In just a few weeks time The Pirate Bay as we know it will be no more. There is no doubt that its demise will signal the end of an era, however, it will also mark the start of a new one. Or to use the words of Pirate Bay insider Rasmus Fleischer, "It’s time to sink the ship and move on!"

Whether or not The Pirate Bay will end up being sold, the ship has served its purpose and is destined for Davy Jones’s Locker. Luckily for most BitTorrent fans there are plenty of alternatives.

However, in the current climate where media moguls send their lawyers after everything that could be used to infringe copyrights, a paradigm shift might be needed. This is exactly what Piracy Bureau co-founder and Pirate Bay insider Rasmus Fleischer is hinting at.

“The symbolic value of The Pirate Bay has enabled us to make a difference in many ways. But there are also problems with it which are becoming ever more clear. After all, P2P was never meant to have one single ship as its almighty symbol,” he writes in a recent blog post.

“It’s time to sink the ship and move on,” Rasmus adds, as he links to a presentation (see below) where he explains how it may live on in a more decentralized setup. In short he argues that The Pirate Bay will dissolve, but in its place many “new TPBs” will return, just without the familiar domain name and pirate ship logo.

This is very similar to a concept Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde had in mind for the new Pirate Bay. A decentralized setup through which the ‘torrent site’ controls only a tiny part of the ‘sharing’ process.

At the basis of this new scheme are two services that have launched in recent months, all run by people close to the original Pirate Bay crew. On the one hand there is the new OpenBitTorrent tracker that does not have a searchable index of torrents, but is simply used as a standalone tracker handling communication between peers.

To decentralize even further, friends of The Pirate Bay have launched the new torrent hosting service Torrage. This new service is open to other torrent sites and can be accessed through an API. When Torrage and OpenBitTorrent are combined everyone can run a BitTorrent site of their own with minimal resources.

There is little doubt that The Pirate Bay as we know it will cease to exist, but with OpenBitTorrent and Torrage it is easy enough to build new ones – and there are already a few promising projects in the making. You’ll be surprised.