Pirate Bay Shuts Down Tracker, Switches To Distributed Hash Table

think_nix writes "The Pirate Bay has shut down their BitTorrent tracker. Instead TPB is now using Distributed Hash Table to distribute the torrents. The Pirate Bay Blog states that DHT along with PEX (Peer Exchange) Technology is just as effective if not better for finding peers than a centralized service. The Local reports that shutting down the tracker and implementing DHT & PEX could be due to the latest court rulings in Sweden against 2 of TPB's owners, and may decide the outcome of the case."

Comments

Does this mean TPB will still be working?

[Kirin Fenrir]

Proving that technology is always one step ahead of copyright law.

Re:Does this mean TPB will still be working?

[sakdoctor]

Sure you can.
The decentralized service doesn't have that central server weakness, so the best you can do is blast sacrificial individual users with law suits.

After that, it's a case of mass disobedience vs prohibition laws, because people are not going to stop sharing any time soon.

Re:Does this mean TPB will still be working?

[SethJohnson]

Whereas the tobacco companies have lost several huge lawsuits, I don't recall any magazines getting sued for running ads for cancer-causing products.

Seth

Re:Does this mean TPB will still be working?

[Mathinker]

> where people post advertisements on where to buy drugs.

X% of which are for legal OTC drugs sold in drugstores and 100-X% of which are for illegal drugs. You're probably right that if X is small enough, the legal system will rule against the site. But if X is large enough, probably not.

All this is academic in the case of TPB, because of the "in your face" way they reacted to takedown requests. Nothing will save them.

However, a site which is polite, officially bars illegal torrents, but errs in favor of accuracy vs. efficiency about reacting to takedown requests could very well replace TPB in functionality while making it a lot harder for the courts to effectively deal with them.

Re:Does this mean TPB will still be working?

[Voyager529]

There are several. First and most realistically, Google has a whole lot more money to spend in court than TPB does. Second, also from a completely practical standpoint, I'm sure that the number of judges/juries who have use Google are orders of magnitude above the number that have used Pirate Bay, so familiarity is on Google's side. Third, Google has complied with legal takedown notices, whereas Pirate Bay has basically said "go walk the plank". Google has shown good faith when asked to, while Pirate Bay has not. Fourth is a little common sense: Google indexes a huge amount of stuff online, and if there are pirated materials available online, then by nature, some will end up on Google. While Pirate Bay might also host game patches, linux distros, Creative Commons licensed artwork, and other legal materials, when their search cloud shows people searching for theatrical releases, Top 100 music, and Adobe Photoshop (i.e. stuff that's obviously copyrighted), it's going to be a rough day for the lawyer who's defending Pirate Bay. Finally, there was/is a community on TPB that helped "cleanse" "bad releases" and/or help highlight "good releases", while Google has no such community in place specifically for pirated material.

To further the GP's example, no one is going to press charges on you because you have a phone book which happens to include a few drug dealers in it (it's a statistical inevitability). Any jury would laugh that out of court. On the other hand, if you've got a little black book which is largely filled with drug dealers, even if you also have some of your friends' numbers in there, if half the people in your black book get arrested, you're going to have a pretty lousy day in court if your only defense is "it's just a list of phone numbers, who doesn't have one of those?" - the DA's response will be "yes, I do. To get into MY phone book, you have to be a family member, close friend, or business contact. 96% of the people in your Rolodex are known drug dealers, Mister Anderson, and I've got a dozen witnesses saying that they got the numbers of everyone else we've arrested from you. How do you explain that?"

I'm no fan of the RIAA by ANY means, nor am I entirely convinced that TPB deserves to be sued out of existence from a legal standpoint. I am saying that they are among the biggest public torrent trackers, made it no secret that they had warez/music/movies for download, and not only did they refuse to comply with the copyright holders, but they were very well known for replying to takedown notices with public replies that usually amounted to "go shove it". Outside of Google being the biggest search engine, they have very little in common.

Still guilty

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

So they go from hosting a tracker to hosting a bootstrap node that gives clients access to the DHT swarm? In short, in the eyes of the law (and probably of the general public), they're still facilitating the illegal distribution of copyrighted material. At the very least, they look guilty as hell, because they seem to do try their hardest to stick it up to da man.

Re:Still guilty

[hitnrunrambler]

Still guilty (Score:2)

by Rosco P. Coltrane (209368) on Tuesday November 17, @09:01AM (#30128264)

So they go from hosting a tracker to hosting a bootstrap node that gives clients access to the DHT swarm? In short, in the eyes of the law (and probably of the general public), they're still facilitating the illegal distribution of copyrighted material. At the very least, they look guilty as hell, because they seem to do try their hardest to stick it up to da man.

Don't you mean:
"Boss, I know them Duke Boy Pirates is guilty! They've gone from bootlegging trackers to bootlegging bootstraps. In the eyes of the law (and flash) they are facily-tatin' the illegal distribution of moonshine. At the very least, they look guilty as hell, with them outlaw haircuts and that fancy car."

Re:Still guilty

[purpledinoz]

Then aren't ALL ISPs also facilitating copyright infringement? Isn't Cisco providing the network technology for copyright infringement? Isn't Intel providing the ability for consumers to download illegal material from the Internet? Isn't AMAT, a semiconductor tool manufacturer, guilty of providing Intel with the tools to make microchips for copyright infringement?

Re:Still guilty

[Cyner]

Didn't the US Government directly fund the development of the global file sharing network?

Re:Still guilty

[L4t3r4lu5]

It's unfortunate that the quote I want to make right now ("The tree of Liberty...") comes from a founder of the very country which put such pressure on the Swedish government.

I suppose the great always have further to fall.

Re:Still guilty

[shutdown -p now]

The real problem is that under standard interpretation of Swedish law they weren't in breach of the law in the first place.

How do you know? Because they've told you so? Are you a Swedish lawyer qualified to judge that they were in the right, and the judge in their case ruled wrongly? (personally, I do not consider myself qualified for that; any arguments that I may advance on this are purely my own views)

Re:Still guilty

[cfalcon]

Jefferson WAS a lawbreaker. He participated in a revolution. And the copyright in the constitution was designed to expire- unlike the one we have today, which is unconstitutional.

Peer ants

[Anonymous Coward]

Pirates are like ants and always find a way around obstacles and tend to attract more pirates to use the same path.
Removing a single tracker, no matter how widely used it was won't deal much harm. This may lead to the removal of other trackers in the future, but peer exhange and DHT are pretty much a good subsitute in my opinion.

Re:Peer ants

[dkleinsc]

In other words, the Internet is seeing copyright enforcement as damage and automatically routing around it.

And the hydra...

[Taibhsear]

grows yet another head. Good luck trying to keep up, MAFIAA.

If DHT and PEX are

[mehrotra.akash]

" just as effective if not better for finding peers", then why did they wait for the ruling to change over?
why not just switch over a long time back??
especially if they are better..

Napster et al court cases...

[nweaver]

One of the reasons why BitTorrent didn't suffer the legal fate of Napster, Kazaa, etc is that BitTorrent only handles data transfer, not search, and has significant noninfringing uses.

Having trackerless torrents however doesn't help the noninfringing uses, only infringing uses. (If its non-infringing, just host a tracker damnit!), thus trackerless client features start to get very dangerous from a legal perspective for the developers.

Re:Napster et al court cases...

[Anonymous Coward]

Having trackerless torrents however doesn't help the noninfringing uses, only infringing uses. (If its non-infringing, just host a tracker damnit!)

Why?

If there's a way to make legal distribution more robust and able to tolerate problems (e.g. slashdotting) on your node, why wouldn't you want to use it?

If the advantages of decentralization are irrelevant, then you don't need bittorrent (tracker or not) for non-infringing use. Just host a ftpd dammit!

The MAFIAA is supposedly out to fight piracy, but it's not like the MAFIAA is the only entity in the universe that has ever tried to interfere with information distribution. Nor are people who try to interfere with information distribution, the only thing that ever causes failures. People are going to want reliable data transfer regardless of whether or not some people happen to want reliability for copyright-infringing purposes.

TPB is going down for piracy, but the fact that it can be shut down at all, overshadows the relatively minor piracy issue. If force can be used against trackers, then everyone (pirates, other governments, Falun Gong, Operation Clambake, Voice of America, you, and me) benefits from trackerless torrents. The pirates-vs-MAFIAA battle is unimportant and uninteresting, except perhaps as a technology driver and microcosm-scale stage. However that turns out, people are always going to need freedom from governments, other bullies, and even "natural" phenomena ("oops the server's down, because a court ordered it / because the admin fucked up and installed some malware / because apparently I tripped over an ethernet cable as I was leaving the building and can't drive back there until tomorrow / because the power went out / because an asteroid hit that city").

Look at any historical record of computer problems, and "shutdown by the MAFIAA for piracy" is a relatively rare explanation. Question: What do you do about the other 99.99999% of cases? Answer #1: learn from your mistakes and don't let the problem happen again. Answer #2: learn from your mistake and make a single node failure not matter. I guess I know which basket you put all your eggs in.

Re:In a related question

[sopssa]

Is it illegal to download a list of instructions on which chunks to use ( and in what order ) to create a copyrighted work from your family photos? :)

That's just the same old "but it's just random 0 and 1 on my hdd, it's not the movie, it just happens to have the same order in bytes!". No matter how you try to circumvent laws with stupid technical jargon, if it's clear you are or your intention is to violate copyright laws, you wont get far with such jargon.