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The Pirate Bay Is Back

All torrenters rejoice. In response to my previous post Is the Pirate Bay Down for Good?, the answer is nope. Just like I said. Told ya it would be back! It just simply can’t shut down because one guy croaked after all that site has been through. I feel better now. Remember kids, respect intellectual property!

Is The Pirate Bay Down for Good?

HEEEEEEEEEEELLLLLLLLLLL No. The Pirate Bay (the absolute best public torrent site ever) has been down for two days. Torrentfreak is reporting that its founding group, Piratbyrån, has disbanded because one of its founding members has died.

This is awful news, but I don’t see how the site can go down just because one of the founding members is no longer here. It’s not like he was the sole admin and operator of the site. Can’t the others carry out his work? And even if your group disbanded, you’d think that after everything that the site operators have been through, they’d want to continue strong:

Historical Site Outages

• On May 31, 2006, the website’s servers in Stockholm were raided by Swedish police, causing it to go offline for three days. They were restored from a secret backup location.

• On 17 April 2009, the admins were all found guilty of assistance to copyright infringement and sentenced to one year in prison and payment of a fine of 30 million SEK. They skipped prison and paid no fine.

• On October 5 2009, one of the IP transit providers to The Pirate Bay blocked all Pirate Bay traffic causing an outage for most users around the world. The site was restored the next day.

• On June 30, 2009 Swedish advertising company Global Gaming Factory X AB announced their intention to buy the site for SEK 60 million. The sale never happened.

• On May 17, 2010 due to an injunction against their bandwidth provider, the site was taken offline. Access to the website was later restored with a message laughing off the injunction on their front page.

• On June 23, 2010 the group PiratbyrÃ¥n disbanded due to the death of Ibi Kopimi Botani, a prominent member and co-founder of the group. So does this mean the end of The Pirate Bay?

Source: Wikipedia (yes, I cited Wikipedia, wanna fight about it? This is a blog, not an academic paper)

I just don’t understand how it can be down for good. It survives a raid, hundreds of lawsuits , a sale that didn’t go through and multiple ISPs cutting its bandwidth or blocking its access. But suddenly, someone kicks the bucket and it’s down? What happened to their will to fight?

I’ll be expecting it to come back sometime in the near future – maybe the outage is just a coincidence. But for now, the once unsinkable has sunk!

PS- it’s 4:38am. Don’t I have anything better to be doing (hint – sleep) than writing about this?