How does The Pirate Bay still exist?

I could have sworn the owners got sued and hauled off to jail. And didn't the site get taken over by a corporation or something? Bought out or something? What happened to them? I mean, how could they just show off all those threatening lawsuit messages from various companies and not take them seriously? Wasn't it inevitable that they'd end up in jail?

I don't get it. Why is thepiratebay still around? Does the fact that they have less available downloads than usual have something to do with it? Obviously I'm glad it's still around, I just don't know HOW.

What'd I miss?

A .torrent file merely contains some file hashes, tracker address(es) and other misc data, none of which is copyrightable. A tracker merely helps users connect to other users; no copyrightable data is ever stored on it or passes through it.

That being said, those defenses are more on the technical side. On the literal side, it's obvious that a TBP torrent for Iron Man aXXo rip.avi is for copyrighted content. It's on this basis that they go after trackers. By helping people to find the torrents they want that relate/refer to (but don't contain themselves) copyrighted content, i.e. making categories like Movies / Music / Anime etc, it's possible to get some trackers on the charge of "assisted" copyright infringement. That's what got mininova took down, as well as torrentspy.

By merely indexing torrents and not hosting them yourself (google can do this, the **AA aren't going to go after google), and using a completely anonymous tracker system like OpenBitTorrent (read that page), it's alot harder to take a system down.

The original owners aren't allowed anywhere near TBP anymore, but they have other people who can manage the site. The court case was against the 3 owners, not against the site itself. Others are free to administrate it on their behalf.

Bingo!  As long as the internet exists, there will always be ThePirateBay!  And explaining about the corporation thing.  Yeah, about a year ago a company attempted to purchase TPB and were planning on charging people to use the tracker.  In the end, the scheme fell through and we've still got TPB.  From time to time it goes down because a group of dumbass copyright lawyers get together and decide to threaten the current webhost of TPB.  Every time it's the same result: new webhost and those idiot lawyers have just wasted their time.  Long live the free internet!