<nettime> TorrentFreak: TPB Will Stop Serving Torrents

[nettime's_seeder <nettime@kein.org>]

<http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-will-stop-serving-torrents-120112/>

    The Pirate Bay Will Stop Serving Torrents

   In a month The Pirate Bay will no longer offer downloads of .torrent
   files. Instead, the largest torrent site on the Internet will only
   provide so-called magnet links to its visitors. The first step in this
   direction was made today with The Pirate Bay replacing the current
   default torrent download links with magnets. Could this be the end of
   an era?

   After half a decade of loyal service, The Pirate Bay shut down its 
   tracker in November 2009.

   The Pirate Bay argued that BitTorrent trackers have been made redundant
   by technologies such as DHT and PEX. In addition, The Pirate Bay
   team said that they might move away from torrents entirely and switch
   to offering magnet links instead.

   "We're talking to the other torrent admins on doing magnet links and
   DHT and PEX for all sites. Moving away from torrents and trackers
   totally - like pick a date and all agree `from this date, we'll not
   support torrents anymore'," a Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak at
   the time.

   Now, two years later, that date is coming soon.

   Today, The Pirate Bay made the first step towards this new future by
   making magnets the default download links instead of torrents.
   TorrentFreak was further informed that in "a month or so" the largest
   torrent site on the Internet will stop serving torrent files
   indefinitely.

   The announcement is bound to lead to confusion and uncertainty among
   many torrent users, but in reality very little will change for the
   average Pirate Bay visitor. Users will still be able to download files,
   but these will now be started through a magnet link instead of a
   .torrent file.

   The Pirate Bay team told TorrentFreak that one of the advantages of the
   transition to a "magnet site" is that it requires relatively little
   bandwidth to host a proxy. This is topical, since this week courts in
   both Finland and the Netherlands ordered local Internet
   providers to block the torrent site.

   Perhaps even better, without the torrent files everyone can soon host a
   full copy of The Pirate Bay on a USB thumb drive, which may come in
   handy in the future.

   Unlike the site's users, existing torrent sites that scrape .torrent
   files from The Pirate Bay will have to make some drastic changes. If
   they want to continue serving .torrent files they will have to fetch
   them from DHT. Also, hotlinks to .torrent files will stop working and
   will soon redirect to The Pirate Bay's detail page for the files in
   question.

   One of the potential downsides of using magnets is that it could take a
   bit longer for downloads to start, especially if there are relatively
   few people sharing a file. This is because the .torrent file has to be
   fetched from other users instead of being downloaded directly from the
   site. More background on these and other technicalities can be
   found here.

   The good news is that all mainstream BitTorrent clients support magnet
   links. This wasn't the case back in 2009, but when The Pirate Bay
   hinted that in the future they could become a magnet-only site, all
   developers quickly made their clients fully compatible.

   There's no doubt that a torrent-less Pirate Bay will certainly mark the
   end of an era. At the moment it's hard to predict what the impact of
   The Pirate Bay's decision will be on the BitTorrent community. But
   torrents, however, will never disappear completely.


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