In layman's terms can you explain to me why this P2P site is still up?

Are you sure you don’t mean http://thepiratebay.se/ ?

1) Because it is easy for their friends to maintain while some founders were in jail
2) Not all the founders were arrested
3) Because intellectual privacy piracy is an invention of the 21st century and large media companies. It is not a real crime and has never been so, therefore most governments which have not been corrupted by global media companies do not know how to deal with it. For example, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” sold 300,000 copies the year it was published. It was widely known, however, that 1,500,000 copies had been printed over and above the run by the original publishing house’s order.

4. Because it’s in Sweden and they have different laws than the US.

anyone else scared with the DDOS attack and it being down last week? RIP Demonoid, I’ll miss you

If you don’t already know, then the truth will always elude you.

The simplest way to put it is different places have different laws, and if Sweden suddenly tries to take them down, they will return elsewhere… even if that means going totally pirate. They WILL find a way.

@jerv That would be sooooo fuckin cool if they did that.

They don’t host the content. They don’t even host torrent files anymore. It is all magnet links now.

It is just a link that is something like this:
magnet:xt=urn:btih:8dcc9031ddc0b338895ed899699fbb5dda16afc5&dn=Little+Snitch+v2.5.3&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A80&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.publicbt.com%3A80&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.istole.it%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.ccc.de%3A80

The torrent client can figure out where to download from from that blurb of text. Google links to the same thing.

Is Frostwire the same thing? And how does it manage to stay around since Limewire was killed?

^^ This is another example of the why I think @johnpowell is awesome. GA.

@rooeytoo Only vaguely, and while the company that made Limewire isn’t around, that did not make the Gnutella network disappear since Limewire was merely one of many software clients that could access that network.

You and @_Whitetigress keep thinking of things in terms of physical objects, discreet entities, and other concepts that do not apply to cyberspace.

@jerv – yep the concept is probably way beyond me, I just want to know if I will go to jail if I down some music now and again???

@jerv I understand fully that intellectual property doesn’t need to exist physically.

@_Whitetigress But you seem to think that borders have meaning in a non-physical “place”. BTW, who has jurisdiction over international waters, or a diffuse web of weather balloons.

@rooeytoo Possible, but unlikely. It would be impractical to go after everybody who downloads a few songs; they generally go after the ones who either download gigabytes at a time, or (more often) those who upload content. Think of it as traffic cops who monitor the highways and occasionally the cities but ignore the rural goat paths.

“But you seem to think that borders have meaning in a non-physical “place”.”

? Where in this forum do I seem to think that borders have meaning in a non-physical place.

You ask “Which laws?”; I contend that jurisdiction (which depends on borders) is tricky, making that a very hard question to answer, for without clear jurisdiction, there really are no laws.

I’m trying to think of the best way t put this….

Servers can be anywhere, and can be registered somewhere other than where they physically reside, meaning they can be virtually anywhere in many senses of the word “virtually”. In meatspace, laws vary by location. The relationship between meatspace and cyberspace transcends the concept of “location”. So, which meatspace location has the rights to enforce their laws on cyberspace? They may control how how cyberspace is accessed from meatspace by attempting to restrict access to certain parts of cyberspace and such, but that is about the extent of their authority and their ability.

@jerv I see what you are saying.

“What law allows them to function still?” (from details)

I thought maybe there was a law in place that might state since nothing is being, “sold” instead files were being shared, their technically was no legal leverage for say, a record label trying to get content off. I’m not asking the question from any one particular position :D

Intellectual property laws are generally more internationally recognized by various treaties than any sort of criminal law. That said, the only ways content can really be removed are to either ask the site to do so voluntarily, or get the government to force their hand.

The former rarely works and the latter… well, it really depends on who you are dealing with. Some governments are cooperative, some are apathetic, some have power and skill, some are powerless against this sort of thing, some sites are easy to take down, others are ingenious at finding ways to survive in the shadows.

Suffice it to say, those sites with resources and ingenuity cannot be stopped. Not allowing them to function will to prevent them from functioning; they will just keep on keeping on no matter how strenuously they are disallowed. Sometimes “allowed” only means “unable to be prevented”.