You're the Backup: Pirate Bay Archive Available for Download
The Pirate Bay is like a gigantic inch worm. If you cut it down, it's various pieces rise up and keep growing. As The Pirate Bay prepares to be passed on to Global Gaming X AB, the service is offering the ultimate legacy gift to users. It looks as if an anonymous user uploaded the entire site's archive in order to ensure that multiple backups exist in case torrents are removed post-purchase. Users who would like to download an archival copy of the site, can access it as a massive 21.3 gigabyte download for free.
According to TorrentFreak, "The backup includes a mock up site and all of the 873,671 torrent files hosted on The Pirate Bay's servers." Users who plan on downloading it are warned to be patient as a file of this size will take a few days to download from a limited group of torrents. Nevertheless, given that the file represents 2 million Pirate Bay torrents, it's actually fairly compact.
Before jumping to it, it may be smart to remind yourself of the legal issues currently facing both the Pirate Bay founders and perhaps more importantly, the non-commercial cases of Joel Tenenbaum and Jammie Thomas-Rasset.
Most recently, the Department of Justice upheld the award of 1.92 million dollars to the RIAA from single mom Jammie Thomas-Rasset. Minnesota woman Thomas-Rasset is expected to pay $80,000 per song for 24 KaZaA files she'd downloaded in 2004. The RIAA has gone after more than 20,000 people for music piracy, but has more recently chosen to focus on internet service providers rather than on non-commercial infringers. Depending on your country of residence, getting caught using the Pirate Bay archive file could be devastating.
If you're still curious, or you simply want to read the comments, the download page is available here.
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I guess what they did is smart to have backups of everything but I would hate to see the government or whoever target those who download the massive file and all of them get fined. Torrents are good for some non-pirated software too like ebooks. I learned how to create a Natural Medicine website from a free, redistributable ebook i downloaded
This news is interesting, but is somewhat false. First, the archive doesn't appear to have been made by The Pirate Bay itself. The uploader mentions that the archive is limited and gathered via crawling (something you or I would do) and not an export (something TPB could do.) This isn't something you can easily lie about: the files are very different in each case. Second, the cases of The Pirate Bay founders and Thomas-Rasset are certainly scary, but simply downloading the archive mentioned isn't likely to get you sued. Connecting people in order for them to download illegal files could get you sued (just like TPB) and downloading/sharing them yourself could get you sued (like T-R) but saving the tools that let people connect to each other to download illegal files... well that's very much like buying some lockpicks and putting them under your mattress.
I should say "misleading," not "false." It seems Jesse and I were both thinking TPB was complicit in this, although careful wording in the article doesn't actually say so. Instead of "archive" maybe say "copy" or "mirror"?
"the non-commercial cases of Joel Tenenbaum and Jammie Thomas-Rasset. "
For a supposedly technical site, I would have thought that you would be able to tell the difference between holding a catalogue of pointers to data and actually having the data to hand. TPB infringes in exactly the same way that Google, Bing and Yahoo infringe ie by being a search engine, not by hosting data.
Hey All,
Agreed. Just downloading the archive and having it on hand is not illegal. Hosting and creating a Pirate Bay 2 etc. is what might get you into trouble.
the underground will never die...it just evolves. ;)
It will be interesting if someone actually uses this data and starts one up.
i wonder who seeded that...
This and database reader are available in here:
http://googolplexian.nurkka.us/beta/
http://googolplexian.jouluserver.com/beta/