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Pirate Bay Archive Goes Online

Posted by timothy on from the action-reaction-counterreaction dept.

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."

7 of 94 comments (clear)

  1. Whatever!!!! by ITJC68 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Whatever!!!! by txoof · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Like the saying goes, "information wants to be free". Not only does information want to be free, but the Streisand Effect is in full effect here. Clearly TPB was a popular site among a very devoted crowd. The harder people try to squish it, the faster it will pop up everywhere.

      This reminds me of when the MPAA got all uppity about DVD Jon's DeCSS code and tried to wipe the code off the interwebs. The response was for thousands, if not millions of people to post the code as poetry, works of art, one really terrible song and a even stenographically encoded into images. The harder the MPAA fought against it, the more people pushed back to move the code into the realm of free speech and thwart them. It cost the MPAA big bucks to send out take down notices to everyone while it cost the average Joe nothing to dump the code into paintshop, add some colors and call it "art" on his web page. Obviously it's a bit harder to perpetuate an archive of TPB as "art", but it's still relatively easy to pick up a copy off the torrent network and restart the site on an ISP with lax laws and rules.

      Weather you agree with what TPB was up to or not, it is interesting to see how ineffective it is to try and hold back information on the web these days. Perhaps 20 years ago it would have been trivial to shut down the ISPs hosting this type of information, but today it looks like it's darn near impossible.

      It'll be fun to watch this over the next few months and see who's interest wanes first. Will the government or the Pirates give up first? What do you think?

      --
      This one's tricky. You have to use imaginary numbers, like eleventeen... --Hobbes
    2. Re:Whatever!!!! by Draek · · Score: 2, Insightful

      This reminds me, rather, of Suprnova. Mostly because it was the MPAA's squishing of it what gave ThePirateBay the popularity it enjoys today, so the fact that the MPAA is trying the exact same tactic against the exact same enemy once again is both laughable, and more than a bit pitiful.

      So the only doubt in my mind is, who's gonna be the third-generation Suprnova? my vote's on Mininova, but my vote was on them last time as well yet it was TPB who continued the legacy.

      --
      No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
  2. Shutting them down just not possible by jollyreaper · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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
  3. .. with one of their trademark images .. by ionix5891 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ha spot the irony!

  4. Re:Torrent the Torrents by Fantom42 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    you're not using "begs the question" correctly.

    ...says he who cannot capitalize the beginning of a sentence. (Still only half-kidding.)

  5. tpb is important as social leverage. by beckett · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.