The Pirate Bay Will Close Its Tracker and Remove Torrents

by Ernesto
TorrentFreak
Jun. 30, 2009

Horrible news, bit torrent is based on the free exchange of information, they are saying they will be pushing some new software to ensure all copyright holders get compensated, well that's all fine and dandy but what it really means is they will be tracking every and all downloads through their new "third party tracker", and that means no more freedom, just approved freedom within a tiny restricted boundary. - Chris, ILAlongside the news that The Pirate Bay will sell shares on the Swedish stock market come some other significant changes. The site itself will decentralize and stop hosting and tracking torrents. Instead, The Pirate Bay will use a third party tracker and torrent hosting service to serve its users.

Earlier today The Pirate Bay announced that it would be acquired by Global Gaming Factory X (GGF) who are listed on the Swedish stock market. So, Pirate Bay users can not only share files but they can buy a share of the site as well.

Perhaps even more significant for the BitTorrent community is the thus far unreported decision to close down the BitTorrent tracker. Up until today Pirate Bay’s public tracker connected more than half of all BitTorrent users but this is about to change.

Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde has informed TorrentFreak that the site will soon decentralize and stop running a BitTorrent tracker of its own. Instead they will encourage their users to use a yet to be launched third party tracker for their torrents.

To decentralize TPB even further, the torrents that will be listed on the site wont be hosted on The Pirate Bay's servers anymore. In the near future the site will use a new torrent hosting service that will store the torrents for them. This new hosting service will be open to other torrent sites as well and can be accessed through an API.

In the end The Pirate Bay is making these changes to ensure that the BitTorrent ecosystem stays intact no matter what happens, Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak. By decentralizing the different aspects they hope that BitTorrent users will be less reliant on the uptime of The Pirate Bay’s servers alone. The burden will now be spread among several independently operated services.

For now it remains a mystery what GGF CEO Hans Pandeya meant with "We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site." That’s worrying to say the least.

In addition, GGF also acquired Peerialism who apparently have developed a new P2P distribution technology which will be used on The Pirate Bay. How this related to the new tracker and external torrent hosting remains unknown.

Some of the implications of this move for the BitTorrent community will be discussed in an article later today.