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.

Comments

cut off one head

[ganjadude]

3 more pop up. "TPB" can die, but what TPB did will never die

Re:cut off one head

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:cut off one head

[Njorthbiatr]

It doesn't matter where the torrent comes from, you're going to be connecting to the same people.

Re:cut off one head

[Njorthbiatr]

*for the same torrent, I mean (obviously).

Re:cut off one head

[TheCastro1689]

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.

Re:cut off one head

[jellomizer]

If each head that pops up is less then 1/3rd of the original then the effectiveness approaches 0.

But I think to the point of the article. TPB has gotten so commercial that the idea of what it does has dwindled

It is like someone who rants about the evil of capitalism, then charges people a lot of money to go to his lectures to listen to him rant about the evil of capitalism.

Re:cut off one head

[Anonymous Coward]

DHT search. If they are there, it will be in the DHT. Can even see the stuff that the private trackers post if they didn't disable DHT.

Re:cut off one head

[JMJimmy]

3 more pop up. "TPB" can die, but what TPB did will never die

They aren't popping up though, especially not ones of any quality. The law is catching up but as usual it's being used as a club and with a complete misunderstanding of what technology is doing. Take the Voltage case in Canada - the legislation and interpretation by the courts to this point is that P2P constitutes a public communication. This ignores the fact that peer to peer by it's very name is a communication between peers, it ignores that it takes place entirely on private networks (there is no "public internet"), it ignores the hearsay nature of swarms, privacy of communications, etc. Until reasonable, predictable law is in place that protects all parties there will be fewer people willing to take the legal risk of starting a torrent site, let alone having the technical expertise. imo there's more need now for TPB than ever.

Unfortunately it's going to cost serious money, effort, and time to regain the civil rights we've lost under these insane treaties like WIPO, Berne, Rome Convention, and soon to be TPP. There are just too many areas where the law has been corrupted in favour of corporate/government rights over civil rights. Heck, in my province the default "civil rights" are those from 1792 England - I'm not even sure anyone knows what those were anymore.

Re:cut off one head

[Anonymous Coward]

We need to index the indexers!

Re:cut off one head

[hairyfeet]

Meh its being replaced with streaming video from Bumfuckistan where "nobody cares about your steenkin treaties man!"

When it comes to piracy as with anything else easy trumps all and "click and watch" don't get any easier. Sure you don't find things like games but Steam has pretty much made gaming so cheap why would anybody bother? this also royally screws the *.A.A as how you gonna bust people for watching video on the Internet?

Re:cut off one head

[JMJimmy]

Meh its being replaced with streaming video from Bumfuckistan where "nobody cares about your steenkin treaties man!"

When it comes to piracy as with anything else easy trumps all and "click and watch" don't get any easier. Sure you don't find things like games but Steam has pretty much made gaming so cheap why would anybody bother? this also royally screws the *.A.A as how you gonna bust people for watching video on the Internet?

Bumfuckistan's of the world are easily bought/corrupted/bullied into shutting down such sites. It's happened dozens of times already. It's also less of a grey area because streaming is a broadcast not a communication between peers. They may not bust individuals for watching but they'll have no trouble shutting down those sites.

The problem is one of access and choice. Steam is great but there's no guarantee of access to specific content through the service of your choice. There's also no equivalent competition for Steam on PC so their policies rule the day. If you disagree you lose your content. I've lost content even while agreeing (I bought games with specific functionality which was later patched out making the game pointless for my purposes to which Steam effectively replied "so sue us").

Re: cut off one head

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a solution to that, it's called Freenet. Slower, but only one user base with a unified data store.

Re:cut off one head

[ultranova]

It is like someone who rants about the evil of capitalism, then charges people a lot of money to go to his lectures to listen to him rant about the evil of capitalism.

Or complaining about the uselessness of the government on government-invented Internet.

Re:cut off one head

[ArmoredDragon]

Try btdigg.org

Re:cut off one head

[lgw]

The government-invented internet was 3 sites. Usenet and only university hosts, with no search and no WWW just wasn't what we think of as the internet today, for better or worse. Commercialism made the internet take off, and gave it the critical mass for projects like Wikipedia to happen, and the infrastructure for online gaming and streaming porn and torrents and etc.

Re: cut off one head

[lgw]

TPB needs to move to Freenet. Freenet will likely always be too slow for content, but of course TPB doesn't host content. For the minimal metadata needed to find the torrent you want, Freenet would actually work, has no servers to shut down or raid, is very anonymous for uploads and, really is a perfect match for what TPB does (as long as you don't need JS to serve those ads, and there's no JS on Freenet, at least by default).

Re:cut off one head

[Anonymous Coward]

Torrentz.eu already does that.

Re:cut off one head

[Austerity Empowers]

Seeding has always been where the real legal risk is, even before torrent when people were getting stuff from IRC bots, "secret" FTP sites, etc. The person hosting the file hosts all the risks, and relatively few people can make such things work, and those that do want to limit their audience for a variety of reasons. Torrent eases this a bit in that it forced people to seed at least as long as it takes to download, although I think even that has gone away.

Warezing will live on forever in the old style of warezing networks and word of mouth, it's far too expensive to police effectively, and easier for the public to defund adequately. What TPB did: show the seeders to all the world in a public way, probably won't live. It makes it far too easy for various interested parties to find offenders without having to spend any money. The general public cannot defund law enforcement to that degree (and probably shouldn't, copyright has some limited value) and certainly can't stop civil suits.

Re:cut off one head

[ArcadeMan]

I have no choice but to leech. My ISP blocked torrent seeding/uploading. That's right, when I get a file from a torrent I give back exactly zero byte every time and it's not my client settings doing that. Maybe their upload capacity matters more than their download, maybe they're doing it to protect themselves and their users from automated lawsuits, who knows. The point is, I have no choice but to leech when I get something from a torrent.

And that's why I disabled P2P in my Battle.net client.

Re:cut off one head

[Immerman]

So, public communication can only occur between non-peers? And only in publicly-owned places? So I guess that means the that guy standing on a soap box preaching to an assembled crowd at the mall isn't engaged in public communication, nor are presidential candidates debating on national TV. So what exactly would fall into your hypothetical public communication pigeonhole?

Re:cut off one head

[nobuddy]

Dirty trick. Most private trackers will ban you if your ratio is bad. Yours, being at all down and no up, is the worst possible ratio.

Re:cut off one head

[Tatarize]

It only got posted to TPB. Other places weren't really needed because those sites would copy it. They were as of lately just magnet links, in that you'd get a link to the swarm and not to the torrent file. And torrents are pretty robust overall so even ten copies of the same file would still be ten copies of the same file and you could, if you wanted, download them all. But, a lot of the topsites would do their releases and "the next guy" was sketchy and nobody would bother.

Re:cut off one head

[Kjella]

And the most common way to avoid that has been third party file lockers, which is why they're going after Megaupload and such. Basically one person uploads the file via some safe, anonymous method and publishes the link for others to download. The site offers slow/limited/captcha/ad-supported download for free users and fast download for paying users, which is how they make their money. Since they aren't the ones uploading it and respond to DMCA takedowns they're mostly getting away with it, but it's certainly under attack. Personally I'm wondering when, if ever, anyone's going to be able to make Freenet style downloads usable to most people where there is no seed as such, you just cut a file into a million little encrypted pieces that are distributed among the entire network. It pretty much does away with the concept of a seed altogether.

Re:cut off one head

[ArcadeMan]

They're the only ISP available and they know it.

Re:cut off one head

[hairyfeet]

Name the game and the functionality or I call bullshit. Now if you bought a game from a shitty dev (cough EA cough) that has strict time limits on how long their MP stays up? Sorry but 1 Google search would have let you know that EA games MP is worthless. But I haven't heard of any game where functionality was "patched out" and Valve told people to pound sand but I've heard of plenty where a dev didn't keep their promises and valve ended up refunding the money and shutting them down.

Re:cut off one head

[JMJimmy]

So, public communication can only occur between non-peers? And only in publicly-owned places? So I guess that means the that guy standing on a soap box preaching to an assembled crowd at the mall isn't engaged in public communication, nor are presidential candidates debating on national TV. So what exactly would fall into your hypothetical public communication pigeonhole?

I would see a communication to the public as one that is single source and indiscriminately communicated. ie: a sign is a public communication, or your guy on a soap box, or a TV program. A communication based on contacting an individual listed in a directory is not a public communication. ie: you look up someone's phone number and call them, the call isn't a communication to the public even if the directory is. A swarm is just a form of directory.

Re:cut off one head

[JMJimmy]

GFWL functionality was recently patched out of dozens of games from multiple publishers. Patches could not be prevented without going to offline mode, however, that only works for a max of 6 months and you're effectively blocked from most of Steam for that period to preserve the functionality. The odd game you could unpatch from a pirated version but many couldn't.

As shit as GFWL is, when you bought the games for the Xbox achievements it's rather useless when that feature is stripped out. If the developer released the patch and we had a choice of accepting it, or be limited in use without applying it, that'd be a different issue. The issue is Steam making them mandatory and not providing a realistic way to stop them from being applied.

Re:cut off one head

[0111 1110]

TPB was always the place I could go to find hard to get things

You spelled Demonoid wrong. Hard to find things on TPB? I never noticed that. I only found the most mainstream stuff there. For rarer stuff there used to be Emule but now there are mostly just specialized private trackers. Demonoid at least used to have rare software. The value of TPB is that it just has everything and anything that is mainstream and popular.

Re: cut off one head

[0111 1110]

so yeah, kiddie porn, and it's in your face, right out in the open, literally a few clicks from the homepage

Really? I've tried using Freenet a few times over the years and I cannot recall seeing any kiddie porn, but then I wasn't looking for it. In your face it was not. Maybe things have changed. Last time I tested it there was no home page either. I am highly skeptical that Freenet is any sort of practical source of kiddie or really any kind of porn for that matter.

Re:cut off one head

[0111 1110]

My ISP blocked torrent seeding/uploading.

Do they block all uploading or just BT uploading? My ISP throttles all torrents to like 25 KB/s download speed so I joined a torrent friendly VPN and have no problem torrenting 24/7 and that is exactly what I do. Maxing out my pathetic upload and download bandwidth.

Re:cut off one head

[Rich0]

Personally I'm wondering when, if ever, anyone's going to be able to make Freenet style downloads usable to most people where there is no seed as such, you just cut a file into a million little encrypted pieces that are distributed among the entire network.

It is called Freenet. :)

There is no reason that you can't post a content-hashed key on a regular website.

Freenet isn't horrible for downloads of large files, as long as they're seeded (which they often aren't - but torrents suffer the same problem though with much more visibility before you go to try downloading a file). The lack of visibility might be the real issue on Freenet - you don't know if you're going to get all the parts to a file before you try, whereas with a tracker you can get a sense for what is and isn't actually seeded or at the very least you know not long after you start downloading it.

For browsing websites and such Freenet is horribly slow, but it is secure for all the reasons that tor/etc aren't - the latency is a deliberate strategy to defeat tracking.

Re:cut off one head

[ArcadeMan]

Leave and do what? They're the only option. I'm just glad they're not blocking torrents completely.

Re:cut off one head

[ArcadeMan]

An ISP cannot block "all uploading" otherwise the Web wouldn't work, email wouldn't work, games wouldn't work, FTP wouldn't work, etc. Your computer has to be able to send requests and data in order to use the Internet.

Re:cut off one head

[Immerman]

So, town-hall meetings - non-public communication? Non-single sourced, and generally restricted to those present unless someone decides to upload a video.

Re:cut off one head

[JMJimmy]

So, town-hall meetings - non-public communication? Non-single sourced, and generally restricted to those present unless someone decides to upload a video.

Each individual speaking would constitute a communication to the public. When a person stops speaking it's someone else's communication to the public that begins when they start speaking. By contrast, someone cheering or booing in a crowd is not a communication to the public, it's a communication by the public and the "private in public" doctrine prevails (ie: anonymity/privacy of the crowd).

Re:cut off one head

[Immerman]

And so when things dissolve into chaos with people shouting over each other and dozens of arguments occurring simultaneously, it suddenly ceases to be public communication? A situation incidentally not so very different than a swarm - in a democracy *all* communication is between peers.

My point is that for *any* given definition of the exact boundaries of public communication, someone can come up with a counterexample. As such a judge (hopefully) hired for their ability to exercise good judgment should err on the side of caution, especially if they're working on the cutting edge of the law. And in a democracy they should probably make such calls in favor of maximizing personal rights - leave it to the legislature to restrict freedoms, if a good case can be made to do so.

Re:cut off one head

[JMJimmy]

If you can't identify the individual speaking then private in public can apply. There is no black and white. The volume of a conversation can change its interpretation in a court. Judges deal in greys.

Re:cut off one head

[Immerman]

Exactly.

Re:cut off one head

[Rakarra]

It doesn't matter where the torrent comes from, you're going to be connecting to the same people.

If you can figure out how to connect to the right people, sure. What about those of us, like me, who only occasionally connected to the Pirate Bay (for me, it's getting archived MLB broadcasts that MLB has refused to release online)? Yes, people who are really plugged into the system and pay attention to it are probably still going to get by just fine.

However, if you're not interested in the latest AAA movie release, and are looking for smaller, more obscure or older stuff, where there may only be 3-4 people seeding.. at all, this just got a lot harder.

Re:cut off one head

[tedgyz]

I would agree that finding good torrents has gotten harder. I have also decided that my time is worth something. I am willing to pay a few dollars to watch a movie on amazon instant video or my cable service. While the quality isn't as good as DVD/BD it is good enough and about equal to most torrents. The thing about torrents is lack of consistency. There are also the bad rips, honeypots, etc.

"So long and thanks for all the fish."

Re:cut off one head

[hairyfeet]

You mean the third party DRM that Valve had fuck all to do with yet offered the publishers the option of switching to Steamworks if they'd bother to make a patch, THAT GFWL? Just played a GFWL game with full MP functionality AAMOF, Bioshock II. the devs had it up and running before GFWL even went offline. It plays fine, not that anybody still plays MP on B2 but it works.

But I don't see how you can blame Steam for your bad choices, after all Steam tells you in big bold letters when a game uses third party DRM so you can choose to take it or leave it. If I wouldn't have been gifted Bioshock II and Far Cry 3 (which I uninstalled the secon I beat it, Fuck UPlay!) there wouldn't have been a drop of third party DRM on my system, I turned down the Splinter Cell series because of third party DRM, but if you CHOOSE to buy third party DRMed games how is that the fault of Valve? they offered with both GFWL and Gamespy games to help devs switch and because of that both Borderlands 1 and Bioshock 2 still have MP and co-op, hell with Bioshock 2 they even ported over my DLC and stats for GFWL so if anything Valve went above and beyond, its the devs of the other games (cough, EA sucks, cough) that have CHOSEN not to give you what you paid for....so maybe you should take it up with them?

Its not like the pirate version is any better, the only MP you can use is a LAN hack like Gameranger...which you can use on the Steam version as well, you just don't get the players using LANhacks like you do with Steamworks. Hell you can fire up TF1 and still find a game going on that thing, good luck finding anybody playing those other servers a year after release.

Re:cut off one head

[JMJimmy]

DRM of all games sucks but that's not the point.

The point is that I purchased the games for the Xbox achievements which were then patched out by Steam without any choice on my part. They weren't giving me the choice of take it or leave it, they just took it away. I *WANTED* GFWL - that was the motivator for the purchases. I have over 1000 Xbox 360/GFWL/Win8/Xbox Arcade games and non-Xbox/PS3 games can't be tracked by my favourite achievement tracking service making Steamworks games less fun/interesting for me.

I still use it

[rockabilly]

It's my number one stop when searching, though I don't do that nearly as often anymore. Not sure how this 'tech' is morphing or if it is at all, but I'm sure something will come up to replace the entire process...

Re:I still use it

[Anonymous Coward]

Magnet links already do away with the need for servers, trackers and torrent files, the only thing remaining to implement is peer-to-peer searching. most of the need for centralized torrent sites is already old tech.

Re:I still use it

[Anonymous Coward]

the only thing remaining to implement is peer-to-peer searching

The question remains, will anyone take the responsibility to implement such searching? Making a P2P search for Magnet links requires some planning and real programming, and cannot be solved by just gluing together some existing components.

Also, TPB implemented a browsable catalogue which allowed one to discover items without searching. Do we want something like that too? If yes, then we need someone to moderate such index, or it ends up being filled with garbage entries.

By the way, do Magnet links really do away with the need of trackers? At least all Magnet links in TPB included a long list of tracker addresses.

Re:I still use it

[DocSavage64109]

The Pirate Bay has always been my main go to. What's funny is that I didn't even know it had ads!

Re:I still use it

[mister_playboy]

When Slashdot first gave me the option of disabling ads I had the same reaction...

"This site has ads?"

Re:I still use it

[0111 1110]

You've never once had to browse there without an ad blocker? It is absolutely fucking awful. I can relate to what Sunde is saying. I too use it as my main go to for torrents and I tend to always browse with firefox with adblock edge installed.

Even at an internet cafe I have to install adblock edge and noscript to make the net actually browsable. Ever seen what youtube is like without blockers? Ugh. I don't think a lot of sites could get away with fucking up the browsing experience quite so badly if so many people did not use ad blockers. I really don't understand how someone could avoid using them now. I figure advertisers must just assume that everyone has ad blockers and proceed accordingly.

What about all the other torrent sites?

[walterbyrd]

So what if one torrent site goes down?

Re:What about all the other torrent sites?

[Rik Sweeney]

According to Torrent Freak, a lot of other sites have gone down, including EZTV, Zoink, Torrage and the Istole tracker (I can't confirm though because I'm at work).

Re:What about all the other torrent sites?

[TheCastro1689]

EZTV is down a lot, but I think that's cause it's run by like one guy and for some reason hackers like to target it.

Re:What about all the other torrent sites?

[ruir]

Language evolves, and while hackers used to have another meaning, nowadays it means something different, and does not matter where it is a script kiddtie or the NSA attacking you.

Re: What about all the other torrent sites?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you use pirate bay with an ad blocker you're essentially stealing.

the pirate bay is important

[Anonymous Coward]

the site stood for freedom and no matter how what it was always there. If it goes down forever it means that we lost a major battle. From that point on our forces will never be as fearless as before.

Re:the pirate bay is important

[Richard_at_work]

How the fuck did it stand for freedom?

Re:the pirate bay is important

[Gavagai80]

The freedom to make tens of millions in ad revenue from other people's efforts.

Re: the pirate bay is important

[Threni]

He meant free.

Re:the pirate bay is important

[pigiron]

Neocons? Hollywood, the record companies, and their lawyers are all liberal Democrats you moron.

Re:the pirate bay is important

[mister_playboy]

The liberal Democrats of 2000 are not the liberal Democrats of 1940. Why didn't you call them neoliberals, you moron?

The fact that the core missions of Democrats and Republicans have varied wildly over the existence of both parties just shows how limiting and misleading the whole R/D /. debate is.

Re:the pirate bay is important

[pigiron]

"The liberal Democrats of 2000 are not the liberal Democrats of 1940."

Exactly my point asswipe.

Still up.

[o_ferguson]

The instances at thepiratebay.ee and thepiratebay.cr are still up.

Re:Still up.

[Anonymous Coward]

both .ee and .cr are known fakes

Re:Still up.

[linuxrocks123]

Those are fakes.

Re:Still up.

[o_ferguson]

Really? Thanks for pointing that out. I always just use torrentz.eu anyway. Not to be a bitch, but do you have any proof of that?

Re:Still up.

[linuxrocks123]

You can search and browse torrents and it will look like it's working, but if you actually try to download anything, it'll ask for money.

Re:Still up.

[o_ferguson]

That sounds like proof to me. Thanks for the heads up.

Re:Still up.

[o_ferguson]

Tried a few out to see - it seems that the listings with magnet links are legit, but there are others that want you to download a *.exe file which is highly suspect.

Re:Still up.

[Anonymous Coward]

and .ee and .cr have google-analytics scripts running on them.

Re:Still up.

[BitterOak]

.ee is definitely a fake. It looks real until you try to download a magnet, then it asks for money. .cr seems to be legit, but it is still having some reliability problems. I have successfully downloaded a few torrents from it (.cr) though.

Re:Still up.

[BitterOak]

.ee is fake, but .cr seems to be working, sort of.

TPB Decentralized

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:TPB Decentralized

[xaotikdesigns]

Do we have a link to the latest copy?

Re:TPB Decentralized

[fafalone]

The best torrent sites I use are the ones that are specialized in a particular type of content i want, they organize their material and they have detailed relevant information on each torrent which is relevant to the type of content in a way that TPB could never do.

Well how nice for you. Meanwhile the 99% of people that don't have connections or large sums of money for invites or file lockers have to rely on more public means. I'd love to get on one of the HD tv/movie private sites, but the ones that are good are impossible to access without knowing someone or paying through the nose.
And I'm not quite sure what information TPB lacked. I can't ever recall downloading a mislabeled torrent, and the descriptions always covered source, quality, contents, file names/sizes, and most even have detailed encoding information or scene readmes for software.

Re:TPB Decentralized

[0111 1110]

Your retarded insistence on using clearnet for serving and downloading material is an outdated model and RISKY AS FUCK

You coward. It's not any more risky than an enormous herd of sheep eating grass in a field. Sure the wolves will get a few unucky ones at the edges but the vast majority will be safe. As things currently stand the risk is minimal even in the US and outside of the US it's practically nonexistent.

Re:TPB Decentralized

[Gryle]

The problem with specialized torrent sites are the membership requirements, either in terms of existing torrents to add that don't already exist or money. I've belonged to one specialized site that approached this correctly. You were given an initial amount of credits that could be applied to downloads. The only way to get more credit was to seed your files. The more you seeded, the more files you could download. Donations went strictly to pay for maintenance and hosting costs, but there was no requirement to spend money. Everything was organized, tagged, and easily searchable. Poor formats or bad files were marked usually within a hour of being posted and admins would delete these usually within 24 hours to avoid cluttering search results. Sadly the site shutdown last year with no warning (or at least none that I saw), I suspect at the behest of some three or four-letter agency.

TPB Database backup?

[slacka]

Over a year ago, they released a 75MB full backup of the site that contained all of the torrents.[1] Does anyone know if a more recent on exists for others to build upon?

[1] http://torrentfreak.com/downlo...

Re:TPB Database backup?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think there's a torrent of it on piratebay

Re:TPB Database backup?

[Anonymous Coward]

The download link refers back to TPB, tho, so...

Magnet URL, 75 Mb version: magnet:?xt=urn:btih:277e1afa0038db7299cd8274310556526599f67c&dn=poor.xml.7z
                                          635Mb version: magnet:?xt=urn:btih:e4b6f847647211b930219492ecf1a9c7bc696d29&dn=rich.xml.7z

FTFY

Silly backwards lobbyists and authorities

[metrix007]

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.

Re:Silly backwards lobbyists and authorities

[GameboyRMH]

Sounds like a combination of torrents over I2P and an index site hosted on Freenet.

Re:Silly backwards lobbyists and authorities

[kamapuaa]

Piracy promotes ideas, innovation, allows good things to spread

I'd link to pirate bay if it wasn't down...they showed the top downloads and literally every single one was a commercial movie or game or TV show from a major publisher. The exact same sort of thing that is popular without piracy, only now you don't have to pay for that copy of "Guardians of the Galaxy."

Re:Silly backwards lobbyists and authorities

[Ravaldy]

I too believe piracy is inevitable but I'm afraid it's going to shrink significantly. Government everywhere is finding ways to obtain more jurisdiction over internet entities run within it's borders. This means that cybercrime will be similar to crime in that it will hide in the shadows. This means closed circles with only trusted new members (such as what private trackers do).

With government ruling over ISPs and forcing DNS redirects (luckily not happening where I live yet), non technical users won't obtain access to this content as easily as before.

Re:Silly backwards lobbyists and authorities

[Connie_Lingus]

its not down...

http://thepiratebay.cr/

also, there is always the "google search 'stuff you want' thepiratebay, hit "Cached" and "Get this torrent" hack

just saying

Re:Silly backwards lobbyists and authorities

[aaaaaaargh!]

I guess I am some "whiny, greedy content owner" for daring to ask you to pay money if you want to enjoy the fruit of my labors.

You're just bullshitting, right? I know plenty of artists, writers, and musicians but I've never heard a creative person call himself or herself a "content owner".

I work my ass off, I pay my actors, pay my crew, pay for equipment, food, props, costumes, etc.

Oh please fuck off ...

Re:Silly backwards lobbyists and authorities

[ganjadude]

you sound like the anti oil people "americas too rich, we need to take them down to our level"

can we still have homes in your world or would you like us all living in mud huts

Re:Silly backwards lobbyists and authorities

[spire3661]

Copyright as it is currently implemented is fundamentally flawed. Until such a time as it is fixed, piracy is the wedge used to keep focus on the issue. Copyright is too strong and favors too few to keep in its current form. I dont mind paying you for your labor, what i mind is the idea that you think you have the right to sell a license for almost a century, to people who havent been born yet.

Re:Silly backwards lobbyists and authorities

[spire3661]

If i could get a DRM free copy of Guardians, i would have bought it. If there was a way to pay for it and add it to my Plex server I would, but there isnt. Optical discs suck and are obsolete, and the current online services (HD digital) all state they only hold your content for a few years, after that no guarantee you will be able to stream product you paid for.

Re:Silly backwards lobbyists and authorities

[camperdave]

You pay your actors, your crew, etc exactly the same way you do now. Producing a movie, or a TV show is not a guarantee of income. It is a gamble. You may wind up with a "Raiders of the Lost Ark", or you may wind up with a "The Postman". Whether you do or not doesn't depend on piracy/copyright infringement. It depends on you putting together a good story.

Piracy isn't putting content developers out of business. Piracy is a result of content producers ignoring a revenue stream by not making content available at the price consumers are willing to pay.

Re:Silly backwards lobbyists and authorities

[metrix007]

Piracy doesn't mean people don't pay for content. We see that today with video game, movies and music franchises topping billions of dollars.

If anything, Piracy leads to greater profits.

Re:Silly backwards lobbyists and authorities

[metrix007]

So what? What's your point?

You don't think kids could be influenced by GofG and go on to create their own amazing universe?

Just because something is popular doesn't mean it is bad or isn't art.

Re:Silly backwards lobbyists and authorities

[metrix007]

I don't really care about the content producers will, and I see no valid argument as to why my copy of something they created should be so very limited.

The only protection a content creator should have is a minimum window to protect against being ripped off. 10 years would be generous.

Information wants to be free, etc etc.

Re:Silly backwards lobbyists and authorities

[metrix007]

I don't have the expectation that people will pay me for my work before I complete it.

Re:Silly backwards lobbyists and authorities

[ShaunC]

OK Genius, if piracy becomes the norm, how does new content get paid for?

Piracy has been the norm for 20 years and has been mainstream for at least 10 of those years. There is no lack of new content that I've noticed. Lack of new ideas, maybe; recently we've seen that even Sony's own employees are tired of the same formulaic Adam Sandler dreck coming out year after year...

Enjoy a future full of Amish Mafia, Real Housewives of what-the-fuck and other horrible drivel because that's going to be the only kind of content that makes money and it's going to push all high quality content off the airwaves.

Game of Thrones, American Horror Story, House of Cards, Breaking Bad, there's a lot of quality programming recently that's making money hand over fist, piracy or no piracy. Half of it is even on free-to-air TV channels to start with.

Re:Silly backwards lobbyists and authorities

[Ravaldy]

I disagree. If you block the highway, traffic won't get through unless willing to take the shoulder. In this case the shoulder is remapping your DNS. Most non technical users won't do that hence reducing the clientele to mostly technical users (like it was in the BBS days).

Re:Silly backwards lobbyists and authorities

[metrix007]

You can't block the highway. The system I described couldn't be blocked. How are you going to block a completely p2p encrypted system that uses ssl over port 443?

Non technical users don't have to know the details, if the program is implemented correctly it will Just Work(TM).

Re:Silly backwards lobbyists and authorities

[Rakarra]

Piracy doesn't mean people don't pay for content. We see that today with video game, movies and music franchises topping billions of dollars.

And the only reason that is so is that piracy is kept on the fringes. It is not seen as the norm, except maybe some tech circles and teenagers.

If anything, Piracy leads to greater profits.

Piracy is great/free advertising. However, the point of an advertisement is to drive purchases. If piracy becomes the defacto way to getting content, then where does the money come from to make the content?

Re:Silly backwards lobbyists and authorities

[Ravaldy]

And how do you know the IP address of said network?

Re:So...

[NotDrWho]

More likely threatened.

Re:You guys should give it up

[marsu_k]

Sure. I'll do it the minute I'm able to subscribe to the content, digitally, and that the content is reasonably priced. Until then, arrrrr.

(For the record between Neflix, HBO Nordic and Spotify I pirate very little. But for example Daily Show/Colbert - I used to be able to watch them from the web site. I even turned off my adblocker there as thanks. But now they block my country, so I torrent them. Viacom, get a clue)

pirate bay

[Anonymous Coward]

It's still a nice big middle finger for the Pirate Bay to keep popping back up after all this time and effort. And it's a great focus for authorities to go after instead of other torrent sites. It's the front lines.

Re:So...

[Anonymous Coward]

More likely the site sucks and he knows it. TPB is/was exactly as he stated, buggy and a terrible site in general. It worked, but barely. Scrap it and start fresh.

Ads? What Ads?

[Anonymous Coward]

Really, anyone who visits a torrent site without full ad blocking is just playing Russian roulette with their PC. I'm preaching to the choir here, but that's a strange way for him to somehow justify why the site should stay down.. ads wouldn't even register on the radar of users with a clue who visited it.

Re:You guys should give it up

[KillAllNazis]

Many of me? How many of me are there?

Re:You guys should give it up

[DocSavage64109]

My friend wanted a copy of the old Disney movie "song of the south" -- which is now completely banned and disavowed by Disney -- to give to his mom who had fond memories of the movie. The Pirate Bay was the only place he could find it.

I dare to disagree

[jbssm]

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.

Censorship

[Anonymous Coward]

Piratebay is about censorship protection. It's exploring just how well a site can stand against massive takedown attacks.
It's about who controls the web. Do *we* control the web - or does the *authoritarians* control the web.

Re:Censorship

[eye_blinked]

TPB makes it look like *porn advertising* controls the web. TPB advertising policy is in conflict with the goals of the movement.

Re:Censorship

[kuzb]

The pirate bay censors people all the time in its own comment system. They then distribute large amounts of malware and virus laden torrents around with no regard to the people who use them. To say they're about censorship protection is a laughable joke.

both .ee and .cr are known fakes

[Scottingham]

I mistakenly posted in a previous /. story that .ee worked. It does not.

I hope TPB does come back though. It's inability to stay down for long gives me hope wrt the freedom of the internet.

.onion site down?

[GameboyRMH]

Just curious, is their official .onion still up? I'm at my office so checking would be a PITA for me from here.

Re:Let it go, Obama

[zeroryoko1974]

Hollywood has been a long time supporter and contributor. Call it guilt by association

Re:You guys should give it up

[dugancent]

There are tons of copies on eBay.

Don't they have a .onion mirror too?

[ron_ivi]

Seems they could host it on tor hidden services too.

Don't laugh...

[grub]

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.

Re:Don't laugh...

[grub]

We're in Canada, CBS only works in the US. :(

Re:Don't laugh...

[torqer]

Then go to Global, or CTV, or CBC or whomever has the requested show.

For the ridiculously lazy:
http://www.globaltv.com/theyou...

Re:Don't laugh...

[danomac]

Global TV streams them next day (or two days?)

You can't record it?

Re:Don't laugh...

[grub]

Thanks, forgot about that. Still, auto-torrenting to the server to the Y&R folder is just easier.

Re:Don't laugh...

[grub]

PVR hard disk is dying and I refuse to pay a bunch of money to Shaw for another. Easier to torrent/usenet TV shows and not have to suffer through commercials.

Re:Don't laugh...

[antdude]

Lady? Prove it please. I am pretty sure YOU are watching it. :P

Re:Don't laugh...

[antdude]

Commercials, waiting, region blocked outside of USA, etc. :P

Make it convenient for me and I will pay

[sandytaru]

I think another reason TPB isn't as necessary as it used to be is because the convenience gap it filled has slowly been replaced by paid services, in many instances. Getting an entire season of a TV show used to involve hunting down disks or even VHS tapes, a lot of waiting, a lot of headache, and the cost - when a pirated torrent of the same thing could be had in a few hours. Even renting a movie involved going outside. What if you didn't want to leave the house - or couldn't?

With the rise of on-demand services like Netflix/Hulu/all their friends, and the availability of most content for a reasonable cost, the laziness factor for torrenting is not as prevalent. For $2 and basically no effort I can buy a streaming movie off Amazon and watch it on my PS3. If I wanted to pirate it now, I'd save $2 but it would not necessarily be any easier or faster.

Same also applies for music. I pirated a lot of MP3s a long time ago because the songs were not readily available on CD or anywhere else (usually because of regional licensing bullshit.) These days, I can pay a dollar to whichever music service of my choice that carries the song, and have the MP3 without having to buy the whole album.

There will be other services along the lines of TPB, but they're more likely to stock 3D makerbot blueprints than they are cheaply available mainstream media in the future.

Re:Make it convenient for me and I will pay

[Moskit]

With the rise of on-demand services like Netflix/Hulu/all their friends

Hulu:

Sorry, currently our video library can only be watched from within the United States

Netflix lie:

Watch TV programs & films anytime, ANYWHERE

Sorry, Netflix is not available in your country.

Those offers are still strongly territory-limited (won't stream outside USA and maybe a few other countries) and not available globally. I agree that such services with relatively low fees provide convenience and can alleviate the need for torrenting, but it's still a long way from pushing it out of the internet.

Re:Make it convenient for me and I will pay

[beanpoppa]

I agree for the most part. My torrenting has really dropped off in the past couple of years. Shows like Top Gear and Dr. Who, which used to be a year or more behind in the US (if they aired at all) are now only a week or so behind. Services like Netflix have much improved libraries of content, rather than just B-movie versions of good movies.

However, I still torrent for a couple of reasons- Streaming services are not compatible when I want to watch content while traveling. They generally don't allow an offline viewing mode.

The other thing I tend to do is torrent kids movies that I have on DVD. The DVD version has umpteen previews, ads, and (ironically) FBI warnings before the movie starts. I used to rip the DVD, but even once I figure out/update the tool that can get around the copy protection, it still takes longer to rip than it does to download the movie in .mkv format.

Re:Make it convenient for me and I will pay

[spire3661]

Shocking ignorance for the 21st Century.

Re:Make it convenient for me and I will pay

[sandytaru]

Yup, the aforementioned regional licensing bullshit. That's a problem the MPAA/RIAA and whoever needs to sort out with the streaming services if they want to end piracy for good.

Re:Make it convenient for me and I will pay

[sandytaru]

Why can't the places that claim to want to make money work out a deal with whatever local regional governments to sell their content for consumers? Country blocks are the stupidest thing ever.

Re:Make it convenient for me and I will pay

[Moskit]

TPB is not about USA-made content, it's about any content. If a service wants to replace piracy, it would need to provide similar content, which Hulu/Netflix/etc don't.

Hulu/Netflix/etc are not about USA-made content either. They have content from other countries, wherever rights could be obtained. Regional restriction is due to content rights, not due to content itself.

TPB provides you (illegally) any content anywhere.

Hulu/Netflix provide you (legally) certain content (that they have right to) in USA (where they have content rights) and a few other countries. This is a large restriction.

Now biting the troll: other places do make good shows/films/games.

Re:Make it convenient for me and I will pay

[CronoCloud]

Maybe, but it's always sounded to me that the Piracy-havens of Scandinavia and Eastern Europe want to have their cake and eat it too. Resenting the US corporations for dominating Entertainment, and then pirating all the US made games/movies/music/TV that they can.

If they don't want to pay, then don't pirate it. No fucking American company is going to be stupid enough to release things in Scandinavia, Finland, Hungary or Russia knowing that some pirate party/information wants to be free guy in Sweden or Finland or Former Comrade Commie current Mafiya Ivan will just upload the thing to finnishtorrents.fi or rodinamafiyatorrents.ru.

maybe if they paid for stuff their own countries would be able to make quality content other than crappy point and click adventures with bad dialog, cheap cell phone games and trojans and viruses and botnets.

Re:Make it convenient for me and I will pay

[sandytaru]

Well, and everyone pirating Japanese animation and Korean TV dramas. But even those have streaming available in the US via Crunchyroll now.

Re:Make it convenient for me and I will pay

[Tom]

This. I can't remember the last time I downloaded music from a torrent site. It's more convenient these days to buy it on iTunes, and prices are fair.

When the same can be said for movies, and the MPAA stops this staggered release bullshit, I'll start buying movies again the same way I bought a lot of DVDs back when that was the most convenient way to get movies.

Re:Make it convenient for me and I will pay

[CronoCloud]

Good point on the Anime.

Re:Make it convenient for me and I will pay

[Moskit]

You keep changing your arguments to suit your goal.

The original statement was that thanks to Hulu/Netflix etc there is no longer need to pirate. This statement is untrue, except to some extent for USA where such services are widespread and cheap.

I don't complain to local content companies. I don't need to. I stopped consuming most of the content out there (TV series and shows, movies, games) as I don't find them attractive.

I'm glad you find USA TV/movies/games to work best for you. Don't worry, if there is a good movie/series from another country it will likely be remade as a USA production. Those offensive boobs will be removed, and a lot of gratitious violence (or extended interrogation) will be added instead.

Re:Make it convenient for me and I will pay

[Dripdry]

It hasn't. There are all sorts of obscure tv shows and movies that will never see the light of day which one was able to find on TPB.
Paid is fine, but there's lots of cool content that will be lost if TPB goes down permanently.

Re:Make it convenient for me and I will pay

[kuzb]

> and the cost

This is really the issue. What they sell a season of a TV show for seems disproportionate to its actual value.

Re:Make it convenient for me and I will pay

[Whiteox]

Please leave the Hungarians out of it.

Re:Make it convenient for me and I will pay

[CronoCloud]

And there is no functional difference between someone who pirates and someone who would never buy the product in the first place.

Well, if one would never buy it, why pirate it in the first place? It's obviously not a "need"

Here's an example. Suppose I ran Windows and wanted to "DJ" in Second Life. On Windows, Sam Broadcaster is considered the best for that purpose.. It costs $300. Now if I only DJ'd a few parties and friends events, that's a big money sink for software I wouldn't use much. But if I don't want to pay that much for it, and would never buy it, that is not an excuse to pirate the thing.

Apologists like you claim that there are "many people who would never buy it", but if they would never buy it, they shouldn't pirate it, because pirating proves it has value to them....but they just don't want to pay for it.

Re:Make it convenient for me and I will pay

[CronoCloud]

Why? The piracy rate in Hungary is twice that of the US.

I once communicated with a Hungarian online. We talked a bit about gaming. He was a fervent PC Master race sort of guy. He said consoles were for rich kids and said the games cost too much and couldn't understand how American PC Master Race gamers sometimes call console gamers "welfare gamers" and that games cost the same price on various platforms. He said the PC was better because piracy was easier and that he pirated games mostly, because he had no money. And then this fellow told me wanted to be a game developer, but complained that pretty much required a move to the UK or the States, because that was where the money is. To me, that made him a hypocrite. I was thinking "Of course it is, because Anglophones actually pay for games."

Re:Make it convenient for me and I will pay

[0111 1110]

If they don't want to pay, then don't pirate it.

Is that supposed to be logic? What's good for the goose is good for the gander.

A fun story about TPB and France

[Cley Faye]

Story time... A few days ago (less than a week!) the SCPP (the french RIAA) finally got a ruling forcing ISP to block TPB. At the time, we all laughed at both the idea that blocking a website is useless, and at the price we payed for this (it took a lot of court time to get this result, which translate into taxpayers money). Fastforward yesterday, TPB disappear. If the situation stay this way it will truly be a ridiculous ruling on all account. Fantastic.

Re:You guys should give it up

[Ingenium13]

You might have better luck with the new Comedy Central android app and a Chromecast. I'm not sure if it's region restricted, but they're all up on there for streaming.

Re:So...

[Anonymous Coward]

No. He just has...

<puts on sunglasses>

Stockholm Syndrome!

Re:You guys should give it up

[marsu_k]

Thanks for the suggestion, but I think even the app itself is region restricted (at least it says my S3, Xperia Z2 and 2013 Nexus 7 are all incompatible with it). And I'd reckon even if I'd sideload the app, the content would be locked away. A VPN might help there - but really, torrenting is just so much easier. Which is kind of my point.

Re:You guys should give it up

[DocSavage64109]

According to google, all those copies on eBay are pirated anyway.

Re:You guys should give it up

[marsu_k]

Cheers! That indeed works very fine.

Re:You guys should give it up

[Pfhorrest]

Offshoring and immigration are completely irrelevant to the "information wants to be free" debate. One is about labor relations, and asking the government not to enable (though immigration and tax policy) greedy corporations to force down the price of wages for local people just to stuff the pockets of corporate shareholders and executives. The other is about communication and not prohibiting any forms of it. They have nothing to do with each other.

Re:Duh

[MightyYar]

Explain why it is our problem, and why the force of the state is necessary to provide you a living?

ads ?

[Tom]

It never changed except for one thing â" 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.

There were ads on TPB? Fuck, now I can't even turn off ABE to check it out.

There were ads on the Pirate Bay?

[FunkSoulBrother]

I would have thought the crossover between people who used AdBlock and knew what the hell to do with a .torrent file would have been higher. I wonder how much money they made.

I recently found out (perhaps a bit naively) that there were ads on YouTube, too. It turns out I'd literally been using AdBlock Plus so long that it predated my ever using that site (or at least whenever they introduced ads). Turns out YouTube is a real shit experience when you use it as intended, as I found on my smartphone.

Not ANYONE. Just potential fans.

[Anonymous Coward]

Corporations still have to pay to use your No. 1 Youtube hit with millions of views for their commercial.
Actual fans will BEG to buy some, ANY, physical artifacts from you.

Oh, you're not in the music-audio-video business?
You draw or write? EVEN BETTER!
Your running costs are peanuts while making money from the audience is an established trade.
Just ask Charles Dickens.

Meanwhile, take a cheap course or two (there are some free ones online) in business, economy and marketing. And get a lawyer.
Don't even bother if you don't do those. Someone who did will come along and take all your stuff and you'll end up owing him money.

Kiskstart and Patreon the shit out of your art until you get a core audience you can live off of.
Know them, love them, worship them. NEVER be an asshole to them. Kid listening to your music for free today is your pension plan if he ends up a fan.

Bills to pay?
Treat it like a 9 to 5 with overtime, 7 days a week, no-vacation-ever job.
But do your work like it is play. It IS the stuff you love doing more than anything else.
Or at least more than working at MacFatFoods.
You can't do that? You're in the wrong line then.

Then... get real good. Keep churning stuff out. Keep gathering fans.
Maybe you become famous or corps come for you along the way - but now YOU own all your shit, not them.
Or maybe you just end up living a comfortable middle class life while doing what you love.

"Bills to pay" is easy. It just takes a LOT of work.
Rich and famous... That's lucky. Talent's good, but what you really need is to be lucky. Just ask Mozart.
Remember, if you're one in a billion there are 6 more of you out there and all 6 of them are cheaper and hungrier than you.

Re:Duh

[blackomegax]

I use torrents to discover high quality content that I then pay for later on for archival if it's damned good. That's your business model. Actual competition to produce the highest quality content that wows people. Everything else can fuck off and die for all I care.

Re:So...

[QRDeNameland]

Stockholm Syndrome!

I was wondering if he might have received some "rectal rehydration".

Re:So...

[Rakarra]

Slough off shitty old site and let the better designs win, not the one with "history". Keeping 1990's-looking sites around isn't really good.

Keeping 1990's-looking sites if fine if they work right. After all, they usually look better and are more functional and less buggy than 2014-looking sites.

Re:Duh

[MightyYar]

Yes, I would like copyright law seriously revisited. It is a concept left over from the British monarchy - that someone can "own" information. There may very well be benefit to society from having short durations of monopoly - something more similar to patents. But there is no way that any artist considers the 90+ year duration of copyrights when pursuing their work. It's blatant abuse of state power, and I consider the ruling class to be the criminals - not the so-called "pirates".

Re:Duh

[Rakarra]

Explain why it is our problem, and why the force of the state is necessary to provide you a living?

Because society as a whole decided that it was better than the alternative. Has the pendulum swung too far? Do copyright holders have too much control? Absolutely. Should the alternative be that no one needs to pay for content anymore? Absolutely not.

Re:Duh

[MightyYar]

I agree that there probably is some role for intellectual property protections, but I get mad when people start to feel entitled to be compensated for something that boils down to a government handout. The government is quite literally forcing other people to pay you through threat of force, just like a tax.

On a more philosophical level, I'm not even sure that copyrights are necessary. It's too bad that a modern society doesn't exist that has experimented with abolishing them to see if they are really needed to generate artistic works. Certainly artistic works were created prior to copyright's modern implementation in the late 18th century.