Pirate Bay shuts down tracking

The Pirate Bay has closed its ports and will no longer offer a torrent tracking service

In November 2003, Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, and Gottfrid Svartholm decided to create their own torrent tracker, The Pirate Bay (TPB). The site was soon to become one of the most popular torrent search and tracking engines on the internet, and an icon to anti-copyright proponents.

In 2006, the website’s servers were raided by Swedish police in what was to be the beginning of a lengthy legal prosecution of the website and its operators. By 15 November 2008, the site had reached 25-million peers.

In April 2009, the trio were found guilty of assistance to copyright infringement, and were each sentenced to one year in prison and a hefty US$905,000 (±R 6.64-million) fine. The judgment has been appealed and the retrial issue is still tied up with the Swedish courts.

Since the verdict was made, The Pirate Bay has seen its ISP legally forced to cut bandwidth supply to the site. Moving the hosting to Denmark, the site has experienced intermittent downtime, and persecution from other anti-piracy groups such as BREIN.

On 17 November 2009, TorrentFreak reported that The Pirate Bay has decided to shut down its tracking service, marking the end of an era. The evolution of the BitTorrent protocol has been cited as the main reason for this move, as trackerless solutions such as DHT and PEX work just as well.

The Pirate Bay crew wrote in a blog post: “Now that the decentralized system for finding peers is so well developed, TPB has decided that there is no need to run a tracker anymore, so it will remain down! It's the end of an era, but the era is no longer up2date. We have put a server in a museum already, and now the tracking can be put there as well.”

The site is now touting a new catchphrase: “The world’s most magnetic BitTorrent site.” Although the tracker is not operational, the search function still is for the time being. Users of the site can obtain files through the use of Magnet links.

TorrentFreak has also revealed that TPB operators are in behind-the-scenes talks with other major tracking sites, encouraging them to move away from the tracker system. The plan is to pick a date at which point torrent files will no longer be supported.

With a site as influential as TPB pushing a move toward evolving torrent technology, it may not be too long before other large torrent trackers begin to shut down their services in favour of DHT.

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