Yar, Mateys! All Of Pirate Bay Made Available As A Single 90MB Zip File
Yar, Mateys! All Of Pirate Bay Made Available As A Single 90MB Zip File
Posted 02/10/2012 at 12:32pm
| by Brad Chacos
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Oh, those tricky Pirate Bay folks. The Teflon buccaneers have always managed to stay one step ahead of the law; for example, the site recently switched to the .SE domain to avoid a Megaupload-style takedown and three of its founding operators fled Sweden to avoid facing jail time and millions in fines. Now, a Pirate Bay user has released a zipped 90MB file containing the key components of every torrent hosted by the site. Basically, if Pirate Bay goes down, anyone with this file will be able to get it up and running again lickity split.
A Pirate Bay user called "allisfine" used a script to copy the titles, ID, file size, seeds, leechers, and magnet links for 1,643,194 torrents found on the site. There is a bit of confusion over the number of torrents, which allisfine admits him/herself in the torrent of the torrent site. TPB claims to have close to 4 million torrents. However, TorrentFreak makes the point that the 4 million-ish number includes torrents on public trackers that the Pirate Bay doesn't actually host itself, which could explain the discrepancy in numbers.
It's not quite a complete listing for each torrent, however. "I did NOT download comments and/or descriptions, since that would be too big and I didn't want it to be as complete as possible, but as small as possible," allisfine explains.
So, how is it that a massive site like The Pirate Bay can fit on a thumb drive? Magnet links. The site recently switched its torrents over to magnet links (also known as "trackerless torrents") and plans to ditch traditional .torrents all together sometime soon. These links are under 1KB each, which greatly reduces the site's footprint. For an in-depth explanation of the technology, check out this TorrentFreak article.
Who knows? Maybe the Library of Congress will fit on a USB drive sometime soon.
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h e x e n
February 12, 2012 at 5:57am
I can't condone piracy and find it pretty low, especially those people who rely on it hand over fist for all their entertainment needs. I have a few movies, I'll admit, but only to replace broken copies of movies I had previously owned. I still love physical collections :)
Still, I can't help grinning when a mere website sticks it to the man so hard.
TRYER
February 19, 2012 at 11:32am
You are funny. "I can't condone piracy and find it pretty low" But yet you say you have pirated movies. Sure I understand you just restored the ones you bought and don't work, but piracy is still piracy and in the eyes of the Entertainment Industries lawyers, you are guilty as the rest of us.
The Corrupted One
February 10, 2012 at 5:13pm
Go to hell pirates
You (indirectly) gave the G-Man a reason to fuck us over.
Not to mention you are killing all of the studios, good or bad. (Witcher 2 anyone?)
szore
February 12, 2012 at 8:49am
In 1984, vinyl records cost about 6 bucks. CD's came out and they cost about 15 bucks plus tax, and the classical stuff like Deustche Grammaphone was 18 - 19 bucks. Everyone was outraged. The "RECORD COMPANIES' said, oh the price will come down, its a new technology. The prices NEVER came down. They are filthy, greedy pigs, and I will steal from them EVERY CHANCE I GET! And if you don't like it you can kiss my A$$. I have exactly 60,519 tracks in my music collection, and I didn't pay a DIME for any of it.
Have a nice day, suckers.
Ghok
February 10, 2012 at 6:34pm
What are you talking about? Witcher 2 sold over a million units despite piracy. They even released a version without any DRM. They're doing well.
The Corrupted One
February 10, 2012 at 6:40pm
I am saying that people always say that DRM is a reason to pirate.
Witcher 2 only had casual copy DRM, and it still had multi million pirate numbers.
Jox
February 11, 2012 at 12:12pm
So what you're saying is: when they relaxed the DRM restrictions, more people purchased the game. So is it piracy or inconvenient DRM that was hurting sales?
-Jox
The Corrupted One
February 11, 2012 at 5:10pm
WTF? Can you read?
"I am saying that people always say that DRM is a reason to pirate.
Witcher 2 ONLY HAD CASUAL COPY DRM, and STILL HAD MULTI-MILLION PIRATE NUMBERS."
Jox
February 13, 2012 at 10:36pm
The Corrupted One: "I am saying that people always say that DRM is a reason to pirate. Witcher 2 ONLY HAD CASUAL COPY DRM, and STILL HAD MULTI-MILLION PIRATE NUMBERS."
The question is: was it pirated because DRM has no effect on piracy OR did it sell well because people don't want overly restrictive DRM? I suspect that if the former were the case then the sales numbers would have been far less.
-Jox
Dartht33bagger
February 11, 2012 at 10:08pm
You do notice that many people that pirate the game would have never bought it in the first place. So it's not like the studio is actually losing out on any sort of real money.
Hell, if I really want to play a game, I'm going to buy it. The game will be more stable, the online will work without having to jump through tons of hoops, and it will be easier to get back in the future. However, if the game is pretty average and I'm only planning to play it as a time filler, I'm probably going to try and download it somewhere. I may only play it once or twice or play it through once, but thing is constant: I would have never bought the game anyways, so why does it matter?
The Corrupted One
February 12, 2012 at 9:51am
That's amazing logic:
"I wouldn't ever buy my games, so I pirate all of them because I wouldn't buy them anyways".That's amazing logic you have there.
RUSENSITIVESWEETNESS
February 10, 2012 at 4:39pm
Much awesome. Fuck the MPAA, RIAA, and their cronies.
AETAaAS
February 10, 2012 at 1:25pm
"Who knows? Maybe the Library of Congress will fit on a USB drive sometime soon."
I have to admit, sometimes when I study in the University's library and get bored, I stare at the shelves and try to calculate in my mind how much it would cost to store digital copies of the books on that shelf, based on the number of books, type, approximate size on disk and so on... :p
DDRDiesel
February 10, 2012 at 2:03pm
OVER 9000!!!
... Sorry, I couldn't resist. I'll let myself out
Hey.That_Dude
February 10, 2012 at 5:20pm
you forgot the "It's"
And now pirate bay will spawn like mold... growing in all the wet/damp seedy corners of the interwebs...
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