Pretty big news to share with y’all today: The Pirate Bay is no more. Well, “no more” in the sense that the site’s admins have decided to kill the tracker once and for all. The site will continue to serve the BitTorrent community, but will instead rely upon trackerless technology, such as DHT and PEX.

You’ll notice that, for today at least, the site’s well-known pirate ship logo has been replaced by a giant magnet. (No, Panic Software didn’t buy ad space on the front page!) That’s a clever reference to the new type of non-tracker links you’ll be clicking should you continue to use TPB. Called magnet links, these links don’t contain .torrent files, but rather the data needed for your client (Vuze, uTorrent, etc.) to connect to other peers to download the data.

It may take a little while to get used to non-torrents, yes.

Perhaps even more interesting, it seems like TPB’s higher-ups are trying to convince other BitTorrent sites to eliminate trackers, too. So says TorrentFreak, who’s usually right on the money when it comes to TPB news.

The idea is that the Internet’s big BitTorrent sites will do away with torrents so as to better evolve with the BitTorrent protocol. Presumably there are legal reasons for this, too.

How you can convince the world’s big “private” BitTorrent sites to hop aboard the DHT bandwagon, I don’t know. All the private sites I’ve been a party to have discouraged the use of DHT for the longest time.

All that said, you may want to star November 17, 2009 on your calendar, for that’s the day the tracker died. (How’s that for melodrama?)

The uTP protocol is an extension of the bittorrent protocol, and essentially times packets being transferred and calculates if there is any serious delay. The idea is that this would only kick in when the network is being stressed.

We’ll see how this turns out, but who knows what other implementations of this sort we’ll be seeing. The net neutrality battle is likely to be marked by compromises on both sides. Expect to see measures taken in other areas like VoIP. It’s progress… I guess.

Hey, remember Hulu.com? It was a Web site that sort of came out of nowhere, and offered streaming TV shows from NBC and other networks. It was ad-supported, and free. People liked it. And then, one day, in October, 2009, a completely bonkers TV executive all but killed it with one sentence: “It’s time to start getting paid for broadcast content online.”

Those are the words of News Corp. Deputy Chairman Chase Carey, uttered at some sort of broadcasters pow wow.

The idea that News Corp. (and the other broadcast execs) expects to be paid for something that travels through the air 100 percent freely, and has for decades is, that’s right, ludicrous. And I’m referring only to broadcast content here. Shows like The Office and The Simpsons, and not Curb Your Enthusiasm or Weeds. Ads pay for the broadcast shows, and that anyone expects us to pay for those shows again! Ha!

It’s like this: Hulu already runs ads. I’m not gonna pay for access to the site when there’s already ads on there.

Never mind the fact that people only put up with the ads because the site is a convenience. “Sure, I’ll put up with a few ads so long as I can watch 30 Rock in between CrunchGear posts.” Otherwise, yeah, I’ll head right back to alt.binaries.multimedia and start downloading away. No ads there, and in 720p!

I mean, was I stealing all those Seinfeld reruns or 24 (aka the Jack Bauer Power Hour) when I had an HDTV antenna hooked up to my TV? I don’t recall paying to watch those shows; that’s what the ads were for!

In essence, charging for Hulu is a one-way to Irrelevant Town. I don’t care either way, seeing as thought I really haven’t watched TV for several years now (outside of live sports).

More news about The Pirate Bay to bore you all! (Seriously, it’s not like people are still talking about the old Suprnova or Torrentspy anymore, yet the TPB has stuck around.) Some time ago, a Dutch court ordered TPB to delete a number of torrents and block Dutch IP addresses from being able to visit the site. Using a sledgehammer on a thumbtack, yes. Then TPB protested, as it does all the time, saying that it had no idea about the court case to begin with, so it couldn’t make a proper defense, etc. The Dutch court agreed to give TPB a a little bit of time to work out its issues, and has now reached another, similar verdict: remove the torrents, and block Dutch IP addresses. Fun all around, really.

Of course, BREIN is behind all of this. (BREIN is sorta Holland’s equivalent of the RIAA, and has been after TPB for as long as I can remember.) In a perfect, BREIN-approved world, TPB would just go away and never return. That doesn’t look like that’s going to happen any time soon, no here we are.

The Dutch court gave TPB’s owners, whoever they are at this point, three months to comply with the ruling, lest they face a €5,000 (~$7,500) per day fine.

TPB is currently studying the ruling, which they may well appeal. I look forward to more courtroom shenanigans. Then again, I also look forward to the day when Hollywood, and its international equivalents, figure out a business model that clicks with the world in 2009, one that doesn’t involve trying to sue dumb Web sites into the ground. One day!

I think we’ve all had our fill of The Pirate Bay stories, but here’s one more in the interest of killing five minutes. The site moved its servers from Sweden to Ukraine last week, and rather than have its servers being stored in some random server farm, they’re being stored in a former NATO nuclear bunker. So we think, at least.

Yup, so TPB’s new ISP, CyberBunker, has provided the site with access to a former NATO bunker that can withstand a nuclear attack, as well as Electromagnetic Pulses. That way The Man can’t interfere with your ability to grab that latest DVD rip you have your heart set on.

What’s not known, however, is whether or not the actual servers are inside said bunker. Or maybe they’re in a different bunker, or maybe they’re just somewhere else where nobody can find them.

And interestingly enough, the crazy Dutch anti-piracy organization, BREIN, did attempt to stop the move to Ukraine, but CyberBunker, after a bit of hemming and hawing, refused to bow to the pressure.

All is right in the world.

What’s wrong with sites like Hulu? Well nothing, per se, except for the fact that they can’t be used anywhere outside of the Unites States. As if other countries don’t want to watch… um, really great shows like “Extreme Makeover” and “The [American] Office”! Perhaps that’s why, then, BitTorrent site EZTV has seen traffic double, mainly from non-American IPs, in the past year? For whatever reason, people want to watch these shows, but since there’s no legal outlet to do so, well, it’s not exactly hard to configure uTorrent or Transmission, now is it?

The problem goes back to a time before the Internet ruined Hollywood’s business model. Back in the day (and still today, actually) people in other countries had to wait months, if not years, for “American TV Show” to show up on their local TV networks. That wasn’t much of a problem before the Internet, because how could you get jealous in London that a new season of The Simpsons started when all you had access to was whatever the hell Sky put on the air? You can’t want to see something if you don’t know it exists.

With apologies to alt.tv.simpsons, where I used to hang out for a minute.

But now you can’t visit Digg or Facebook without seeing your online, American buddies chatting about “30 Rock” or “Curb Your Enthusiasm. These shows won’t show up on your local TV stations for months, but that’s why there’s BitTorrent!

It’s like this: would you rather wait months and months to see “Whatever” when you can download it in seconds from EZTV? That’s what I did when I was in Barcelona and wanted to see “Generation Kill.” I downloaded the episodes a few minutes after they made their way to whatever site I was using at the time.

Is that piracy though? I mean, I guess it is, but what are you gonna do? Wait around like a jerk for Local TV Station to pick up the shows?

What the studios should do, but probably never will, is either A) eliminate staggered release schedules or B) set up international versions of sites like Hulu. I mean, why do they do that staggered release nonsense anyway? To protect the local market from imports or some nonsense? One World, baby, so treat it as such.

And why can’t a Web site be set up where my BROTHERS FROM ANOTHER MOTHER~! can stream “Family Guy” from the comfort of their home in Vienna, Melbourne, or Rio? It’s a stupid, Old World restriction that no longer make sense in this environment.

And yes, I know you can merely use a U.S. proxy, but that’s not the point, now is it?

At ease, soldiers. The Pirate Bay is back in the Google search index. I understand this was eating at your very soul for some time now.

We know now who made the original DMCA complaint against Google: Evasive Angels, known for such works of art as “Big Butt All Stars” and “Horny Black Mothers.” That’s right, a porn producer was responsible for The Pirate Bay being thrown off Google last week.

In any event, The Pirate Bay is back in the Google index. As if any of you need to search for TPB to find it!

The Pirate Bay just can’t catch a break these days. I won’t bore you with the past, but today’s juicy gossip is: Google has removed The Pirate Bay from its search index because of a DMCA complaint!

A search for “the pirate bay” now brings up, in the first two results, the site’s Wikipedia entry, and a link to piratebay.com, a weaselly little site that promises “unlimited downloads” for “no extra fee.” Stay far away from that, friends.

Oh, also, the DMCA complaint isn’t online yet (as of 1:30pm ET), so we have no idea who made it.

Lost in all the Apple hoopla yesterday: the company that wanted to buy The Pirate Bay was just thrown off the Swedish stock exchange. Still think the deal is going down?

So why was Global Gaming Factory X given the boot? Oh, you know, just a minor case of fraud here and there. Charges include: providing “false information” (regarding the acquisition of TPB), showing a “lack of accountability,” and “seriously violating” transparency rules.

Just another day in the park for TPB-GGCF!

It’s basically down to this: GGCF doesn’t have the money to buy TPB, despite the fact that it said it would (1) find the proper financing (because banks are just throwing money at companies these days /me eye roll) and (2) then said it would finance the deal itself. Lies, lies and slander!

In other words, this whole thing has been a charade, which is what many of us here at CG expected from Day One.

Years from now, when the history of BitTorrent-related Internet piracy is written, there will have to be at least one chapter devoted to The Pirate Bay. It showed up just as the likes of Suprnova and LokiTorrent were being shut down, and quickly became the go-to place for, shall we say, the less savvy BitTorrent user. It also became a symbol of the copyright reform movement, though the site’s cavalier attitude toward any sort of authority ultimately led to its undoing. (The whole “we’re untouchable!” gimmick the site had played up was, we can now say, ill advised.)

But if an entire chapter is to be devoted to TPB, then it only makes sense that the sale of TPB being given at least two. It emerged two days ago that Global Gaming Factory X, the company slated to buy TPB for nearly two months, had acquired the financing required to go through with the acquisition. The plan, somehow, was to turn TPB legitimate, completely ignoring the makeup of its user-base. These people use TPB: do you really think you can take this community (if you can even call it a community), take away the one thing it had going for it (“Free stuff!”), and completely turn it on its head? Laughable. Even more laughable when you consider what a key would-be technology partner of TPB 2.0, Peerialism, has said. And that is, essentially, that GGF has no money. No money to buy TPB, and no money to buy Peerialism.

It is, in fact, difficult to buy something when you have no money, a concept that’s perhaps lost on people who are used to getting things for free.

Oh, there’s more. The CEO of GGF, Hans Pandeya, has had his car and motorcycle repossessed after being unable to pay back a tax debt of $110,000.

I can’t stress how bad that makes GGF look, if it’s even possible to make these guys look any worse. Here you have a company that’s trying to buy, and turn legitimate, the best known piracy site on the Internet. According to the company that was set to transform TPB into a prim and proper organization, it has zero money to do so. And now, its CEO is seeing his personal property being hauled off for his inability to pay tax debt. If you can’t afford a motorcycle, you probably shouldn’t be in charge of a company that’s trying to spend millions of dollars to turn TPB into a shining beacon of legitimacy.

Good luck to all parties involved, of course, I’m just a little bit skeptical.

Oh, God. Well, it looks like Global Gaming Foundation X, the company that wanted to buy The Pirate Bay, has approved the acquisition. All the financing is in place (the deal will be financed by GGF itself, which means that nobody else wanted anything to do with the deal), and GGF is ready to roll, officially. Total price: 60 million Swedish kroner, or about $8.3 million. In the immortal words of Greg “Opie” Hughes, “Good luck, bro.”

Says TorrentFreak:

After the domain has been transferred to GGF, the new Pirate Bay will be transformed into a pay site charging users for access. To please the entertainment industries, GGF will install a system that will allow the copyright holders to either authorize the “illegal” torrents or have them removed from the site.

My opinion on TPB is already out there; no need to rehash it.

If GGF thinks it’s going to successfully turn TPB, the home of rotten, know-nothing pirates, into some sort of New Internet Paradise, well, it’s just wrong. Those people will move on as soon as things become different to what they’re used to, especially if the change involves going from FREE to NOT-FREE.

Scratch one Web site off that “alternatives to The Pirate Bay” list. Mininova has been ordered by a Dutch court to remove all links to copyrighted items from its servers, or face fines to the tune of €5 million. You get the feeling that the era of BitTorrent as we know it is about to end, don’t you?

Mininova, which is based in the Netherlands, has been charged with “contributory copyright infringement,” which means only that it contributed to copyright infringement, and not actually infringed on anything itself. I hope that makes sense out there.

Then there’s something about profiting from the whole venture, making some €1 million in ad sales in 2007 alone. That doesn’t look good in court, no sir.

The court said that up to 90 percent of the content on Mininova infringed copyright in some form or another.

I’m right now imagining a world where BitTorrent trackers like Mininova don’t exist, and I have to say: I’m not too concerned. Will I miss being able to get things really quickly? Yeah, for like a day, but then I’ll find a new hobby, like gardening or stamp collecting.

You need only one word to describe The Pirate Bay. It comes from the Ancient Greek, is six letters long, and entered the English language in 1884, some 120 years before the Web site’s founding. When The Pirate Bay starts to compare its struggles to those of Western Europe during World War II—you know, the struggle against Nazi Germany—only one word is needed. That word is hubris, and if it were possible to die from hubris, The Pirate Bay would have already expired. Hopefully there’s no such thing as copyright in Heaven (or Hell).

As you’re probably already aware, The Pirate Bay was briefly knocked offline yesterday as a result of a Swedish court order. The court order forced TPB’s ISP to disconnect the site from the Internet, or face heavy fines. The ISP, Black Internet, acting rationally, complied. (That someone may actually be sabotaging Black Internet is a separate issue, one that’s not necessarily germane to this here discussion.) What was TPB’s response, after activating a Plan B, as it were, thereby bringing the site back online? To sell a t-shirt, and send it to the MAFIAA.

A few hours later, TPB posted this:

We have, ourselves, full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once more able to defend our Internets, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone.

Even though large parts of Internets and many old and famous trackers have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Ifpi and all the odious apparatus of MPAA rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the ef-nets and darknets, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Internets, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the baywords.org, we shall fight on the /. and on the digg, we shall fight in the courts; we shall never surrender, and if, which I do not for a moment believe, the Internets or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the Anon Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in Cerf’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.

Signed;

The Pirate Bay Crew – Always when needed.

All of this, mind you, a mere two days before the sale of TPB is scheduled to go through.

The speech is a wry homage to Winston’s Churchill’s “We shall fight them on the beaches” speech, made before Parliament in June, 1940, during the height of the Battle of France. How you can compare the threat of German guns to, I don’t know, not being able to download the latest episode of “So You Think You Can Dance,” I’ll never know.

My position is this: TPB should go away. Its five-year run on the Internet will forever be remembered, much the same way that people of a certain age still remember Suprnova and TorrentSpy, but its time has come; it’s nothing but a distraction now, whose childish remarks about how those fancy American laws have no sway in Sweden now seem so long ago.

Let’s say the MAFIAA successfully shuts down TPB. It’s not as if “BitTorrent”—for some people, TPB=BitTorrent—will disappear. Rather, just like in the case of Suprnova (and the Napster to Kazaa/Gnutella/Pick-your-service before it), new sites and services will surely take its place. After all, it was just a few days ago that Gizmodo came up with a list of perfectly viable alternatives to TPB. (That assumes, of course, that no one will merely resurrect TPB with that one big torrent that was recently created.)

And who’s to say that the next big thing, so to speak, has to use BitTorrent? Go talk to someone in high school (or younger!) and you’ll find out that people there are using the likes of Rapidshare, Megaupload, etc. for their online needs. The proliferation of things like Spotify should help cut down the desire to download entire albums from nefarious sources. After all, if you’re 13 years old and have access, legally, to a ton of music in the form of things like Spotify, you won’t need to develop the skills it takes to figure out something like BitTorrent: configuring a router, tweaking uTorrent or Vuze, obtaining an invite to a private BitTorrent site like What.cd, etc. If there’s no need to develop these skills, that’s one less generation of pirates that you have to worry about.

I guess that last paragraph is meant for the MAFIAA. Not that those guys will ever learn.

So if and when TPB goes offline, don’t think of it as OMG WE’RE ALL DOOMED, think of it as an opportunity for something newer and better to develop. (How many torrents are terribly seeded at TPB? How many torrents are filled with viruses and other malware? TPB is not, I assure you, the end-all, be-all of BitTorrent. Frankly, it’s pretty woeful.)

And if I were talking to rights holders, I’d say this: Look, you’ve completely lost people college-aged up to around age 40, give or take. Any older, and those people didn’t grow up pirating things, and certainly aren’t inclined to figure out how to now. (These are the people, incidentally, that will be excited when The Beatles end up on iTunes, despite the fact that’s it’s been dead simple to rip a CD for at least 10 years now.) You still have the opportunity to get young kids, let’s say junior high on down, into your clutches, as it were. Start developing Web sites and services today with the idea that everyone will have broadband Internet access as fast as mine within three years. Put everything on there, from the biggest pop acts to the most obscure one-man bands, from the most lucrative summer blockbusters to the worst pieces of garbage ever produced (someone out there likes it, and will pay for it). Just figure out how to make this site work today, then put it in place as soon as possible. Otherwise you risk missing out on yet another generation of customers. Don’t treat people like common thieves, and stop suing single mothers. This generation, as far as you’re concerned, is dead, and no amount of lawsuits will change that. Work so that you don’t kill the next one before they head off to college in a few years.

That’s it.

You know how on the Internet, after something particularly stupid happens, someone says, “I lol’d”? Well, I lol’d after reading the following two sentences: “There is uncertainty surrounding the purchase of file-sharing website The Pirate Bay (TPB) by Swedish-based Global Gaming Factory (GGF). Trading in GGF shares has been suspended and there are reports that the firm’s chairman—Magnus Bergman—has resigned.”

Says it all, really.

Hans Pandeya, the CEO of GGF, somehow still believes the sale will go through by August 27, as was originally scheduled. The Swedish stock exchange, does, however, want some more info about the sale, primarily who the investors are.

Three days and counting till this circus ends…

This goes to show you just how quickly someone will replace The Pirate Bay if it ever goes “legit.” As you’re probably aware, someone downloaded every single torrent fie hosted on TPB’s servers; that torrent file was the uploaded back to TPB, where it’s now being seeded from hundreds of sources. What’s new is that someone took that copy of TPB and uploaded it to another Web site, creating, in essence, a copy of TPB.

All 873,671 torrents are now alive and well at BTArena. There’s no way to search the index just yet (it’s too stressful for the server), but you can still browse the directories just fine.

Keep in mind that this current copy is only intended as a backup. If TPB blows up in the next 24 hours, then yeah, that’s where the copy can come handy. That is to say that it’s not meant as TPB2.

via TorrentFreak

You might like to know that The Pirate Bay has been ordered to shut down in the Netherlands. That is, courts there would like to prevent people from inside the land of orange from accessing the site. Of course, The Pirate Bay, when they found out* about the case, denied all wrongdoing.

Here’s what happened, nearest I can tell from looking around the Internets. BREIN, which is sorta the Netherlands’ version of the RIAA or MPAA, had taken TPB to court. What’s absurd is that, apparently, TPB knew nothing about the case, and didn’t send any legal representation to the proceedings.

The result of the case? TPB banned from the Netherlands, and TPB’s three public faces—Fredrik, Gottfrid, and Peter—slapped with a €30,000 per day fine for every day TPB is still accessible. (They have 10 days to block their site from the Dutch.)

TPB, when they find out about all of this, asked the court to dismiss all charges.

Man, anyone else think it’d be better if TPB just went away quietly? It really just seems like this, combined with all the other TPB news, is unnecessary drama, as the kids say.

Not for nothing, but it looks like the sale of The Pirate Bay may well be in jeopardy. You’ll recall that the site announced last month that it had found a buyer in Global Gaming Factory. The deal was predicated on the ability of GGF to come up with nearly $8 million, which now doesn’t look all that certain.

A few days after the announced sale, the ex-Grokster CEO, Wayne Rosso, had announced his involvement with the “new” Pirate Bay. That involvement appears to be over, with Mr. Rosso saying that “the more time we spent with Mr. Pandeya [GGF's CEO], the less confident we were.” He told that to TorrentFreak, for those of you not having a tough enough time keeping track of all these names and organizations.

And it looks like it comes down to a money problem, with Mr. Rosso telling TorrentFreak that he doesn’t “think there’s going to be any money raised with GGF’s current (lack of) plans.”

Sounds to me like this was a rushed announcement with no real “business plan” in place. I don’t know how well credit is flowing right now, but I can’t imagine it’d be very easy to convince a big bank (Citibank, Deutsche Bank, Barclays, etc.) to loan you millions of dollars to buy the world’s most notorious BitTorrent site with some cockamamie idea of turning it “legit.” A responsible bank manager should proceed to throw you out of his office at that point.

In other Pirate Bay news, Hollywood wants an injunction against the site and for there to be some sort of fine.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Is the company that announced plans last month to buy The Pirate Bay now getting cold feet? A lawyer representing Global Gaming Factory X said in a Dutch court today that GGF would only buy The Pirate Bay if it could turn it into a “legitimate business.” And while we’re at it, I’d like to announce that I plan on purchasing the New York Knicks, but only if I can turn it into a winning baseball team.

The deal to buy The Pirate Bay, valued at some $7.8 million, was due to close in August, but this latest hiccup may put all of that on hold. If you read the first press releases announcing the sale, you’d see that everything was contingent upon GGF obtaining the financing to buy the Web site. And, really, how do you convince a bank, in this day and age, to lend you millions of dollars to buy a Web site that’s synonymous with copyright infringement? “Come on, Citibank, we’ll make a honest site out of it, honest.”

I knew this wasn’t going to go as smoothly as so many had predicted.