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Comment by onphonenow | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious if sites like the pirate bay are "high risk". If so, did it take $100M / year to keep them up with legal and HR teams etc?

These claims are often made, but I'm not sure they check out. Plenty of much much more controversial stuff stays online / is available. But supposedly wikipedia will be destroyed without these experts.

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Pirate Bay is banned in many countries, was raided by the police multiple times, had its founders literally put into jail, had its domains seized, is blocked by Facebook, can't get donations outside of crypto, etc.

It's a pretty good example of why you need legal teams for any sort of sustainable effort.

But, despite all of that, they were online for years with a budget that was a fraction of $100 million.

And they were hosting content that was blatantly illegal in many countries, while Wikipedia really isn't.

I mean Piratebay is up right now. At least, if not literally, in spirit. I can get torrent magnet links off a site that looks exactly like the same Piratebay and probably not get a virus.

>And they were hosting content that was blatantly illegal in many countries,

PirateBay never hosted content, and that's the problem. It's like sue yellow-pages, because they listed a drug-dealer.

And what do you mean with illegal?

Pirate bay is a much smaller scale than wikipedia.

Their approach to legal is to basically just get arrested, which is an interesting approach.

The Pirate Bay spent years hopping from legal jurisdiction to legal jurisdiction because of all the suits and enforcement against them. Wikipedia doesn't, and also probably doesn't have any interest in pursuing any sort of expensive jurisdiction-hopping strategy that would also throw all of its employees and work into jeopardy.

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