There is no denying that The Pirate Bay played a central role in the torrent ecosystem.

As one of the few well-moderated sites it was the source for dozens, if not hundreds of other torrent sites. And with millions of visitors per day the site also had the largest user-base.

With an event like this, one could expect that BitTorrent usage would have been severely impacted, but it appears that people have found their way to one of the many alternatives.

TF reached out to the operator of Demonii, the tracker that was used for all Pirate Bay torrents, and it appears that the Pirate Bay raid isn’t affecting its traffic much.

“Not much is happening differently on our side due to the TPB downtime. I cannot see any anomalies or differences,” the Demonii operator told us.

“Since all the torrents are pretty much mirrored by KickassTorrents and Torrentz, it seems that the downtime hasn’t stopped people from downloading or uploading at all,” he adds.

The connections per minute to the Demonii tracker remain relatively stable, hovering around the 25 million mark, with a peak during the weekends. The graph below shows the pattern for the past week with the Pirate Bay raid (last Tuesday) included.

Demonii weekly stats

The monthly graph suggests that traffic over the past several days has been a fraction lower than the weeks before, but the impact is relatively low.

“In terms of connections we are looking at roughly 2,880,000 connections per minute at peak hours and about 2,160,000 connections per minute at the lowest,” Demonii’s operator says.

Demonii month stats

If The Pirate Bay remains down for a longer period of time problems may arise on a different level though. TPB has traditionally been one of the best moderated sites, which helped to prevent malware and other scams from spreading.

In theory others could take over this role, but if more sites topple the quality element may become an issue. For now, however, most people seem to be sharing as much as usual.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

A week ago The Pirate Bay was pulled offline with a single raid at the Nacka station, a nuclear-proof data center built into a mountain complex.

Despite the rise of various TPB copycats and rumors of reincarnations, the Pirate Bay crew hasn’t made its mind up about a possible comeback.

“Will we reboot? We don’t know yet. But if and when we do, it’ll be with a bang,” Pirate Bay’s Mr 10100100000 told TF yesterday.

In addition to police seizing some of Pirate Bay’s crucial infrastructure, last Tuesday authorities also arrested one individual with alleged ties to the notorious torrent site.

After being held in custody for nearly a week, the Pirate Bay suspect was released from custody yesterday, pending an ongoing investigation.

The suspect is believed to be one of the moderators of the site, but this hasn’t been confirmed by the police. Expert file-sharing case prosecutor Fredrik Ingblad did state that the man was suspected of copyright violations.

“The suspicions relate to a violation of copyright law. Everything is being analyzed now and new hearings may possibly be held,” Ingblad said.

The prosecutor’s comments also make it clear that there’s a new investigation into the people behind The Pirate Bay.

The data seized in the raid will first be examined by the authorities. Paul Pintér, National coordinator for intellectual property crimes, told NyTeknik that there is a lot of information to go through, so it may take some time before the investigation completes.

In recent days TF has received evidence that Fredrik Neij, who is currently serving a 10 month sentence from the previous trial, remains a Pirate Bay suspect. Neij was arrested by Thai immigration authorities last month when he tried to cross the border from Laos.

How many people the police are investigating in the new case and whether there will be a fresh trial is unknown at this point.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

While headlines may suggest otherwise, the vast majority of online file-sharers go about their business without ever falling foul of the law. Like hundreds of millions of speeding motorists every day, most breaches go unnoticed or unpunished.

Nevertheless, that’s not to say people can forget about the risks. Breaches of copyright law can result in hefty fines in most developed countries, if rightsholders feel strongly enough about prosecuting the case.

One such case began in Sweden four years ago when police investigating another incident stumbled across content being shared on a man’s computer. The discovery, which involved material obtained from The Pirate Bay, was reported to both copyright holders and the prosecutor.

After moving through an initial case and an appeal, the prosecutor’s office was disappointed when the file-sharer was issued with just a fine. With ambitions for a scary legal precedent, those sharing files habitually should be sent to jail, the prosecutor argued.

The case went all the way to the Supreme Court but it didn’t work out as planned. The Court agreed that the defendant (known as JS) had damaged the interests of copyright holders with his actions but noted that in the majority of cases (57 out of the 60 movies) his subsequent sharing with others had been brief.

Also in the man’s favor was how the Court viewed his activities. No commercial motivation was found, with the Court noting that his file-sharing had been for personal use, despite its scale.

“Such use of the current networks and services should not be considered as an aggravating factor when assessing the penalty amount,” the judgment reads.

Sweden operates an income-calibrated system of fines known as “day fines” which are equal to the amount the defendant could have earned in a day. The Court ruled that for each movie download with a short upload, the man would be sentenced to 50 day fines.

While that sounds like the fine could increase to a huge amount, in Sweden when people are convicted of several offenses at the same time the penalty is gradually reduced for each subsequent offense. In any event the maximum punishment is 200 day fines.

In this case the man was sentenced to 180 day fines, up from the 160 handed down by the lower court. Anti-piracy group Rights Alliance who assisted with the case welcomed the judgment, but there can be little doubt that a custodial sentence (even a suspended one) was the target here.

Nevertheless, it appears that the judgment could have drawn a line in the sand.

“This is a borderline case where the sentence is located on the edge of going over to prison. If you’re looking to see what is necessary for a prison sentence, it’s not much more than this,” Supreme Court Judge Svante O. Johansson concluded.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

For more than a decade The Pirate Bay’s been the bastion of uncensored information. Until the raid on some of its critical infrastructure last week, the site never had more than three days of downtime.

The big remaining question on everyone’s minds right now is whether the site will make a comeback, and if so, how long this will take.

The TPB crew have remained awfully quiet and haven’t commented on the raid in public, but today “Mr 10100100000″ breaks the silence in order to get a message out to the world.

“We were not that surprised by the raid. That is something that is a part of this game. We couldn’t care less really,” Mr 10100100000 informed TF through an encrypted channel.

“We have however taken this opportunity to give ourselves a break. How long are we supposed to keep going? To what end? We were a bit curious to see how the public would react.”

Without hearing about the exact issues, we get the feeling that a comeback may be more complicated than most people assume. It seems unlikely that the site will return within the next few days, but if it does eventually come back online people will surely notice.

“Will we reboot? We don’t know yet. But if and when we do, it’ll be with a bang,” Mr 10100100000 says.

Obviously there are discussions ongoing behind the scenes on how to proceed. The entire team including the moderators comprises a few dozen people who all have their own opinions on the matter.

“The people behind TPB are like one big collective mind. There are no leaders nor any one in charge. About 30-50 people from all over the world pitch their ideas against each other and whatever comes out of that is what will be the fate of TPB.”

In recent days many “copies” of The Pirate Bay appeared online and many of these have now started to add new content as well. According to the TPB crew this is a positive development, although people should be wary of scams.

“Copycats are to be seen as a higher form of the proxies. If [Pirate Bay’s] code wouldn’t be so shitty we would make it public for everyone to use, so that everyone could start their own bay.”

“Of course there is a problem if sites like [thepiratebay].ee try to scam people. But overall, we’d love to see a thousand Pirate Bays,” Mr 10100100000 adds.

The Pirate Bay doesn’t really have a preference when it comes to the best Pirate Bay alternative and says the “swarm” has to decide which one is best. In any case, people should keep the Kopimi spirit alive as TPB is much more than some hardware stored in a dusty datacenter.

“We’ve always lived by Kopimi. We love being cloned. It would be amazing if, like in the classic movie Spartacus, everyone could stand up and say “I am The Pirate Bay,” Mr 10100100000 says.

To be continued.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The Pirate Bay was without doubt the most iconic BitTorrent site in history before it was abruptly shutdown last week following a raid on a Swedish datacenter.

Even today it seems strange talking about The Pirate Bay in the past tense. Many believe it’s simply a question of time before the site reappears but for others any amount of time is too long to wait.

Within days, many replicas of The Pirate Bay appeared online, each trying to recreate the look and feel of the old site. While some, such as the isoHunt.to domain oldpiratebay.org, made it clear that they’re a copy of the iconic site, others are flat-out lying by pretending to be the real deal.

The worst offender by far is ThePirateBay.cr. Thanks to several mainstream news outlets posting uninformed articles in the days following the raid, millions of people now believe that this site is the real deal. Admittedly, that’s not the site’s fault, but that traction is adding weight to their current campaign which involves impersonating Pirate Bay operators and lying to the media.

In an email sent to out to the mainstream press, ThePirateBay.cr identify themselves as “winstonbay”, a name that has been used by genuine Pirate Bay staff in the past. By carefully weaving some fact into their press release (thanks to Emil Protalinski for the copy), their aim is to mislead.

“Most of our cloud servers including load balancer are shut down except one in NZ. TPB is back and already running at thepiratebay.cr which used to be an official proxy previously,” the release reads.

Referencing an earlier article on TF in which we pointed out that .CR was redirecting to another domain charging users for access, the release again blends truth and lies.

“Redirection to .ee – scam site running from long time was due to technical fault while DNS propagation which was cached by server. Comments & normal user login (VIP users allowed access) are disabled currently due to excessive load.”

Enter your TPB VIP username and password here – at your peril

The fact the site brings up user registrations is interesting since their existence offers a straightforward test to determine whether a site is a clone of The Pirate Bay or not. Quite simply, clone sites do not have the millions of user accounts The Pirate Bay used to have, neither do they have associated user comments under torrents.

While ThePirateBay.cr tries to explain this away by saying accounts have been disabled due to server load, they also have another trick up their sleeve. New torrents being added to the site now show names of popular uploaders. However, as pointed out by ExtraTorrent.cc, these are not being uploaded by the people in question.

“None of the torrents are actually uploaded by ETTV of ExtraTorrent and we didn’t log in or sign up to that site,” ExtraTorrent told TF.

Fake user accounts on ThePirateBay.cr

“This is them making their own bot to grab our torrents but the funny thing is that they made accounts [in our names] and are fooling members that we are uploading there. They are trying to make it look more legit so users go there.”

Other user accounts recreated on the site include SaM and Juggs of ETRG, YIFY, EZTV, scene4all and BOZX, previously one of The Pirate Bay’s most popular uploaders.

While people might argue that having as many Pirate Bay’s as possible is a great thing, sites like this are problematic. There have been attempts to mislead right from the very start and the recent mails to the press just make matters worse. It’s now impossible to determine the nature of their intentions but the lies aren’t a good start.

Add to that the very real possibility that former TPB users (VIPs no less) might enter their usernames and passwords into this site and there’s a very real possibility of account hijacks should the original site come back online. If they use the same username and passwords elsewhere, things will go bad a lot sooner.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.