Slashdot Mirror
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.
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).
Summation 2
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.
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.
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.
I think there's a torrent of it on piratebay
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)
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.
The Pirate Bay has always been my main go to. What's funny is that I didn't even know it had ads!
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.
If you use pirate bay with an ad blocker you're essentially stealing.
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,
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.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Try btdigg.org
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.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!