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Pirates of the Caribbean: the Pirate Bay Moves To Island of Sint Maarten

Posted by Soulskill on from the arrr-me-hearties dept.

New submitter coolnumbr12 writes "For the second time in a week, The Pirate Bay has found a new home for its popular torrent website. A complaint issued Tuesday by Swedish prosecutors threated the Icelandic domain, forcing the file-sharing pirates to take harbor in the Caribbean island of Sint Maarten with a new .sx domain name. 'Control of the island, which has just 78,000 residents, is split between France and the Netherlands. Around 41,000 live on the Dutch side and 37,000 on the French. ... Even if the court grants the prosecutor’s request it remains to be seen how effective any seizures will be. Time and again the BitTorrent site has responded by relocating to new domains.'"

3 of 108 comments (clear)

  1. Whats really amazing. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Is they hop around the world with almost no downtime at all.
    Even the best sites that we PAY for can barely manage to do simple upgrades and changes and say the same..

    1. Re:Whats really amazing. by girlintraining · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Even the best sites that we PAY for can barely manage to do simple upgrades and changes and say the same..

      That's because the biggest threat to any company has never been natural disaster, but government intervention. You can protect against everything but a corrupt government with a desire to seize all of your infrastructure. It started with Steve Jackson Games; It continues to this day. Every day, dozens of corporations are rendered extinct due to seizures by the government... and lacking the ability to continue to conduct business, they lack income, and thus there is no legal challenge mounted. The only businesses that can survive, are those who go multinational, hide their money in secret accounts, and bury themselves in a complex and dense legal framework that makes easy elimination by the government difficult.

      All of that costs a lot of money. The pirate bay, on the other hand, doesn't have to worry about that. They don't have to pretend to be "legit", so the operating costs are quite low, and redundancy quite easy. And as they're showing... once you pass a threshold, you can become a criminal organization that the government can't touch, at least as long as your assets are entirely digital and distributed across many jurisdictions.

      It is a model I expect more small businesses, legitimate and otherwise, to do more often. It's the only reasonable reaction to a corrupted government... let alone over a hundred of them, all corrupted to varying degrees.

      --
      #fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
  2. TPB is NOT a BitTorrent site by EmagGeek · · Score: 3, Interesting

    TPB has absolutely DICK to do with BitTorrent or its creators.

    TPB is a site that aggregates links to torrent files that pirates created, much to the chagrin of the BitTorrent and users who use it for legitimate purposes.

    But, again, to describe TPB as a "BitTorrent site" is patently false at best, and a thinly veiled attempt at associating TPB with the creators of BitTorrent at worst.