Early Pirate Bay Server Immortalized In Museum

Nerval's Lobster writes "One of the first servers used by notorious torrent tracker The Pirate Bay has ended up at the Computer Museum in Linköping. A picture of the exhibit sent to TorrentFreak shows the server in its original tower casing. The hardware will headline an exhibit on 50 years of file sharing. As the exhibit notes, The Pirate Bay is one of the focal points for the file-sharing phenomenon, used to share both copyrighted works (such as music and movies) and free-for-all material (open-source Linux distributions and the like). The sharing of the former has created a worldwide cat-and-mouse game, with governments doing their best to block file-sharing sites, capture their servers, and prosecute their operators. 'In less than ten years The Pirate Bay has become a contemporary historical phenomenon, due to its distinguished position in the file-sharing debate,' according to the museum exhibit. 'The discussions that have sprung from this simple computer server concerns serious subjects as freedom of speech, global democracy and of course the sole existence of copyright.'"

Comments

Ahem.

[TubeSteak]

The Pirate Bay has become a contemporary historical phenomenon, due to its distinguished position in the file-sharing debate

The Pirate Bay has become a contemporary historical phenomenon, due to its distinguished position as the last man standing.
Before TPB, there was SuprNova (TPB's forums are still hosted @ https://forum.suprbay.org/ )
and before SuprNova there were several other sites that were central to the bittorrent community.

Some of TPB's contemporaries are still around, they're just not as vocal in their fight against the existing copyright regime.

Re:Ahem.

[VortexCortex]

Not to mention all the crackers and hackers with BBSs came before and spawned the Demoscene to one up eachother's cracked intro screens, and coined the competitive term N-Day, eg: 3-day or 0-Day (three day or zero day -- meaning a software (or game) that had its copy protection (DRM) cracked on 3rd day or 0th day (release), thus devs didn't know about the hole and it needed to be patched immediately) all originally in the pursuit of sharing files...

Will a torrent server operator wake to the beeping terminal alarm "Archive Not Present" and search frantically to swap in a different disk/drive just so you can access the warez or porn you're looking for before you log off the BBS at 2:00am? Now THAT is a service; For what compensation? Just to meet folks and share common interests -- You're browsing the files when suddenly: Your screen splits in two "Sysop Wants To Chat" and you chat about some rare games / demos / warez for a bit, seeing each keypress as they're typed, much more personal than today's revisionable chat progs... Ah good times.

File sharing has been around since files. Torrents, eMule, Usenet, etc. are just the latest incarnations. Seems like the smart thing to do would be to join them and leverage the "pirates" (who are the biggest fans) as word of mouth advertising, I mean, considering that "you can't beat 'em". That's what we're seeing in some new-media, e.g., Indiegame the Movie uploaded their film to TPB with a scroller that appears ~3 times at the bottom asking you to buy a copy if you like it so they can keep making films... That's smart, but the scroller text could have been more wobbly and colorful IMO... kids these days...

I get your post is specifically about torrents, but if you're just picking some arbitrary point in the past to say "these sharers came before", if you ask me. To say they're the "last man standing" is laughable at best. File sharing evolves, they're just another notable part of its history, more relevant due to being more recent and powered by a global network, not limited by local calling area codes, you know, like the warez rooms on IRC w/ direct transfer requests... I feel that so many people get caught up in the present day struggles that they forget sharing files is something that has always been a part of digital culture.

You can't win the war on sharing information -- That's what makes us human. Making laws against human nature is how you create a police state...