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.

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

[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?

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.

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.