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."

Comments

Correction

[TheSpoom]

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.

Whatever!!!!

[ITJC68]

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.

Re:Whatever!!!!

[txoof]

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?

Re:Whatever!!!!

[Pingmaster]

it's easy as pie to take the TPB site code and turn it into 'art':

Step 1) RAR the whole thing, break it down into, say, 50MB files
Step 2) View those files in Notepad, which you are running from the copy of Windows XP that you downloaded last week from TPB
Step 3) Copy the ASCII text into a new image in the copy of Photoshop that you downloaded three months ago from TPB
Step 4) Apply some filters, gradients, throw in some flames and fractals at random, maybe a lens flare or two
Step 5) Be sure not to add too much crap to it, so that it can be OCR'ed later
Step 6) Save as ThePirateBaySiteRipPart1of4200.rar.JPG and post it somewhere

And you're done!

Re:Whatever!!!!

[ByOhTek]

Maybe they can't shut it down, but it is hillarous that someone pirated The Pirate Bay.

Re:The cats out of the bag

[Anonymous Coward]

Like iTunes?

Backup, or decentralize!

[bergwitz]

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.

.. with one of their trademark images ..

[ionix5891]

ha spot the irony!

Shutdown of Suprnova led to rise of PB,Mininova...

[guidryp]

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.

What good is a mirror

[Sinbios]

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.

Re:.. with one of their trademark images ..

[selven]

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.

Just moments before coming up again

[skzo]

thepiratebay.com, had this message:

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.