news Comment Avast, Me Hearties: How The Pirate Bay Changed The Way We Steal

The Pirate Bay, in many ways, is disappearing. It is one of the most popular torrent sites on the web and its database of millions of torrent files – essentially pointers to pieces of files hosted elsewhere – has long been the go-to spot for budding pirates around the world. While it still exists in spirit, the admins are now moving all of the torrent files off the site and are instead offering magnet links. This is an important distinction that will move the locus of general piracy from a single site to any number of sites, reducing the Pirate Bays importance as a source.
First, let’s talk a bit about torrenting in general.
A torrent file is a document containing a number of pieces of information about a file including the names of its various component parts as well as pertinent identifying information. Torrent files do not point to specific files on specific servers but instead point to codes that identify chunks of a file. These files are actually quite large – a few kilobytes to a few hundred – and most BitTorrent feeds have used them exclusively for the past few years – The Pirate Bay included.
There’s a problem with torrent files, however, that has to do more with perception than reality. To the average politico – and to the average media lobbyist – Torrent files are “files” that point to pirated content. It doesn’t matter that there are legitimate uses for Torrents and that torrent suppliers don’t actually know what those files contain. The idea is offensive to many, and so lots of legal muscle has been flexed to attack targets that pirates have already abandoned. The pirates snicker while authorities torch ghost ships in the night.
Before going further, understand that I find the process of making money on piracy abhorrent while I consider the act of piracy to be a what amounts to a perfectly lubricated market. For example, a newsman in 1990 or so would consider what you are doing right now – reading a bit of news and opinion that you didn’t pay for – piracy. Granted that simplifies the matter considerably (you do pay for it indirectly through your attention and advertisers capitalize on that attention) but I doubt TechCrunch in its earliest form would have been very popular if it was a paid newsletter sent to Mike’s parents and close friends.
That said, as a content producer, I find general “free” piracy to be a valuable tool, even an asset, in getting the word out. There is no clear reason why I should, for example, make an out-of-date book available to folks who may want to read it. I consider this a free form of advertising and the more people who like or dislike my work, the better.
What the Pirate Bay did (and still does, just using a different record locator format) is offer links to files that may or may not be pirated content. Devin wrote a great piece on this concept last night.
What the Pirate Bay also did was popularize torrents in the same way Napster popularized peer-to-peer sharing and the same way MegaUpload popularized massive file storage and the performance upsell.
But what the Pirate Bay really did was put a snarky face on the pirate, moving the average pirate out of the realm of Neo or the evil, evil kids in this video:

In general, we hear little about piracy but the tales of happy-go-lucky antics of the Pirate Bay and the associated groups, including the politicized Pirate Party. The MPAA and RIAA would love to associate piracy with terrorism, massive theft, and the decay of Western Civilization and, in a way, that’s their right. Their goal is to sell as many widgets as possible. A pirate’s goal is to see content that is otherwise unavailable to him or her.
Not to get all Cory Doctorow here, but the Pirate Bay made pirating silly and the attacks by outside authorities made it look even more enticing. The site, with its jolly roger and swift ship tilting into the waves, makes it a Magic 8 Ball of piracy. You type something in, find it, wait, and if the stars are aligned you can grab the file you wanted. More often, however, you grab nothing because the swarm has moved on.
As I said during the SOPA hubbub, there is no way for anyone to enforce anything. There are ways to make things uncomfortable for content sharers and there are ways to arrest people for soliciting pirated content, but in the vast panoply of the Internet there’s very little chance any dedicated enforcement agency can perform its duties with any effectiveness, China’s easily-avoidable Great Firewall being one example.
The Pirate Bay changed piracy by becoming the Google of content. As of this writing it is no longer hosting torrent files and in fact you can download the entire contents of the site in a few minutes, proving that the Pirate Bay is essentially a guide and not a repository.
The attacks against the Pirate Bay have given it far more popularity than it really deserves and through a combination of excellent branding and nearly non-stop coverage, everyone with an Internet connection knows of that Jolly Roger waving endlessly in the digital winds while the real business of piracy – counterfeiting, fake DVD sales, and fraud – are going on in the shadows. Whichever side you’re on, you have to admit the Pirate Bay asks for nothing and expects nothing in return. We feed the beast that is the pirate underground and, no matter how hard we try or how many times we seize a bunch of Swedish servers, we will never tame it