Pirate pride is alive and well in Sweden, where notorious file-sharing search hub The Pirate Bay is moored. The site announced today that it set a new record of 22 million active peers this week, up from only 12 million in April of this year. If P2P growth has slowed, the most prominent public tracker in the world certainly isn't feeling the squeeze.

The first rule of high seas hijinks, of course, is never trust a man with a peg leg and an eye patch, so are the numbers accurate? We have to take the site's word for the tremendous growth, but if true, that growth is explosive. In April, the site admins set a target of 20 million concurrent peers, which they hoped to reach at some point in 2009. But only seven months after setting the target, The Pirate Bay has broken it.

In addition, the site operators announced in late September that they had topped three million registered users—also a new record (most users are unregistered).

And these tremendous numbers have been racked up by a team of "uploaders, seeders, leechers, mods, and admins," all laboring together, all volunteering time and resources, all coordinating their activity through the Internet in order to bring change to a prominent coastal town filled with bigwigs and fatcats.

"Say it loud, say it proud!" says the blog post." Yes. We. Can! I am The Pirate Bay!"

We would love to bring you The Pirate Bay's own take on its explosive numerical growth in 2008, but like a very different US presidential campaign, the site admins have decided to wage war on the media. "All planned and booked interviews are to be considered suspended," they said in a post this summer. "All future interviews are to be considered impossible. We have no longer any interest in participating in traditional media since it's apparent that they are not trustworthy or willing to adopt [sic]. The mail sent to the press spokes person will not be read. The phone will not be answered."

So, instead, we'll just note that 22 million peers is a pretty staggering number. The rise of the BBC's iPlayer catch-up TV service, US-based Hulu, Last.fm, Pandora, and other legal, simple alternatives to hoisting the Jolly Roger have only succeeded in limiting the site's growth rate to nearly 100 percent in just over half a year—in other words, they haven't helped at all.