The Isohunt.to team have decided to give an early Christmas present to Pirate Bay fans. They've launched "The Open Bay," an initiative that allows anyone to put a 'copy' of The Pirate Bay online, minimal technical knowledge required.

The Pirate Bay raid last week was a landmark incident which disrupted the BitTorrent ecosystem.

Many people have been looking for Pirate Bay alternatives in recent days. While there is nothing that can match the old Pirate Bay, there are plenty of copies available.

Earlier this week the TPB crew said that it would be a good thing to have clones of the site all over the Internet, and it appears that the Isohunt.to team heard this message loud and clear.

The same team that previously resurrected isoHunt launched a copy of TPB on Oldpiratebay.org last week, and now they’re opening up its code to the public.

The initiative, properly named The Open Bay, opens up the source to their Pirate Bay clone. This means that in a few simple steps anyone can have a copy of the Pirate Bay installed on his or her own domain.

“We, the team that brought you Isohunt.to and oldpiratebay.org are bringing you the next step in torrent evolution. Open Pirate Bay source code,” Isohunt.to says.

According to the people behind “The Open Bay” there’s a lesson to be learned from the isoHunt and Pirate Bay shutdowns. Instead of a few big players, the torrent community itself should be a swarm of copies.

“We want to change the torrent landscape which has been frozen for 10 years. We need to push it ahead,” Isohunt.to tells TF.

“The Open Pirate Bay source code will give absolutely anyone with minimal knowledge of how the Internet and websites work and some basic hosting, the opportunity to create a pirate bay copy on his own domain.”

To do so, the Isohunt.to team offers code and scripts and a large database dump with instructions to get it up and running on a simple shared hosting account. In addition, they put all files in a GitHub repository so people can create improved copies of their copy.

We have to emphasize that the term Pirate Bay “copy” should be used loosely here. The standard release includes oldpiratebay.org’s theme and a database dump of roughly 8 million torrent links, while Pirate Bay only had around 3 million.

The difference is explained by the fact that The Open Bay database also includes files that originated from KickassTorrents and Isohunt.to. The original Pirate Bay code or descriptions are not there, and it’s not possible to upload or comment either.

Finally, it may go without saying but people should keep in mind that hosting a Pirate Bay copy comes with a legal risk.

Whether the surge in Pirate Bay copies is really a good development is open to debate, but we’ll examine this topic in an upcoming article.

For those who want a local copy of The Pirate Bay’s archive for historical purposes there’s a safer option. A recent dump of the files database, complete with all original pirate bay IDs, torrent descriptions and hashes is available here.

Torrent savvy people who know how magnet links work can even use the latter as a local Pirate Bay search engine, with the help of notepad.