Quiet pirate bay

What will the closing of The Pirate Bay: Vice lead

The largest illegal torrent tracker The Pirate Bay has not been working for three days-the Swedish police confiscated the servers of the resource and brought it to offline. This happened for the first time in eight years. During this time, The Pirate Bay founders have already managed to sit in prison; At the same time, the tracker continued to work uninterruptedly, allowing millions of people to download films and music for free. Vice believes that The Pirate Bay will definitely return, and recalls why the previous attempt to close the site made it only more popular.

In 2006, the Swedish police under pressure from the American Association of Films arrested four founders of The Pirate Bay and confiscated the tracker servers. The Pirate Bay did not work for three days - after which she returned, raising new servers in Holland. The audience of the tracker doubled: the temporary closure attracted the attention of the media, many users who have never heard of torrents learned about The Pirate Bay.

The first closure was followed by a real positional war - the authorities of different countries invented how to close the tracker, and the The Pirate Bay team invented new ways to go around the prohibitions and protect its users from accusations of spreading counterfeit content. Tracker servers moved to inaccessible places around the world, including the NACKA data center in Sweden, capable of withstanding a nuclear blow. Recently, the tracker has used data cloud storage systems. In many countries, laws on blocking sites with illegal content have been adopted, under which The Pirate Bay fell, but starting a new version of the tracker is quite simple-all torrent files weigh about 90 megabytes.

Will The Pirate Bay be able to return this time, is still unknown. The Pirate Bay team does not comment on the closure, but there are no signs that the tracker will quickly resume work. According to the TorrentFreak project, the attendance of smaller torrent trackers increased by 5-10% after suspension of The Pirate Bay, which means that the fight against piracy on the Internet is an obviously more difficult task than closing individual sites. At the same time, the war with illegal content actualizes the question of whether the cultural heritage should be free. According to the founder of The Pirate Bay, Peter Sunda, there can be no two opinions here: "If something is published, it is yours."

Do not be surprised if The Pirate Bay rises like Rocky Balboa (or an incurable rash) soon. The main question is how such a large center for the spread of illegal content was able to leave the authorities for so long (English).

Vice