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You're the Backup: Pirate Bay Archive Available for Download

Dana Oshiro — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 21:45:16 -0800

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.

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]]> 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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Last100: The Making of Network Torrent

Josh Catone — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 01:35:01 -0800

Our network blog Last100 has an interesting story about the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's recent experiment with offering a legal torrent download of one of its original primetime television shows -- a first for a major North American broadcast network. The post was written by Guinevere Orvis, who is a Web Producer in Toronto, Canada and is currently working with CBC. It's an interesting read about how a legal torrent is made at major broadcasting network from idea to deployment.

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Last week, CBC released an official DRM-free BitTorrent of a prime time show -- a first for a major north American broadcaster (see last100 coverage). Since then we’ve been getting hundreds of emails of support and one clear resounding message: give us more. This begs the question, why aren’t broadcasters doing more? Why in the year 2008, seven years after BitTorrent’s birth and a lifetime in Internet years is this a groundbreaking thing? Let’s break down what it takes to get a legal torrent going and maybe we’ll get some answers.

The post is worth a read, and be sure to subscribe to the Last100 RSS feed to keep up to date on all the latest digital lifestyle news and commentary.

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YouTorrent: Torrent Meta Search Engine

Sarah Perez — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 11:17:56 -0800

Although the name is clearly meant to recall that of ubiquitous video portal YouTube, YouTorrent upon first reading sounded more like an accusation than anything else: You Torrent. Although some of us hesitate to admit it, we do torrent.

Yes I know there are many legitimate reasons for doing so, but that's not always the reason for hitting up sites like The Pirate Bay.

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]]> Unfortunately, upon visiting many of these torrent sites, you're bombarded with ads - most of an unseemly nature, making you feel like maybe you are doing something naughty after all. In comparison, what's notable about YouTorrent's site is how uncluttered it is. In fact, there are no ads to be found anywhere. On the homepage, you simply see an entry box, a search button, and a list of popular searches below. The results pages are also ad-free. Since the site is brand-new, something tells me that this won't last; still, it's nice to enjoy it while you can.

When you begin a search on YouTorrent, you'll see the engine work in real time to display the results. The date, size, seeds, peers, and engine are listed for each torrent. By default the results are ordered by popularity (seeds and peers) , but you can quickly sort results by any of the other options just by clicking on the column header.

YouTorrent searches all the top torrent engines, including Mininova, The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, SumoTorrent, myBittorrent, Monova, Vuze, BitTorrent, LegitTorrents, SeedPeer, and BTjunkie. On the results page, you'll see a green check next to the ones where torrents were found. Underneath the listed engines, a related searches section can help guide you by providing similar queries to try.

Since the site has just launched, you can expect to see new features in the future like Boolean searches, advanced search, more engine selections, and a Firefox plugin (can't wait for this!), and maybe they will even finish their FAQ.

YouTorrent's design and clean user-interface makes this site one of the best torrent search sites I've seen. It's definitely worth checking out...just remember to buy the DVD later.

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