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Anyone Can Now Launch Their Own Version of the Pirate Bay

Posted by Soulskill on from the we're-all-spartacus dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Not satisfied with merely launching The Old Pirate Bay, torrent site isoHunt today debuted The Open Bay, which lets anyone deploy their own version of The Pirate Bay online. This is achieved via a new six-step wizard, which the group says requires you to be somewhat tech-savvy and have "minimal knowledge of how the Internet and websites work." The Pirate Bay, the most popular file sharing website on the planet, went down last week following police raids on its data center in Sweden. As we've noted before, The Old Pirate Bay appears to be the best alternative at the moment, but since The Pirate Bay team doesn't know if it's coming back yet, there is still a huge hole left to be filled.

4 of 81 comments (clear)

  1. I think by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I think one of the most valuable features of the old pirate bay was its reputation system.

    To be able to tell between a (relatively) trusted contributor and a virus uploader.

    How can you duplicate that on a pirate bay clone.

  2. The Legit Bay by tepples · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I wonder how hard it'd be to take The Open Bay and turn it into a "LegitTorrent" site centered around works under a Creative Commons license or other licenses for free cultural works. Such a site would promptly respond to OCILLA notices to help discover uploaders that have been engaging in license laundering.

  3. Re:The next big thing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    A few years ago, I missed the opportunity to see a show live. I tried and tried to watch it legitimately online. I was signing up for memberships and had my trusty credit card in hand, but it was impossible. After a couple days of trying to give someone money to see what most people had seen for free, I became angry with the system and decided to quit trying to follow what were obviously flawed rules. I downloaded what I wanted in minutes.

    Up until then, I'd never used bittorrent for anything illegal. I used it for getting Debian and I was impressed with how well it worked, but considered it exactly the wrong method for copyright infringment because it isn't anonymous. Fast forward to now, and I pay monthly fees to get a VPN to countries where the laws are different and watch what I want when I want with no BS.

    I'd rather pay monthly fees to watch what I want (and Netflix and Amazon help) but if I can't, I'll pirate. If you refuse to allow someone to pay you for copies of the thing you're getting special protection to sell copies of, (which is all copyright is) then it is moral and should be legal to copy without permission.

    Let me repeat this logic more clearly:


    •  
    • You don't have any right to keep people from copying things unless it is granted by the government for the greater good of the people
       
    • If you refuse to allow copies to be sold, then you are violating the intrinsic agreement that gives you that special right
       
    • The law may have a loophole you can exploit, but that doesn't make it morally justified and so I don't consider it immoral to break the other side of the agreement.
  4. tracking by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Visit the site and the first thing you'll notice is that it's referencing facebook connect. twitter and google analytics.
    How can one trust this source if their goal is to track your online activity in the first place?