The Pirate Bay has just launched a new survey in collaboration with the Cybernorms research group at Sweden's Lund University. As part of a sociology study they hope to find out more about the motivations people have to share files, with the ultimate goal of influencing and shaping more sensible laws regarding copyright issues and the Internet in general.

The Pirate Bay renamed itself to The Research Bay today, for a good cause.

The world’s largest BitTorrent site has teamed up with the Cybernorms research group at Lund University and is encouraging its users to take a sociological survey on file-sharing related matters.

The group researches how the Internet creates new social norms in society, and to what extent these norms are or should be reflected in relevant legislation. Ultimately, the researchers hope the collated knowledge and insights will help legislators to draft more sensible laws. Needless to say, this is a topic that The Pirate Bay takes to heart.

“The Pirate Bay undertakes this study in cooperation with the research group Cybernorms at the Sociology of Law Department at Lund University in Sweden. Completing this short survey will take only a few minutes of your time, after which you will be redirected to The Pirate Bay,” the introduction of the survey reads.

“Understanding online norms and values is essential to developing relevant and effective laws and policies. The purpose of this survey is to help researchers to better understand habits and norms within the file-sharing community. With your help, we hope to create a knowledge base that will influence new laws and law enforcement related to the internet,” it adds.

The survey itself is pretty straightforward and can literally be answered in under a minute. Due to the nature of the topic, all data will be kept strictly confidential and no personally identifiable information such as IP-addresses will be stored.

TorrentFreak got in touch with Cybernorms head of research Måns Svensson to find out more about the project and the purpose of the project.

“In this survey that we are conducting together with The Pirate Bay we are collecting data that will give us information about file sharing around the world,” he told us.

“We know that recent developments in terms of law and law enforcement in Sweden have weak support in the social norms of society. By conducting a global study among file sharers we will be able to get new information on the situation in other parts of the world.”

“In a broader sense we want to follow and study the social norms that are emerging as a result of new technology and law’s ability to respond to the changes. Our hope is that better knowledge in this area will lead to a more sensible legal development,” Svensson added.

Marcin De Kaminski, PhD candidate in Sociology of Law at Lund University and researcher at the Cybernorms group told TorrentFreak that The Pirate Bay has been a partner from the start but that this is the first time the site’s users are being asked to participate.

“The Pirate Bay is still one of the top hundred largest sites on the Internet. As a researcher, it is a great opportunity to be able to base your work upon this. Especially when you’re trying to target a community which sometimes is hard to grasp,” De Kaminski said.

The Cybernorms group officially started in 2009 and previously made the news when it found that millions of Swedes started to hide their online identity in response to tougher anti-piracy legislation. At the time the researchers found that 10 percent of all Swedes between the age 15 and 25 were taking measures to protect themselves against the increasing online surveillance.

The new survey in collaboration with The Pirate Bay is truly the first of its kind. Although many academics and commercial research outfits have looked into the file-sharing issue, to date, none of them has reached out to such a massive group of BitTorrent users. We encourage all our readers who’ve occasionally shared a file to take part, and we’ll report on the results as soon as they come in.