The Pirate Bay has teamed up with the Cybernorms research group at Sweden’s Lund University to carry out the latest round of the largest file-sharing survey in history. Through the survey the researchers examine the norms of file-sharers, and how they respond to increased censorship, online monitoring and tougher laws.

The Pirate Bay renamed itself to The Research Bay today for a new collaboration with the Cybernorms research group at Lund University.

The notorious BitTorrent site has changed its iconic logo and is encouraging visitors to take part in the survey, which examines people’s file-sharing habits and their views on privacy and copyright-related issues.

The study is the third iteration of a longitudinal study which has already enjoyed participation from 170,000 Pirate Bay users.

To learn more, TF talked to Stefan Larsson, one of the researchers involved in the project. Larsson believes that it’s crucial to document values and norms of The Pirate Bay and its users, as it’s one of the defining Internet icons of our times.

“It is the biggest, most popular and most resilient hub for free file-sharing, and collects invaluable information on values, norms and conceptions of the file-sharing community,” Larsson says.

“Also, it is one of the most interesting phenomena of our times in itself, in the intersection of social, legal and technological change,” he adds.

The previous surveys have already resulted in some unique insights which have been published in several academic articles.

For example, the researchers found that the majority of Pirate Bay users planned to use VPNs or other measures to become more anonymous. Another observation is that only a small percentage of Pirate Bay users contribute to the site. Most people are relatively passive downloaders.

These and other statistics are also available to the public on the Survey Bay website which launched a few months ago.

Larsson tells TF that one of the key goals of the project is to look for trends and changes over time among Pirate Bay users. By repeating the survey the researchers can see how attitudes and behaviors of Pirate Bay users develop.

In addition, the latest survey also includes new questions to tap into newer trends, among other things.

“We have added some stuff, for example a method for measuring the strength of social norms, which we’ve done in smaller surveys before, as well as questions on when and how – if ever – authorities should collect and process information on internet behavior,” Larsson says.

The Research Bay project runs from 25 to 27 February, and survey will be linked from The Pirate Bay homepage during these days. People who are interested in taking part can do so here.