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With ISPs Tracking Bittorrents Has Pirate Bay Finally Lost?
By Dan Morrill
Expert Author
Article Date: 2009-09-04
After losing the court case, after the multiple attacks against the site, after the buyer for the site waffling, and now with the loss of its primary ISP, is it time for the Pirate Bay to simply fade into Bittorrent lore? I know this will upset many who use Bittorrent, but it is a question worth asking, is the fight still worth fighting.
The Pirate Bay is/was the most important site in bittorrent; quite simply it was a one stop shop for everything, legal, illegal, and many times simply questionable. But the Pirate Bay was also an important pulse on many of the things that people wanted to share, and things that were popular in the global culture of media regardless of its legal standing. From a research viewpoint the Pirate Bay was invaluable as a way to track the things that people wanted to share, and gave a great view into popular culture, something that will be hard to replace. The pirate bay trial was interesting, but even through the glimmer of hopes, the trial ended with the Pirate Bay losing the argument, and major fines.
The loss of the ISP Black Internet is most likely the final blow, while the Pirate Bay owners vow to come back (and they have done so brilliantly in the past) it might be time for the Pirate Bay to let go, and move onto other projects. The Pirate Bay was brilliant, a digital archeologists dream web site, but as the attacks against file sharing continue via DDOS or in court, the fragmentation of Bittorrent trackers is the right way to go to keep the service alive.
There are many zombie trackers on the internet, and it is a simple Google hack to find them. Larger sites are exposed and always under constant threat of being attacked or shutdown by lawsuits. Smaller sites can slide under the radar better, and with a distributed search function in many of the bittorrent trackers it would be easy to co-opt many of the defunct bittorrent trackers on the internet to make a more survivable tracking and serving system. The other question is "is it time for P2P" to move onto a more survivable technology without trackers, obfuscation of IP Address systems, and other ways of hiding the sharer using the bittorrent client. The technology is there amongst dozens of clients, a unified client with all the security measures in place and using smaller zombie trackers would be an interesting solution to the whole problem. But then again, the minute it gets popular is the minute everything starts to go towards the lawsuit route.
Is it time for the Pirate Bay to throw in the towel? Most likely yes, the owners have a huge fine to pay off, the site is on its last legs, and there are alternatives to the major trackers out there. The real answer though lies in the users, in the final word; users will have a huge input into the final status of the Pirate Bay. ISP's might shut them down, but there is 23 gigs worth of spidered data from the pirate bay out there, hundreds of zombie trackers could have all this information uploaded into them and serving torrents using a distributed search function. In the end though, the Pirate Bay will morph into something else, the lawsuits will continue, trackers will still get raided and shut down (even zombie ones), and the battle will continue until we all find that happy median point in how to share entertainment on a global basis.
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About the Author:
Dan Morrill runs Techwag, a site all about his views on social media, education, technology, and some of the more interesting things that happen on the internet. He works at CityU of Seattle as the Program Director for the Computer Science, Information Systems and Information Security educational programs.
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