Surprise: shut down of The Pirates Bay had different outcome than expected
If you have been following the news lately you know that the torrent indexing website The Pirate Bay has been shut down after the data center servers of the site were hosted in was raided by Swedish police.
One could see this as a success for organizations such as the MPAA or RIAA as a notorious site has been removed from the Internet.
The outcome however it turns out is quite different than expected.
Rights organizations still think that they can win the war against people copying and download media by going against the tools and services used for it and the people who make use of these tools.
The past has shown however that the outcome is usually different. It is a Sisyphean task as sites and services that are taken down are usually replaced by others stepping in.
While it sparked the creation of fake sites that claimed to be the official successor of The Pirate Bay, it did result in legitimate initiatives.
One of the first is The Old Pirate Bay which provides access to a large part of the database of The Pirate Bay.
http://cdn.ghacks.net/wp-content/upl...2/open-bay.jpg
The creators of the site went a step further this time though as they have created the Open Bay project.
The project consists of the Pirate Bay script that anyone can use to run a site like The Pirate Bay.
It is an open source project hosted on GitGub which means that developers can go through the code and improve it further.
In addition to that, a full database dump is provided as well that interested users can download. According to the creators of the project, it offers more than 8 million torrent magnet links that have a size of about 420 Megabyte currently.
This release includes torrents not only from the Pirate Bay but also from Kickass Torrents and Isohunt.
The release of the script and database can only mean one thing: more copies of the Pirate Bay website will appear on the Internet in the near future.
Depending on where you live, hosting a Pirate Bay website may be perfectly legal or not at all. It is likely however that we will see copies on free hosting services.
The script that has been made available includes database updates which means that all copies will always offer the most recent torrent index provided.
Organizations like the RIAA or MPAA need to realize that they are fighting symptoms but not root causes currently.
While it may look good on paper that the Pirate Bay site has been taken down, it does not change a thing in the end.
