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The Pirate Bay To Stop Serving Torrent Files
An anonymous reader tips news that The Pirate Bay is making a move away from .torrent files in favor of 'magnet links.' On Thursday the site made magnet links the default, and TorrentFreak reports that they'll stop serving .torrent files altogether in about a month.
"The announcement is bound to lead to confusion and uncertainty among many torrent users, but in reality very little will change for the average Pirate Bay visitor. Users will still be able to download files, but these will now be started through a magnet link instead of a .torrent file. The Pirate Bay team told TorrentFreak that one of the advantages of the transition to a 'magnet site' is that it requires relatively little bandwidth to host a proxy. This is topical, since this week courts in both Finland and the Netherlands ordered local Internet providers to block the torrent site. Perhaps even better, without the torrent files everyone can soon host a full copy of The Pirate Bay on a USB thumb drive, which may come in handy in the future."
You are writing in the future tense but this is already happening... I use http://malaysiabay.org/ because it is nearer to me and therefore quicker...
If they take that down I am sure that a copy will be up within hours... As usual the only people that will really benefit from all this are the lawyers.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
Because sometimes there are things it is useful to pirate. Such as losing a Windows install CD, or ending up with a film that is so full of DRM you cannot watch it in the way you want so you download a copy that you can. Legal consumers circumventing their asinine protections are just as much frequenters of TPB as those who just download movies and TV shows every day compulsively.
rember the http warez of the old they would try taking down the sites and they would be back up in hrs with 10 new mirrors. there was even a tool that would generate accounts on every free hoster and upload your site all with a click. went threw this in the 90s and did just fine the only reason it quit was stuff like bittorrent took the need for it away. its the same game over again and the pirates know how to win.
Depends what the goal is. If the goal is to stop piracy, no, it won't work and never would have. If the goal is for politicians to throw a bone to the content owners in exchange for big time donations, then I suspect it will work quite well.
Why is that good?
Because the shows I download legally and pay for are not available in my country with the subtitles that I need to understand them. If the Powers That Be would provide those, I wouldn't need to download a copy from the Pirate Bay. As it is, I buy the download legally off iTunes, because I have a vain hope that some of the money I pay might make it to the artists responsible for the show rather than the accountants who fleece them, and then I download the torrent off the Pirate Bay so that I can understand what I watched.
TPB is useful for filling in the gaps that iTunes and the like leave open. The quality and service that the pirates provide are better than what the authorized distributors provide.
Plus, I can rest assured that my pirated copy will work on any device I may happen to purchase and at any time; I don't have to worry about region locking, permissions servers being taken offline (anyone remember PlaysForSure?), or other arbitrary and unnecessary constraints placed on my purchases. So long as standards like AVI or DIVX or H264 can be read, I'm good to go; there's no threat to the longevity of my purchases.
So, using TPB to provide open standards-based backups that are free of useless and arbitrary impediments that add no value to me ensures that I'm no longer placed at the whim and caprice of the content industry. I give them money (I legally download a copy via iTunes) and in turn receive the goods without any restrictions (I download a copy via the Pirate Bay).
That's why the Pirate Bay is good.
Or he could've lost the CD-keys and since you need a valid one to do even Single Player...he'd have to either keygen or crack the game (or buy a CD-key), which are still bad in the eyes of Blizzard-Activision.
Of course, if he did the smart thing and kept a personal-use ISO on his hard drive of the disc he made a copy of himself, he'd still be seen as a criminal...by somebody, anyway.
If a list of filenames is all that separates your ideas of a "good" and a "bad" torrent, then I suspect that you'll have other problems soon enough.
Kid-proof tablet..
Because Copyright is an out of control monster that needs to be opposed.