The Pirate Bay is back online but not back to normal. The new TPB seems to be a slimmed down version where many of the old moderators and admins, who have taken care of the site over the past decade, suddenly have no place. The new TPB will be easier to operate but old staff are warning for fake torrents, spam and malware.

“The launch that is about to take place on February 1 is not us […] it was until some dickhead decided to take TPB crew out of the picture. He thinks a site can be run without any staff at all and at the same time keeping up with fakes, internal issues etc,” says WTC-SWE (One of the old lead admins of The Pirate Bay)

After eight years of peaceful filesharing, the Swedish police staged another raid on The Pirate Bay servers.  One of the TPB founders, Brokep (Peter Sunde), said that the maintenance group had lost the original spirit, shifted to commercial interests of dubious ethics and had no commitment to the site’s resilience. He wanted TPB to shut-down completely after being active for a decade, as they had initially agreed upon at the start.

“TPB has become an institution that people just expect to be there.” – Brokep

The Argentinian Pirate Party (PPAR) found it obvious that they couldn’t keep trusting this group of people with the access and care of our culture. They took up the call from Peter Sunde, to transform this “single point of failure” and make it into a multitude of new Pirate Bays. Effectively allowing TPB to become a true Hydra Bay instead of risking it to get taken down again.

“We shouldn’t expect just one ship to maintain afloat the free exchange of culture between peers.” -PPAR

Jacob Appelbaum  tweeted

The https://thepiratebay.se/  is back and I get a captcha from @CloudFlare? This is a joke, right? Surely they’re trolling, right?

Looking at the information and partial copies published by several groups and persons all over the world the Argentina’s Pirate Party made a kit available to everyone. They created a set of tools that can be used by anyone to copy, replicate and use The Pirate Bay’s site. PPAR named this set of tools “The Pirate’s Bey”, a pun derived from the original website’s name and the anarchist Hakim Bey (populariser of pirate utopias).

The tools, made available through Github, include:

• Incremental backups of The Pirate Bay (for starters) and other torrent sites (in the future)

• Software to setup your own torrent site with searching capabilities. This allow anyone to have their own TPB on their computer.

• Software to copy and backup torrent sites and the capability to import them as well.

• Software to make censorship useless by setting up a distributed infrastructure

The Argentinian Pirates invite the whole free access to culture and free software community to make their own copies, to help with the backup updates, to develop the software and to publish their own websites.

The dinosaurs of commercial culture will become extinct before our torrents, resistance is futile.

Test it now at http://tpb.partidopirata.com.ar or help with development.

Featured image: CC BY-SA Pirate Times from work by  The Pirate Bay and  pathfinderlinden

About Josef Ohlsson Collentine

I’m a dual citizen (American/Swede) and try to integrate my reflections from a more global perspective if possible. I’m the organizational leader for Pirate Times and work actively to strengthen the pirate movement through this work as well as being the international contact for Piratpartiet (PPSE). Elected board member of PPSE for 2015-2018.
If you would like to ask me something I speak English, Swedish and Spanish. Find me on the links below

 

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The Pirate Bay is back online but not back to normal. The new TPB seems to be a slimmed down version where many of the old moderators and admins, who…