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Peter Sunde: the Pirate Bay Should Stay Down
An anonymous reader writes: We are on the second day since The Pirate Bay was raided by Swedish police. While it's still unclear how hard the site was hit, not everyone is mourning its troubles. Peter Sunde, one of the well-known founders of TPB, wrote, "The Pirate Bay has been raided, again. That happened over 8 years ago last time. That time, a lot of people went out to protest and rally in the streets. Today few seem to care. And I'm one of them." He paints a rather crusty picture: "The site was ugly, full of bugs, old code and old designs. It never changed except for one thing – the ads. More and more ads were filling the site, and somehow when it felt unimaginable to make these ads more distasteful, they somehow ended up even worse." Adding to that, the plan had always been to pull the plug after 10 years, so others could take over. However, when that day came last year, the site remained online. The big question that remains right now is whether The Pirate Bay will make another comeback, or if this is indeed the end. Peter seems to believe that the latter may be the case, but that others will fill the gap.
Three more smaller, shittier heads that together do not equal what used to be there.
The truth is, torrenting has been getting harder every year. Lots of leeching and a userbase stretched out over too many sites.
I'd mod this up, but I'd rather comment that I agree with you. TPB was always the place I could go to find hard to get things, organized terribly, but deep in its bowels were the links I needed. Other sites like KAT or whatever they have to rename themselves I like using more, but it's harder to find rare items.
Ever since it got big they've been pushing for more decentralization when it comes to file discovery and sharing. Magnet links made hosting torrent files unnecessary. They looked into mesh networking to get around ISP damage. Ironically the only thing standing in the way of the rise of decentralization was TPB itself.
Piracy as the norm is inevitable.
Trying to hold on to the old methods just doesn't make sense, is greedy, artificially limiting and ultimately a net loss for society.
Piracy promotes ideas, innovation, allows good things to spread via word of mouth, acts as a repository for things which would otherwise be lost (unedited star wars, old no longer released games) and often provides a superior product.
What we need is a completely decentralized system, that can never be taken down, and that it cannot be proven what is being transferred.
Perhaps something to make it impossible to download a full file from one node on the network (although this option could be enabled), and that any chunk downloaded is salted, and impossible to tell what the contents is.
Have the search be purely P2P, so every client has a copy of the index, and this is always updated and distributed. Obviously it would need to be immune to tampering, but perhaps a system like bit-coin would make sense.
It's only a matter of time until something like this comes along, and when it does, the whiny, greedy content owners will have to adjust.
The world is changing, and for the better.
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
All in all, TPB was still pretty usable compared to other sites. I just can't find any other torrent site that does something as simple as grouping HD TV shows by number of seeds during the last days, like TPB did in the TOP section. That's usability IMO and with an adblocker you got usability together with simplicity, there's nothing wrong about that.
Don't laugh, but TPB was the only place could get The Young and The Restless for my lady if she missed it on TV.
If anyone has suggestions for another place to get it, please comment.
Trolling is a art,