eli5 Why some websites that host insane amounts of pirated content are well known (have Wikipedia articles etc) yet don’t get taken down.
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The beautiful thing about the internet is it connects all of us, from all over the world.
Now what these websites are doing might be illegal in your country (USA for example) but what they’re doing might not be illegal where they’re actually *doing* it.
If you pirate a movie from the pirate bay, that was illegal in the USA, but in the early days of the pirate bay, Sweden, the country that hosted the pirate bay, had no laws on the subject. And it took minimal effort for amircans to go to a swedish site to use it.
Well eventually Sweden changed their laws, so the pirate bay moved their operation to servers in Iceland for a while. Iceland similarly had no laws on the subject because it had never come up before. For all practical purposes all the “illegal” activity was happening in Iceland, despite very few parties involved even being located there.
Well eventually Iceland got pressured into changing their laws. So the pirate bay relocated to servers in Cambodia. Again, no one running the operation was physically located in Cambodia. However the “illegal” activity was happening in Cambodia where it was not illegal. And for all intents and purposes anyone doing these illegal things was going to Cambodia to do them. Even if they never physically left their Minnesota house.
Anyway governments got sick of that shit and so started building firewalls between internet accesses of countries, which is why China is basically on its own internet these days, almost completely disconnected from the rest of the world. The USA did this as well (although not as restrictive or isolative as China) to “put a stop” to piracy. And it was pretty effective. They were able to restrict access to servers in whatever countries they didn’t like.
But then VPN’s came along and you could fake your footprints and pretend to never leave your own country, but actually leave and go to those illegal sites. But that’s a story for another time.
Anyway those “great firewalls” were the death of the pirate bay. And a lot of the founders ended up in jail.
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