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The Pirate Bay has been cited by the MPAA and RIAA as one of the biggest reasons new anti-piracy laws are needed, along with the recently taken down MegaUpload.

During last week's blackout to protest SOPA and PIPA, they made a protest of their own via a blog post titled, "That pipe of trash that someone smoked." It contains a press release which compares the legal issues surrounding file sharing with the early days of Hollywood.

They point out the reason movie studios first re-located to California from New York was to avoid patent litigation from a patent holding company formed by Thomas Edison. In fact, the company established to control the movie industry via Edison's patents was eventually found guilty of antitrust violations in 1915.

Here is the full text of their press release:

INTERNETS, 18th of January 2012.

PRESS RELEASE, FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE.

Over a century ago Thomas Edison got the patent for a device which would "do for the eye what the phonograph does for

the ear". He called it the Kinetoscope. He was not only amongst the first to record video, he was also the first person

to own the copyright to a motion picture.

Because of Edisons patents for the motion pictures it was close to financially impossible to create motion pictures

in the North american east coast. The movie studios therefor relocated to California, and founded what we today call

Hollywood. The reason was mostly because there was no patent.

There was also no copyright to speak of, so the studios could copy old stories and make movies out of them - like

Fantasia, one of Disneys biggest hits ever.

So, the whole basis of this industry, that today is screaming about losing control over immaterial rights, is that they

circumvented immaterial rights. They copied (or put in their terminology: "stole") other peoples creative works,

without paying for it. They did it in order to make a huge profit. Today, they're all successful and most of the

studios are on the Fortune 500 list of the richest companies in the world. Congratulations - it's all based on being

able to re-use other peoples creative works. And today they hold the rights to what other people create.

If you want to get something released, you have to abide to their rules. The ones they created after circumventing

other peoples rules.

The reason they are always complainting about "pirates" today is simple. We've done what they did. We circumvented the

rules they created and created our own. We crushed their monopoly by giving people something more efficient. We allow

people to have direct communication between eachother, circumventing the profitable middle man, that in some cases take

over 107% of the profits (yes, you pay to work for them).

It's all based on the fact that we're competition.

We've proven that their existance in their current form is no longer needed. We're just better than they are.

And the funny part is that our rules are very similar to the founding ideas of the USA. We fight for freedom of speech.

We see all people as equal. We believe that the public, not the elite, should rule the nation. We believe that laws

should be created to serve the public, not the rich corporations.

The Pirate Bay is truly an international community. The team is spread all over the globe - but we've stayed out of the

USA. We have Swedish roots and a swedish friend said this:

The word SOPA means "trash" in Swedish. The word PIPA means "a pipe" in Swedish. This is of course not a coincidence.

They want to make the internet inte a one way pipe, with them at the top, shoving trash through the pipe down to the

rest of us obedient consumers.

The public opinion on this matter is clear. Ask anyone on the street and you'll learn that noone wants to be fed with

trash. Why the US government want the american people to be fed with trash is beyond our imagination but we hope that

you will stop them, before we all drown.

SOPA can't do anything to stop TPB. Worst case we'll change top level domain from our current .org to one of the

hundreds of other names that we already also use. In countries where TPB is blocked, China and Saudi Arabia springs to

mind, they block hundreds of our domain names. And did it work? Not really.

To fix the "problem of piracy" one should go to the source of the problem. The entertainment industry say they're

creating "culture" but what they really do is stuff like selling overpriced plushy dolls and making 11 year old girls

become anorexic. Either from working in the factories that creates the dolls for basically no salary or by watching

movies and tv shows that make them think that they're fat.

In the great Sid Meiers computer game Civilization you can build Wonders of the world. One of the most powerful ones

is Hollywood. With that you control all culture and media in the world. Rupert Murdoch was happy with MySpace and had

no problems with their own piracy until it failed. Now he's complainting that Google is the biggest source of piracy

in the world - because he's jealous. He wants to retain his mind control over people and clearly you'd get a more

honest view of things on Wikipedia and Google than on Fox News.

Some facts (years, dates) are probably wrong in this press release. The reason is that we can't access this information

when Wikipedia is blacked out. Because of pressure from our failing competitors. We're sorry for that.

THE PIRATE BAY, (K)2012

New music tracker elK decide to go ratio free:

It's happening,we are ratioless

Ratioless system is setup to count your total traffic (download + upload).

It's required that your account have some traffic in every week.

Bonus system is under maintenance right now, staff working for new bonus features.

Current stats of elK:

Online Since: 07-01-2012

Max Users: 1000

Registered: 646

Unconfirmed users: 1

Disabled Users: 96

Torrents: 5,011

Dead Torrents: 56

Seeders: 6,370

Leechers: 6

Peers: 6,376

Releases size: 862.16 GB

Average Speed: 770.10 kB/s

Total Uploaded: 3.66 TB

Total Downloaded: 1.62 TB

Traffic amount: 5.29 TB

Yupppii ;D

This week has been a very intense week in Staff and probably for you as a user as well. We have migrated into a new system and when we did this, we discovered that our server hadn't been configured correctly.

The site was down for 2 days but is now up and running again. The website is now working fine and is a lot faster. The problems didn't stop there however. Our backup was corrupt, resulting in a ~99% loss of the forum and a 100% loss of the torrents but please, don't fear. We will begin reconstruction a.s.a.p.

You're probably asking yourself right now, how we could make such a simple/stupid mistake? Well, everyone make mistakes, this was one of ours. We have now taken better precautions in order not to be in this mess again.

Besides giving you our sincere apologies for this,

LEECH 4 FREE has been activated until Sunday, (Feb 19).

So go ahead! Download everything you can, seed until you bleed.

We will grow into a strong community again. We hope these recent events haven't made you doubt Ti.

/ Staff