HiGame

If you’re still lamenting the loss of The Pirate Bay, which was shut down last week by Swedish police, you now have an intriguing new option: If you have some web hosting, a small amount of tech savvy, and you’re located in a country where it’s legal, you can now easily host your own Pirate Bay. Called The Open Bay, it’s as simple as downloading some files*from Github and running a setup wizard. If you so wish, the download also includes the complete database of torrents from The Pirate Bay, KickassTorrents, and IsoHunt.

The timing of The Open Bay is perfect: Earlier in the week, The Pirate Bay team remarked that they would love to be cloned — that the best case scenario would be lots and lots of Pirate Bays that are impossible to shut down. “It would be amazing if, like in the classic movie Spartacus, everyone could stand up and say ‘I am The Pirate Bay.'” And now, thanks to the folks at IsoHunt, we now have The Open Bay.

As far as I can tell, The Open Bay is a direct copy of The Old Pirate Bay, which IsoHunt launched earlier in the week. To run your own version of The Open Bay, you simply download the source code from Github, grab the database of (8 million!) BitTorrent magnet links, upload all the files to*some web hosting, and then run the installation*wizard.*It isn’t clear if IsoHunt will provide a regularly updated database, or if this is a one-off thing. It goes without saying, of course, that hosting links to torrent files might be illegal in your country.



I had a brief look through the source code, and it looks like this is just a very basic search engine. You can’t create an account, upload new torrents, or comment on torrents. It appears that the original descriptions from Pirate Bay uploads aren’t available, either: The database is just a huge dump of file names and magnet links. There is actually another database file floating around, with all of the original Pirate Bay descriptions, but I won’t link to it here (and anyway, it wouldn’t plug into the Open Bay software; you’d have to do some hacking to make it work, I think).

I’m not entirely convinced that having hundreds of Pirate Bay clones is necessarily a good thing. There are already a lot of torrent sites out there — enough that it would be impossible to shut them all down in one fell swoop. By adding lots of clone sites — clones that don’t allow for comments or uploads, and which probably won’t be updated on a regular basis — it’s possible that high-quality torrents will become harder to find. I think it’s certainly a wise move to keep distributed backups of magnet links, so that new sites can be set up quickly if needed, but I don’t think it’s quite as*simple as everyone standing up and saying “I am the Pirate Bay.”


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