HiGame

A week ago, The Pirate Bay was raided and shut down. At this point, with no resurrection apparently forthcoming, it looks like it might be dead forever. This hasn’t stopped fake sites from popping up — including, rather amusingly, a site called Old Pirate Bay that is being managed by IsoHunt, one of Pirate Bay’s largest rivals. According to data from an anti-piracy firm, which tracks the number of people downloading torrents, there was a small dip in downloads in the two days following the The Pirate Bay’s shutdown, but they’re already back up to the same level as before. Ah, the futility of shutting down file sharing websites.

Last week, TPB was shut down by the Swedish police for copyright-related issues. Almost immediately, new Pirate Bay websites started to pop up. Most of these were simply a clone of The Pirate Bay index of BitTorrent magnet links, without user accounts or any other advanced features. To be clear, there is no official Pirate Bay website at the moment. For that to occur, the current TPB admins would need to set a website up with the existing TPB database of torrents and users/uploader accounts — or they would need to pass the official database to someone else. Neither of these have come to pass yet.

Amusingly enough, though, one of the many new Pirate Bay clones — Old Pirate Bay — has been set up by IsoHunt. It’s essentially just another copy of the Pirate Bay magnet link index, but operated by IsoHunt. The index seems to be fairly recent, though it’s clearly not 100% complete. IsoHunt, incidentally, officially shut down back in October 2013 after a prolonged legal battle — the IsoHunt that exists today is run by someone different (though they seem to be doing a fairly good job of things). Rather than allow for user accounts on Old Pirate Bay, IsoHunt is encouraging all of the old TPB uploaders to register an account on IsoHunt. In short, Old Pirate Bay is just a promotional tool to get more people over to IsoHunt — but still, if you’re looking for torrents that aren’t available elsewhere, Old Pirate Bay might be useful.


According to the anti-piracy company Excipio, the shutdown of the original Pirate Bay only caused the tiniest of ripples in the metaphorical global piracy ocean. On Monday December 8, Excipio tracked 101.5 million IP addresses on BitTorrent trackers worldwide (there’s no word on their methodology, but presumably this excludes private trackers). On December 9, it dropped to 99 million, then 95 million on December 10, and 95.6 million on December 11. By Friday, it was back to 100.2 million, which is in line with the pre-shutdown average. There was a blip, then, while people looked for a Pirate Bay alternative — but it didn’t take them very long to get back into the groove.

Given how large The Pirate Bay was, this might be somewhat surprising — but really, it isn’t. While TPB was the largest torrent site, the same torrents were available from dozens of other large sites. It’s not like TPB had exclusive torrents that weren’t available elsewhere — it was just the largest database of torrents, with the highest amount of traffic. There are some smaller, more esoteric torrents that might’ve vanished with The Pirate Bay, but the lion’s share of popular downloads (films, games, TV shows) are all available through other large torrent sites. Don’t forget that there is a big difference between an index (which just lists torrent files/magnet links), and a tracker, which actually facilitates the sharing of files. There are hundreds of torrent indexes, but only a handful of big trackers — and furthermore, it’s not unusual for a single torrent to use all of the big trackers, for additional redundancy.




Basically, shutting down The Pirate Bay is pointless. I suppose it’s a somewhat symbolic victory against the pirates, but the numbers don’t lie: Unless you shut down a large number of torrent sites, the impact will be minuscule. Somewhat ironically, it might even have made things worse to shut down The Pirate Bay — like the mythological hydra that grows two heads every time a hero chops one off, the shutdown of a large file sharing site usually spawns multiple clones or replacements. Updated: Just as this story went to press, The Pirate Bay made its first official comments following its raid and shutdown last week. In short, the whole TPB team is currently assessing whether they want to relaunch the site, or just call it a day. TorrentFreak has all the details.


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