Pirate Bay Archive Goes Online
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "With the main Pirate Bay website experiencing DNS issues, downtime and uncertainty about both the lawsuits and potential sale to GGF, a Pirate Bay clone has already gone online. True to their principles, someone at TPB put up a torrent with a 21.3 GB copy of the site as it exists today. And now that archive is alive, at BTArena.net. Linus' old adage about backing up everything by putting it on FTP and letting the world mirror it may need to be updated. Torrents are much more efficient." "Downtime" may be a nice word for it; reader Underholdning writes "The Register has a story about a Swedish court ordering ISPs to disconnect The Pirate Bay or face a massive daily fine. The reason for the shutdown was an upcoming civil lawsuit by copyright holders. As usual, Torrentfreak has an updated story. It seems like the takedown until now has been successful." Believe what you will; the site itself says they'll be back up "in a few hours."
The site is currently up, with one of their trademark images, this time of a T-shirt with the following on it:
I spent months of time and millions of dollars to close down The Pirate Bay and all I'll get is this beautiful T-shirt!
Please never die, TPB, if only for your front page images.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
When are they going to realize you can't shut them down. Too many people use their site and will mirror it if necessary. Pretty soon the word torrent will be illegal on the internet.
This summary begs the question... Could you revise the bit torrent spec to allow people to query an index of torrents via bittorrent?
I'm only half-kidding here...
Even if TPB gets the axe, there's a thousand other ways to get alternative music/videos/games...
TPB is NOT that important anymore.
A back-up is all OK, but the people behind TPB (well I suppose it's them, because they use the same servers as TPB) is working on a decentralized replacement for TPB called openbittorrent.com and torrage.com. This decentralized version will be almost impossible to take out both legally and technically, and according to the ideology behind TPB it will be more democratic.
Evolution is just a scientific theory. Creationism is not.
Hint: this is -1 Flamebait and +1 Insightful.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
There's been an archive of TPB's torrents up for a LONG fucking time. Why the fuck did they put up a story of it 'just being uploaded somewhere'?
If we take a look at the range of activities proscribed by the government, making no moral judgment here, just talking about stuff they don't want you to do, you'll never get rid of it. Take drugs. Some will say that the US is too permissive a society, that we can only get rid of them if we go totalitarian. You can't get more hardcore than Singapore, China, various Islamic countries with the death penalty for drug smuggling. Guess what? You can still get drugs there. China is doing their level best to suppress the Falun Gong and they're still around. The lions didn't do much to dissuade the Christians back in the early days. Ideas couldn't be suppressed when the only way to spread them was handwritten letters and walking tours. The printing press only made suppression more difficult and the internet is the printing press x100.
I suppose, in theory, one could impose filtering at the ISP level and stop the bulk of casual P2P traffic. But just think of what people did before the internet. Oh, that's right -- mix tapes for songs, file copy parties for software. There's just no way to stop it. If we still had Prohibition, that would be enough to stop me from drinking -- there's no way I'm going to risk so much for a shot of whiskey. But my lack of patronage wouldn't hurt the speakeasies a bit.
So, what would we see if total p2p filtering was successful? (which I still say it couldn't be.) Look at Cuba. Broadband costs too much there but flash drives are cheap. There's a thriving trade in flash drives, people copying and sharing away.
Ultimately, I think that the only viable solution will be a patronage system. The content will be given away for free and a tip jar will be set out for fans to contribute to. No, the vast majority of the people who watch the show won't be paying for it but if enough do so it can remain on the air, what's the problem? I'm sure the transition from our current media model will be a painful process but we're already seeing success in some areas.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
ha spot the irony!
RTFA, ballsack.
Apparently it's hosted in Romania and the local RIAA already tried to take it down.
.sig: No such file or directory
In its day, Suprnova was THE torrent site. Its shutdown lead to the rise of PB, mininova and many others.
What will the shutdown of PB lead to? It is a giant game of wack a mole.
I will miss PB mainly for their snarky attitude posting the threat letters they get and responding to them in almost Monty Python fashion.
Let aside the legal angle. Let's say I want to make a torrent tracker, a TPB kind of site. Is there a package I could install that allows me to do that? I'm looking something that is as easy to install as Wordpress or something like that. Is there anything like that out there?
You will never shut down the real Napster.
What's the use of a mirror of the torrent files if nobody else has the infrastructure to maintain the tracker? Even before this legal storm TPB has been having trouble dealing with the load on their servers.
Plus most of the torrents point to the PB tracker, which is unreachable at this point.
Anyone can "stand up for what they believe", but it takes a very brave individual to change what they believe. - Loundry
I'm frustrated.
Yes the website is up, but the tracker is still non-functional. How am I supposed to download my half-finished 10 GB torrents of "ifeelmyself.com" or "cdgirls.com" or "playboy.com" if the tracker is not working. :-(
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
I would have guessed that it was closer to 21.3 TB. If it's only 21.3 GB, I could store a couple copies on my computer at home.
Trademarks and copyrights are two entirely different concepts.
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
There is no irony. Trademarks are not intellectual property - their purpose is to prevent people from impersonating you and harming your brand image, copyrights and patents prevent people from copying your work/invention and unfairly competing against you by selling it without having to pay development costs.
We have, ourselves, full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once more able to defend our Internets, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone. Even though large parts of Internets and many old and famous trackers have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Ifpi and all the odious apparatus of MPAA rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the ef-nets and darknets, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Internets, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the baywords.org, we shall fight on the /. and on the digg, we shall fight in the courts; we shall never surrender, and if, which I do not for a moment believe, the Internets or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the Anon Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in Cerf's's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.
I herd you like torrents, so I put a torrent in your torrent so you can leech while you leech...
Upgrade your torrent client. The decentralized tracker in many torrent clients is automatically used if the main tracker can't be reached. I grabbed a torrent yesterday and didn't realize it was a TPB one until I looked at its details. It's less efficient at finding seeds and such (because you don't know how big the "cloud" is), but if it's out there, it does work.
The only big issue with the decentralized tracker is it isn't searchable - it assumes you have the torrent file (or magnet link) acquired from some source already. That's what OpenBittorrent and the like are for.
It would be interesting to see someone develop a distributed site mirroring protocol so that anyone with a server can opt-in to being a TPB mirror by downloading the archive and then getting real-time updates from one or more mirrors as more torrents are posted. The same distributed network idea for the tracker index sites as gets used for the file downloads.
With it being so easy, the sites could go offline after very short intervals. Imagine several thousand TPB mirrors at any one time, each one only up for a week or so before being retired. Try and stop that!
Yay, now we can torrent a torrent site! Does this mean that we can be sued for it, though?
That's not the solution. My Azureus client has decentralized tracking in Azureus, and it works just fine with my dialup connection, but not with my DSL modem. I have no clue why one would work but not the other.
Doesn't Pirate Bay have *any* working trackers? I'm using tracker.thepiratebay.org/announce which is the most-generalized form I can think of, but still it refuses to connect.
isohunt.com is also reporting the piratebay trackers as unreachable.
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
Hmmm. Maybe it is ironic that you can't differentiate between copyrights and trademarks?
"But this one goes to 11!"
Given a torrent with no tracker, there is no way to find peers.
You need existing peers to find other peers.
There is no true decentralized bootstrapping method available for someone who has no tracker and 0 peers to start with.
Have fun patting yourself on the back. You are incorrect, though.
The torrent is just a file transfer protocol, and as such it is not illegal. Using the protocol to transfer copyrighted work without authorization is a civil issue, not a criminal one.
it's important as a symbol for people that download and don't give a shit what the law says. it's also a great way to divert attention and resources away from prosecuting other torrent sites by making tpb public enemy number 1. who cares if half the peers are hacking and the warez contains trojans; at least that's lawyer money that they can't throw at someone else. it keeps bittorrent, IP rights, and issues of net neutrality and surveillance in the public debate.
TPB works in several positive, intangible ways, and is important as a lawyer/enforcement magnet so other sites can stay under the radar that much longer. every day TPB is up and running, i think everyone that isn't an **AA crony can smile a bit inside.
So nobody knows the address of a working piratebay tracker?
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
Just found out now that the new version of Avast is blocking the Pirate bay. Great, now I have censorship in my antivirus.
There's none. Not only are the other posters correct in pointing out that trademarks and copyright are very different legal concepts, but it sounds to me that the word is being used by its casual definition, rather than the legal one.
It's as in the phrase "the Statue of Liberty is one of New York's trademarks". It doesn't mean New York will sue you for trademark infringement if you put a photo of the statue on your website, its just that its image is commonly associated with the city of New York.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
There is plenty of irony. You totally missed it.
DSL Modem is going through a firewall/router that's not set up to forward BT ports? I'm not familiar with your setup, but in my experience dialup was always straight to the computer (windows firewall etc, where Azureus could ask for permission) where DSL was usually on a LAN setup with a router (which usually contains a builtin firewall)...
1178161 is prime...
We will not go gently into that good night. We will no give up without a fight. Tomorrow will be our Independence Day.
Hey it worked great against aliens (along with Jeff Goldbloom's virus), so plain old Earth Governments wouldn't stand a chance.
Lock on. Fox three. Yeah, those helped too.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Please enlighten me.