The Pirate Bay Goes Down Worldwide

The Pirate Bay has officially went down worldwide, after the Rights Alliance filed a complaint in Sweden against the piracy organization. Instead of simply banning the IP, the Swedish authority raided the server room keeping The Pirate Bay alive. Rumors said The Pirate Bay was on cloud servers now, but it looks like the site managers were unable to bring the full site over to the cloud.

Little pockets of The Pirate Bay live on, but most of the different domains have went offline. The Rights Alliance has been working on getting The Pirate Bay down for some time. Since 2004, the pirating site has been popular, due to its easy of use and popularity by seeders. The founders of The Pirate Bay, Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij, are both in prison for extended charges. The other founder, Peter Sunde, claimed he is glad The Pirate Bay has shut down, citing lack of goals and excessive advertising polluting the community.

Nobody knows who the new site owners are, but it is clear the intention is to make as much money as possible. The Pirate Bay has not been actively updated on the front-end design or back-end code in quite a few years. Even though The Pirate Bay is still the most popular torrent site, it has seen various attempts to shut it down. The UK, France and a few other European Internet service providers have been forced to block the site by the government.

It is the first time the Swedish government has actively targeted the server room keeping The Pirate Bay active. The effect looks similar to when the CIA shut down Megaupload, another torrenting site. What effect this will have on torrenting is questionable, especially considering the alternatives already available and the fact torrenting didn’t slow down after the closure of Megaupload.

Some piracy experts claim the only way to stop the growth is to offer a paid system for a good price. People obviously don’t want to pay $15 to watch a movie or $99 for a song and prefer streaming services.

It looks like the film industry isn’t too keen on dropping the prices however, possible because DVD and streaming deals are already lucrative enough. Newer pirating platforms like Popcorn Time make it even more easy to watch free movies and TV shows, making the incentive to torrent even more tempting.