While the Pirate Bay's domain continues to wave a pirate flag, there's no sign of a pending return yet. However, many supporters of the notorious torrent site are keeping its torrents widely available. In just a week nearly 400 Pirate Bay copies have appeared online. But is the Hydra really alive?

More than two weeks have passed since The Pirate Bay’s servers were pulled offline and it remains doubtful if the site will ever return in its full glory.

A few days ago The Pirate Bay showed signs of life again when the domain name started waving a pirate flag. While this created plenty of mystery, there are still no torrents to be found on the site.

For now, it’s Pirate Bay supporters carrying the Kopimi spirit and keeping the “Hydra” seemingly alive and kicking. Chop one head off and new ones will grow back, making the beast stronger and stronger.

This week, most of the Pirate Bay copies have been growing from Isohunt.to’s OpenBay project. Thus far nearly 400 Pirate Bay clones have launched and the people behind the initiative say that OpenBay is currently the most popular project on developer platform GitHub.

“Since it’s launch The Open Bay has drawn a lot of attention. As a result it’s placed as #1 on GitHub. During recent weeks 372 Open Bays have been created,” the Isohunt.to team inform us.

“Our current goal is to not only make it open source, but eventually provide a fully decentralized torrent database for the community,” they add.

Although Isohunt told us that they’re not in contact with TPB, the Pirate Bay crew appears to appreciate the efforts. After all, the pirate flag that’s waving on the official Pirate Bay domain comes from OpenBay.

Isohunt.to is happy with this support and is now calling on developers to improve and expand the code, to support bigger and better torrent sites.

“We’re glad that the original ThePirateBay founders are supporting us waving the pirate flag and the hash tag #CodeOpenBay. We hope that the community will step in and the new era will begin,” Isohunt.to tells us.

The Pirate Bay homepage



The question is, however, whether or not copies are going to be good enough. When Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde talked about the Hydra concept 7.5 years ago he wasn’t referring to copies, but entirely new sites with their own communities.

“Start up your own torrent sites, make the Internet the hydra it is and needs to be. If there’s hundreds of sites, they can’t all be shut down,” he said, pointing out that the torrent community was relying too heavily on TPB.

Seen through this lens, the hundreds of TPB copies that sprang up in recent days are pretty much useless. That is, until they become thriving communities of their own. Simply having a copy of the torrent listings isn’t going to be good enough.

Sticking with the Hydra mythology, if Pirate Bay copies are new heads then they’re on top of a dead beast for now. In this flawed analogy the Pirate Bay raid didn’t just cut off a head, it killed the beast itself.

The Pirate Bay’s real value were the uploaders and moderators, and these can’t simply be copied.

The real Hydra is something much broader. It is the entire BitTorrent ecosystem where The Pirate Bay was just one of the many heads, living alongside other popular torrent sites.

Only time can tell whether this Hydra is indeed alive and kicking.