. No files that are being shared in this fashion are ever anywhere but on the seed's or the peer's computer hard drive.
So, when ThePirateBay.Org was shut down by Swedish authorities earlier this week, it came as a bit of a surprise to many people since their servers (which were all seized) wouldn't have anything illegal on them. They may have a log of the IP addresses (your computer's location on the Internet) of people who used their tracker, but there's no way to know if illegal material was downloaded just from the IPs.
Hm...unless the log was connected to the torrents that the users at the IPs seeded/leeched. That could be problematic for torrenters. I'm not honestly sure how that side of it works.
You can read more about all of this in [http://www.thelocal.se/article.php?ID=3955&date=20060531|a May 31 2006 article] at English-language Swedish news source http://TheLocal.SE or by checking out ThePirateBay.Org for news. They've been posting info on the situation since their servers were taken down. Who knows? By the time you're reading this, they may be back up already.
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