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My dear comrade Napho:
TPB wasn't exactly curing cancer; their sole purpose was to facilitate piracy and laugh at authority.
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In Pirate Bay's case there's much more involved. The guys behind Pirate Bay have been actively raising public political discussion in Sweden about copyright laws and they are serious about reforming those laws radically through parliamentary means. Meanwhile they are doing all they can within the limits of the Swedish law to establish a more free information society based on people's needs rather than those of corporations. And being pretty smart with both media and technology they have come up with a site like Pirate Bay and they have succesfully fought their own war of words against the well-oiled propaganda machine of the media cartels.
Whether personal non-commercial filesharing is illegal piracy or legal and positive cultural activity depends entirely on how we as societies define it in our laws. Copyright itself is an artificial construct from the early days of the printing press, a government-granted temporary monopoly to encourage publishers to print more books to the people with the carrot of making some profits behind the protective shield of a temporary monopoly. The true long-term beneficiary was supposed to be us, the people, not the companies to whom the temporary monopolies were granted. Somewhere along the long way this principle got twisted real badly though, and now we are in a situation where the publishers who were supposed to compete with each other are consolidated into cartels that bribe our politicians to write copyright laws that suffocate competition and creativity instead of encouraging them.
This is what the guys behind Pirate Bay are really interested in and keen to fix in Sweden, and if they manage to do it in Sweden, it will be a great example for the rest of the world to follow. The defiant Pirate Bay has of course been a big provocative spike in the corporate asses of the media cartels who otherwise have quite succesfully managed to control the mainstream media and public discussion into harmless non-political contexts, where naughty pirates get caught for stealing corporate intellectual property etc. As long as they manage to keep up this media atmosphere where people feel guilty of stealing something from somebody while copying music or movies for their own personal use from each other, the cartels have nothing to worry. But when people start to perceive this sort of 'piracy' as a positive thing and to do it as a nationally hobby like the Swedes have done already for some time, the time is close for real political changes where the twisted copyright legislation can be fixed again to serve its basically good original purposes.