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

Re:Still guilty

[thisnamestoolong]

Hold on there, hoss. It's not that simple -- if we were to define our terms that simply, then ski mask manufacturers would be facilitating the illegal procurement of liquor store cash register contents. The law needs to operate on very black and white terms, and things like the Pirate Bay are operating in very new, and very gray, legal territory. I am nowhere near enough of an expert to comment on how this will specifically affect the legal standing of the Pirate Bay, but I will say that such sites operate on a knife edge of legality -- and any case the legal system can possibly raise against them will depend on an extremely specific set of conditions. If not, Google would be every bit as guilty as the Pirate Bay (as would every single ISP on the planet). What this means is that if the Pirate Bay sufficiently distances itself from the actual illegal activity, then there is no way they can be legitimately prosecuted. We saw the same thing happen with Kazaa (where the industry types decided to go after individual users instead).

Re:Does this mean TPB will still be working?

[DangerFace]

I personally wouldn't demonize TPB. While this kind of sharing isn't the nicest thing, if the companies who are being effected had been decent about their cost structure people wouldn't have resorted to this in the first place.

To be honest, I'm starting to see the whole argument about filesharing redundant. If the cost structure was fairer I would most certainly spend more money on it. However, if I walked into a shop and bought everything I had downloaded over the last year, say, we end up with this:

~1 000 albums, at £15 each = £15 000 (assuming cheap albums balance out rare items - I know for a fact the market value of some of my Nina Simone stuff would be in the hundreds of pounds, but I'm choosing to assume that they are outliers and can be ignored)

~250 films, at £10 each = £2 500

~50 full seasons of TV shows, at £20 each = £1 000

TV shows as and when they come out in their country of origin = a little over £1 000

~30 games, at £35 each = £1 050

Adding up to a grand total of £19 550 ($32 851.38). So assuming I didn't have to pay rent or bills, buy food, or have any way of watching this stuff / listening to this music / playing these games, I'd still need a significantly increased household income. And I haven't really listened to / watched / played loads of that stuff, I just like being able to think "I want to watch x genre" and having it there, and when someone comes round and I discover they've never seen WarGames, come on, I need to be able to show them...

The point being, I spend most of my disposable income on media of various sorts, but that doesn't mean I can afford everything I want - and if I can have it, why not? No one would be getting my money if I didn't 'steal' it, so the only person losing out would be me. The whole argument has been rendered redundant in my case by me not having a huge pile of cash to hand over in the first place. The RIAA/MPAA/whoever can take me to court for however many millions of dollars if they want - they'll get a lower percentage of my income awarded to them than I hand over voluntarily.

tl;dr: my girlfriend gets annoyed at how much I spend on media, when I should pay bills, and I still pirate more than 95% of the stuff I own. Meh.