Most of you will heard of illegally downloaded movies. Many of you probably have actually tried it.  But for those of you who don't know the entire process I will narrate it here so that you can fully understand the story I'm about to tell. 

       Most Movies, games, books, music etc. are downloaded using a bittorent program. Most people use azureus. Sites like piratebay.com, isohunt.com, and torrentspy.com offer torrents that you download and open using your bittorrent program. Movies in particular are a HUGE size. The average size is about 1.25 gigabytes.(That's a massive file). It takes about three days on a very fast wireless connection to download a movie that size. Only 20% of the time will you get a watchable movie. So right off you can see that there's no possible way that illegal downloading can be costing movie stores money. 

       On with the story. The most famous illegal downloading site is piratebay.com. Piratebay is hosted in Sweden. The creators of piratebay.com are some of the most hunted people on the internet. But everybody loves piratebay. Everybody. The following paragraph is only part of a three page article on piratebay. But I'm just going to post the most interesting part. You can view the original post HERE . 

 On May 31, Swedish police finally arrived with a search warrant and carted off enough servers to fill three rental trucks. The Motion Picture Association of America issued a press release announcing a milestone. "The actions today taken in Sweden serve as a reminder to pirates all over the world that there are no safe harbors for internet copyright thieves," trumpeted MPAA chairman Dan Glickman.

But the three stewards of the site -- 27-year-old Peter; Fredrik Neij, 28; and Gottfrid Svartholm, 21 -- were already preparing their response.

Coordinating with volunteers around the world in an IRC chat room, the trio scrambled to relaunch the Bay at a new location. Peter -- a slim, dark haired, dark eyed geek -- didn't sleep in those first few days, fielding a stream of phone calls from the press while confronting the technical challenge of resurrecting a high-traffic site with a partial database and all-new hardware. "They stole most of our backups as well," he says. "I managed to get some backups out of the servers while the police were in the building." (Peter wasn't arrested with the others, and remains anonymous.)

They took the reconstructed data to temporary hosting in the Netherlands, and three days after the raid, the Pirate Bay reappeared on the internet.

So fast was the Bay's rebound that some news articles reporting the site's demise went to print after it was back up, recalls Peter. The resuscitated site had a few glitches, but the resurrection was remarkable in that it had never really happened before; when the major American rights holders take a website down, it stays down. The pirates delivered a victory message to the MPAA, and the Swedish equivalent, APB, through the site's reverse-DNS, which now read: hey.mpaa.and.apb.bite.my.shiny.metal.ass.thepiratebay.org.

Thanks to the press generated by the raid, the Pirate Bay instantly became more popular than ever. The Bay's T-shirt vendor alone now has four people working full time to fill orders for apparel sporting the site's pirate ship logo, and a skull-and-crossbones with a cassette tape as the skull. "They are behind something like 2,000," says Neij. "They are working day and night."

The pirates have since moved the Bay's hosting back to Sweden, where they've built technological bulwarks against another takedown, law-hardening the Bay's network architecture with a system of redundant servers that spans three nations. Shutting down the site in any single country will only cripple the Pirate Bay for as long as it takes for its fail-over scripts to execute, a gap measurable in minutes.

The rest of the article is about the new security technology but I doubt you'd be interested in that. But just imagine it. You're sitting in your house. Probably watching TV. The police burst in through your door. Two of your friends get arrested. You manage to evade the police and sneak backup servers WHILE THE POLICE ARE SEARCHING THE HOUSE. You load them into a truck and set off down the highway. Sounds like something from world war 2.  Peter was amazing. 

     Most of you are probably wondering if I've ever illegally downloaded things. Of course I have! I downloaded TONS of movies and watched them. Almost every single serious internet user has at one point. I'm not alone here.