[p2p-research] It’s Time To Sink The Pirate Bay, and Replace It

[Ryan]

  Sent to you by Ryan via Google Reader: It’s Time To Sink The Pirate
Bay, and Replace It via TorrentFreak by Ernesto on 9/13/09

Whether or not The Pirate Bay will end up being sold, the ship has
served its purpose and is destined for Davy Jones’s Locker. Luckily for
most BitTorrent fans there are plenty of alternatives.

However, in the current climate where media moguls send their lawyers
after everything that could be used to infringe copyrights, a paradigm
shift might be needed. This is exactly what Piracy Bureau co-founder
and Pirate Bay insider Rasmus Fleischer is hinting at.

“The symbolic value of The Pirate Bay has enabled us to make a
difference in many ways. But there are also problems with it which are
becoming ever more clear. After all, P2P was never meant to have one
single ship as its almighty symbol,” he writes in a recent blog post.

“It’s time to sink the ship and move on,” Rasmus adds, as he links to a
presentation (see below) where he explains how it may live on in a more
decentralized setup. In short he argues that The Pirate Bay will
dissolve, but in its place many “new TPBs” will return, just without
the familiar domain name and pirate ship logo.

This is very similar to a concept Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde had
in mind for the new Pirate Bay. A decentralized setup through which the
‘torrent site’ controls only a tiny part of the ’sharing’ process.

At the basis of this new scheme are two services that have launched in
recent months, all run by people close to the original Pirate Bay crew.
On the one hand there is the new OpenBitTorrent tracker that does not
have a searchable index of torrents, but is simply used as a standalone
tracker handling communication between peers.

To decentralize even further, friends of The Pirate Bay have launched
the new torrent hosting service Torrage. This new service is open to
other torrent sites and can be accessed through an API. When Torrage
and OpenBitTorrent are combined everyone can run a BitTorrent site of
their own with minimal resources.

There is little doubt that The Pirate Bay as we know it will cease to
exist, but with OpenBitTorrent and Torrage it is easy enough to build
new ones – and there are already a few promising projects in the
making. You’ll be surprised.
The Pirate Bay is about to dissolve: End of an era?


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