Story 2014-12-10 2VSW The Pirate Bay is gone for good

The Pirate Bay is gone for good

by
in internet on (#2VSW)
story imageIt's not that the Pirate Bay may cease to exist, although with this most recent raid by Swedish authorities, that may be true as well. It's that since a couple of years ago, the Pirate Bay has become a shadow of its former self, and changed in ways some users would call fundamental.
TPB has become an institution that people just expected to be there. Noone willing to take the technology further. The site was ugly, full of bugs, old code and old design. It never changed except for one thing - the ads. More and more ads was filling the site, and somehow when it felt unimaginable to make these ads more distasteful they somehow ended up even worse.

The original deal with TPB was to close it down on it's tenth birthday. Instead, on that birthday, there was a party in it's "honour" in Stockholm. It was sponsored by some sexist company that sent young girls, dressed in almost no clothes, to hand out freebies to potential customers. There was a ticket price to get in, automatically excluding people with no money. The party had a set line-up with artists, scenes and so on, instead of just asking the people coming to bring the content. Everything went against the ideals that I worked for during my time as part of TPB.<\a>

What's next for The Pirate Bay?
Reply 7 comments

Next? (Score: 2, Insightful)

by insulatedkiwi@pipedot.org on 2014-12-10 11:23 (#2VT6)

We'll put it up there next to Napster and Limewire, et al.

Testaments to the fact that just because tech can do something, and do it really well, that doesn't naturally translate into it being legal/just/unnecessary to evolve.

BitTorrent (Score: 1)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-12-10 11:32 (#2VT7)

Wonder what the world and history will say about the bittorrent protocol someday though. What a wonderful thing, and yet it's so easy to vilify the protocol as a vehicle for piracy, which isn't exactly fair.

Re: BitTorrent (Score: 1)

by zocalo@pipedot.org on 2014-12-11 08:39 (#2VVA)

I think it's going to end up in the same situation, or verty similar situation, to firearms since they have the same combination of being extremely useful tools for some situations yet with a massive potential for abuse. Perhaps the pro-BitTorrent mantra could draw on that too: "BitTorrent doesn't infringe copyright, people do".

Bad quality with some good stuff (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-12-10 14:15 (#2VTB)

I found something recently on tpb that was nowhere else so it was still relevant. Guess people just moved on. In a world of millions of torrents few were on tpb. The ads were just porn in the end.

Collateral damage (Score: 1)

by evilviper@pipedot.org on 2014-12-11 23:18 (#2VVR)

I can't say I care what one person who happened to work at TPB happens to think. His complaints are just a bunch of whiny nonsense, and since TPB hasn't become what HE would have liked, he'd rather see it destroyed entirely, like any child taking his ball and going home.

I'm more interested in the collateral damage. From Wikipedia:
On 9 December 2014, The Pirate Bay was raided by the Swedish Police, who seized servers, computers, and other equipment.[18][19][20][21][22][23] Several other torrent related sites including EZTV, Zoink, Torrage and the Istole tracker are also down in addition to The Pirate Bay's forum Suprbay.org, which is also offline.[19]

TPB cloned by Isohunt (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-12-16 12:09 (#2VZV)

Costa Rica? (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-12-23 03:31 (#2W9R)

It seems to have popped up in .cr.