For those of you who recently attempted to connect to the popular torrent site The Pirate Bay, you’ll notice that it’s no longer available. As recently reported by TorrentFreak, the Swedish Police raided the Pirate Bay’s host servers on Tuesday potentially ending its long of service. In the time that The Pirate Bay was live, it endured through numerous raids, lawsuits, and other actions that attempted to end its existence, but this time its future seems a bit more uncertain.
After The Pirate Bay dropped off the radar, numerous reports of new sites have emerged, but so far these sites have all been mirrors of the original which relies on the original site to function. Popular torrent indexing site isoHunt however, has launched oldpiratebay.org as a tribute to The Pirate Bay. It has a complete copy of The Pirate Bay’s torrent database and also let users search torrents with active magnet links. Unfortunately, users can’t upload new content to the site, but it’s currently the closest thing to the real deal. To commemorate The Pirate Bay, the isoHunt team has included a little passage at the bottom of the oldpiratebay’s main page to signify its importance.
When will The Pirate Bay return? Will it return at all? Nobody knows for sure, but Peter Sunde, co-founder of The Pirate Bay, believes that The Pirate Bay lost its soul after its rights were transferred to an undisclosed group several years back and that The Pirate Bay should stay down. He had said the following in his most recent blog post:
“The past years there was no soul left in TPB. The original team handed it over to, well, less soul-ish people to say the least. From the outside I felt that no one had any interest in helping the community if it didn’t eventually pay out in cash.”
With all that said however, Peter thinks that something else will arise in place of The Pirate Bay. He ended his blog with the following:
“But from the immense void that will now fill up the fiber cables all over the world, I’m pretty sure the next thing will pan out. And hopefully it has no ads for porn or viagra. There’s already other services for that.”
Since The Pirate Bay was taken down, numerous other torrent sites such as EZTV, Zoink, Torrage, etc. went offline as well. These sites may have gone offline as a precautionary measure to avoid a police crackdown.
Source: TorrentFreak, Peter Suede’s Blog
