The Pirate Bay Has No Place in 2015

Category: thoughts

A 4 Minute Read

02 Feb 2015

Note: I don’t condone piracy. This following post is purely a philosophical discussion. Don’t Barrett Brown me.

Last week The Pirate Bay emerged from the ashes after being down for a significant length of time. As the top torrenting site in the world, going offline for even a day can cause a lot of people to freak out. Nevertheless it’s back, but with a couple of peculiarities that weren’t there before.

First, the site seems to have integrated Google Analytics. With free, privacy preserving alternatives like Piwik Analytics (which is what is used on this site), The Pirate Bay has made an unquestionably strange choice considering that it’s claim to fame is the distribution of copywritten material. Of course for anyone worried about Google peering in on their torrenting habbits a little bit of NoScript, Ghostery, or Disconnect solves everything.

Second, it looks like Cloudflare has been set up to protect the site from DDOS attacks. I think most would give this a pass, as the site has a history of being attacked from all sides. Nevertheless, the result of this move is that Tor users are faced with CAPTCHAs upon entering the site. Again, for a site who’s pride and joy is copyright infringement, impeding users from using Tor is simply strange. Nevertheless, CAPTCHAs aren’t the end of the world.

These two things on their own are nothing to write a post about, but I have to say that I completely agree with their founders when they say The Pirate Bay really does need to just die. The site is little more than a cash cow at this point, and the only reason anybody uses it is because of how many torrents it has. In addition to the use of Google Analytics and Cloudflare, the interface is terrible, there’s no Tor or I2P gateway, and there will inevitably be massive porn ads on this version just as there were on previous incarnations. Ultimately, The Pirate Bay lags behind what we should have in 2015 as a torrenting platform.

I’m not sure how long The Pirate Bay will last at this point, especially as its previous users have likely found a new source for torrents during the hiatus. To make matters worse, this ressurection hasn’t gone as smoothly as previous ones, with frequest database errors and fraudulent torrents topping the charts.

If The Pirate Bay wants to survive in the long term it needs to innovate; it needs to make a major change within the next eleven months that differentiates it from numerous competitors; The Pirate bay needs to add I2P as a method of access and use.

The Pirate Bay’s biggest threat has been, and will continue to be governments shutting it down, and with a growing number of countries becoming more strict in their enforcement of copyright laws a move to garlic routing is needed for both The Pirate Bay itself and for its users. That’s not to say it should stop existing on the clearnet, rather that having an I2P based platform as both backup, and as an alternative for privacy conscious users would bring significant advantage to all parties (except Warner Brothers).

Of course, this would include millions of torrents that would have to be reseeded onto I2P, but this wouldn’t be difficult from a purely technical perspective. The first step would be to add an I2P frontend to the site, something that can be easily accomplished with Nginx. From this, users could get the magnet links they need without anyone’s IP address being exposed. Terabytes of data would also need to be reseeded over I2P. However with the new Vuze I2PHelper plugin this processes could be greatly expedited. The plugin allows data to be downloaded and seeded both over the clearnet and over I2P using Network Mixing.

On its own this is far from enough and would fail miserably, as the likelihood of the masses even understanding the move are next to nill. But The Pirate Bay has something that most other platforms in this genre don’t: brand recognition. The Pirate Bay would truly need to flex this in order to get enough people to assisst in the transfer, and the technical aspects of it would have to be hidden in the background.

Similar to their web browser, if The Pirate Bay released a torrent client packaged with a very lightweight I2P router allowing users to opt into Network Mixing, then the friction of moving such a massive amount of data could be made significantly less. With proper UI design and user-friendly language (such as offering a ‘Safe Download Mode’), getting enough people to take part is far from an impossible task. Users would clearly have to be informed of the speed penalty, but even implementing one hop tunnels would help keep copyright claims at bay and would obfuscate the location of the servers. In the end, the mere ability to say that your torrent platform is resistant to censorship, has the world’s largest database, and that users can access it without letters from their ISPs gives an advantage that is hard to compete with.

Do I believe this will ever happen? Hell no. But I think that it would be a very smart long term strategy as the site and its users constantly come under attack. Failing to make some sort of fundamental change, I2P or otherwise, I believe The Pirate Bay’s days are numbered.