Digital Sabrina

Here’s a piece of news I read off TechCrunch and TorrentFreak.

Apparently, Sweden’s most popular cultural export The Pirate Bay has entered the blog hosting game with new free-speech focused blogging service Baywords.

The Pirate Bay is known for defending people’s right to freedom of speech on the Internet, and this is exactly what motivated them to start this new blogging service.

The service was launched by The Pirate Bay after a friend of Brokep, one of the co-founders of the site, had his blog deleted by Automattic (WordPress.com) for linking to copyrighted material. Which somehow or other, went against the “uncensored web” philosophy of The Pirate Bay team.

With that, “they” didn’t hesitate to start their own blogging service, Baywords, using WordPress as their blogging engine.

The Pirate Bay team explains:

“Many blogs are being shut down for uncomfortable thoughts and ideas. We will not do that. Our goal is to protect freedom of speech and your thoughts. As long as you don’t break any Swedish laws in your blog, we will defend it.”

In a response, Matt Mullenweg from WordPress told TorrentFreak that he supports Pirate Bay’s Baywords, but he assured us that Wordpress.com would never take down a blog for posting deviating thoughts or ideas. (So they say…)

“WordPress.com supports free speech and doesn’t shut people down for “uncomfortable thoughts and ideas”, in fact we’re blocked in several countries because of that. However as a US-based companies we must comply with US laws, which means if the primary purpose of a blog is distributing illegal material it’s not a good fit for WordPress.com”, Matt said.

Baywords is currently working on expanding the feature list to include support for domain redirects and improved stats. The service is ad-free for now, but Brokep told TorrentFreak that there will be ads blended into the blog design later, to cover the expenses.

If not mistaken, this is not the first time The Pirate Bay has launched a service where people can publish whatever they want, without being censored. They have already created an image hosting service for this reason, and a YouTube competitor is soon to follow.

For people who are considering moving their WordPress or Blogger account over to Baywords, importing is pretty straightforward and compatible with all the popular blog platforms.