Baywords is a new blog host running WordPress MU, offering free blogs completely, and promising not to extract any censorship as long as you abide the Swedish law. Behind the initiative stands The Pirate Bay, and Peter “brokep” Sunde had this to say in the launch post:

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.

The reason behind all this is said to be that a WordPress.com blog was closed down due to linking to copyrighted material.



TorrentFreak got this quote from Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg:

“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.

The Baywords service is free, but there will be some ads, kept to a minimal though. The team is also working on the option to add your own domain, captcha to battle spam, and better stats.

It’ll be interesting to follow this one.