Anyone Can Now Launch Their Own Version of the Pirate Bay

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.

Comments

I think

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Why not decentralized ?

[Lennie]

Why would you create many centralized points if you can create a decentralized system ?

They worked more than 9 years on Tribler might as well start using it, right ?:
http://www.tribler.org/
https://github.com/Tribler/tri...

Re:Hole

[Anonymous Coward]

You've obviously never watched porn.

Federated reputation

[tepples]

I guess Open Bay sites could associate reputation with an OpenID identifier, public key, or other identifier that remains constant from site to site. Have there been attacks on the Advogato trust metric yet?

The Legit Bay

[tepples]

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.

Re:The Legit Bay

[jones_supa]

That would certainly be an exciting idea! A website about true sharing of free culture and entertainment. Sign me up.

Re:The Legit Bay

[tepples]

Please define "free culture"

If you got a certificate error when viewing the link that I posted above, here's another link to the definition of a license for free cultural works using cleartext HTTP.

Re:The Legit Bay

[Anonymous Coward]

Regardless of the comments from the peanut gallery, the vast majority of those using TPB today have no interest in "practicing their craft" or producing anything of their own in any form. Places like TPB would fall into disuse in about 30 minutes if the internet was somehow regulated in such a way that sharing would only be the artists original creations put into the creative common.
 
It's about being a thief, first and foremost. If you could stop all non-public media from being released all P2P styled traffic would drop by 98+%. After that there would still be a trickle of CC media packages. The rest is legal software distribution such as Linux distros.

Recursion

[Anonymous Coward]

Soon, The Pirate Bay will be a torrent on The Pirate Bay.
The next step will be to build a torrent site that will host all the torrent sites that don't host themselves.

Anti-paradox measure

[tepples]

The next step will be to build a torrent site that will host all the torrent sites that don't host themselves.

Plus a mirror of a few of the torrent sites that do host themselves, for added protection against both hardware failure and paradoxes.

The Jedi Bay

[ilsaloving]

In death, The Pirate Bay will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.

It would last

[future assassin]

until it got popular then the media companies would sue oh behalf of the starving artists as your free music is making them poor now.

Re:It would last

[tepples]

then the media companies would sue oh behalf of the starving artists as your free music is making them poor now.

What would be the grounds for such a suit, especially given the ruling in Viacom v. YouTube that OCILLA-compliant providers are not liable for their users' copyright infringement?

Malware bay

[ruir]

The highlights of (old) pirate bay were the reputation as some already said, AND the user comments about the download. Without that, the usefulness of having the torrents replicated is so much less useful.

The Pirate Bay from Partido Pirata Argentina

[Anonymous Coward]

We are working (at the Pirate Party of Argentina) on getting a complete backup of The Pirate Bay and getting it back without ads, free and for free. We have comments til february 2013, descriptions til june 2013 and torrents/titles til september 2014, you can help us scrapping a piece of the missing torrents. \n \nThe source code and tools for loading the backups and scrapping TPB as well as getting a copy of this site up and running is available on https://github.com/piratas-ar/piratesbey

Re:The next big thing

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

tracking

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:The next big thing

[hairyfeet]

Meh torrents are gonna go the way of emule, the future is media streaming sites hosted in dontgiveafuckistan.

Lawsuit against whom?

[tepples]

Because it only takes one blockbuster renamed as a Linux distro to give them grounds for a lawsuit.

Against the uploader of the torrent, not against the site. OCILLA shields compliant providers from liability for uploaders' actions.

Muzak

[tepples]

How can I avoid "consum[ing] that slop" if grocery stores play proprietary music over their speaker system, the royalties for which come out of the price of the groceries I buy?