So as we all mourn for the loss of The Pirate Bay this past week. (Their headquarters were raided and shut down by Swedish Police) popular competition/torrent site Isohunt launched a new fully functional website—oldpiratebay.org—it lets you search through the Pirate Bay archives.
It’s hard to guess what the company’s intentions are for the Old Pirate Bay, though it sounds sincere enough in the announcement:
As you all probably know, the beloved Pirate bay website is gone for now. It will be missed. It will be always remembered as the pilgrim of Freedom and possibilities on the Web. It’s the symbol for a whole generation of the internet users.
In it’s honor we are making oldpiratebay.org search. We, the Isohunt.to team, copied the base of the PirateBay in order to save it to the generations of users. Nothing will be forgotten.
Torrent on for the legacy of freedom which The Pirate Bay has left upon the world, it opened up the door and changed the mindset for a generation of internet users.
Co-Founder Peter Sunde released a blog post detailing his thoughts on the loss of the site, and his disdain for what it had evolved into:
News just reached me that The Pirate Bay has been raided, again. That happened over 8 years ago last time. That time, a lot of people went out to protest and rally in the streets. Today few seem to care. And I’m one of them.
Why, you might ask? Well. For multiple reasons. But most of all, I’ve not been a fan of what TPB has become.
TPB has become an institution that people just expected to be there. Noone willing to take the technology further. The site was ugly, full of bugs, old code and old design. It never changed except for one thing – the ads. More and more ads was filling the site, and somehow when it felt unimaginable to make these ads more distasteful they somehow ended up even worse.
The original deal with TPB was to close it down on it’s tenth birthday. Instead, on that birthday, there was a party in it’s “honour” in Stockholm. It was sponsored by some sexist company that sent young girls, dressed in almost no clothes, to hand out freebies to potential customers. There was a ticket price to get in, automatically excluding people with no money. The party had a set line-up with artists, scenes and so on, instead of just asking the people coming to bring the content. Everything went against the ideals that I worked for during my time as part of TPB.
The past years there was no soul left in TPB. The original team handed it over to, well, less soul-ish people to say the least. From the outside I felt that noone had any interest in helping the community if it didn’t eventually pay out in cash. The attention for new artists (the promo bay) felt more like something TPB had to do in order to keep it’s street cred. The street cred I personally tried to destroy when being part of TPB, multiple times, in order to make sure that people stopped idolizing TPB the way they did. Mostly it didn’t work though.
As a big fan of the KLF I once learned that it’s great to burn great things up. At least then you can quit while you’re on top. I think I left TPB just a little bit after that top, and not when it’s as shitty as it was when it was closed today. It feels good that it might have closed down forever, just a real shame the way it did that. A planned retirement would have given the community time and a way to kick off something new, something better, something faster, something more reliable and with no chance of corrupting itself. Something that had a soul and could retain it.
But from the immense void that will now fill up the fiber cables all over the world, I’m pretty sure the next thing will pan out. And hopefully it has no ads for porn or viagra. There’s already other services for that.
SOURCE: Gizmodo + Peter Sunde
