Now that The Pirate Bay is shut down, will the era of free movie watching be gone forever?

On December 12, according to foreign media reports, the strongest fortress in the pirated resource world, The Pirate Bay, was forcibly closed by the Swedish police on Wednesday. To make matters worse, major domestic film and television resource sharing sites have been shut down one after another. First, the Renren Film and Television website was inaccessible, and all major subtitle groups were in danger. Although it reappeared today with a new vest, I don’t know how long Renren Film and Television can last this time. Then the largest subtitle site, Shooter.com, was shut down due to copyright infringement. As Internet users are turning to foreign pirated resource sites, foreign police seem to be cooperating with China’s anti-piracy actions, and The Pirate Bay and eztv.it have fallen one after another.

Pirate Bay in Pirate Kingdom

The Pirate Bay may not return to the public eye anytime soon: its two founders have been jailed and its offices have been raided. The Pirate Bay was born in the pirate nation of Sweden and is the largest file-sharing site. The site was launched in 2003 and had 22 million users at its peak. There is even a political party in Sweden based on the Pirate Bay concept. Although it has been cracked down on by the government over the past few years, it has always remained standing.

Swedish authorities are considering dealing with the Pirate Bay's copyright infringement under pressure from US film and television companies Warner Bros. and Columbia Pictures. The website uses the BitTorrent protocol to allow users to download various music files, movies and other pirated resources. As of Thursday, the Swedish government has not yet fully responded. At present, it seems that the target of this crackdown is not only the Pirate Bay, but other file-sharing websites with servers set up in Sweden are also in danger.

Wired magazine once described The Pirate Bay as "the world's most notorious file-sharing site." In 2009, the founders of The Pirate Bay, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Warg and Peter Sunde, were sentenced to one year in prison by a Swedish court and ordered to pay $7 million to some film and television companies. The verdict was described as a landmark trial.

But after that, The Pirate Bay did not fall into decline. The Pirate Bay's administrators moved their servers to the cloud, which allows them to move their servers from one country to another at any time. Currently, all servers do not use the same network provider, or even in the same country. "

But the founders of the site were not so lucky due to physical limitations. Two of the founders fled Sweden to Southeast Asia. However, Warg was arrested in Cambodia in September 2012, and this time he received a three-and-a-half-year sentence. Fredrik Neij has been in exile in Laos and Thailand. He was arrested last month when he tried to cross the border into Thailand. The picture shows a disheveled man in a gray shirt being detained by Thai authorities.

Foreigners don't watch pirated content? The Pirate Bay has fostered a generation of pirates around the world

Regardless of macro issues such as Internet freedom or intellectual property rights, what The Pirate Bay has changed is the viewing habits of millions of Internet users. The greatest achievement of the world's "most notorious file-sharing website" so far is to make digital piracy part of the mainstream world.

An industry report shows that in just one month in 2013, 340 million people tried to download illegal content from The Pirate Bay, covering North America, Europe and Asia, accounting for a quarter of the world's Internet users.

The report also shows that "copyrighted content reaches users in a free and easy way through the piracy ecosystem. The number of users of the piracy ecosystem and the amount of traffic generated by accessing infringing content increased significantly between 2010 and 2013."

Before the BitTorrent protocol was invented, sharing TV shows or movies was almost impossible. It wasn't until 2001 when a computer science student at the University of Buffalo named Bram Cohen invented BitTorrent that this idea became a reality. Less than two years later, in November 2003, a group of young Swedish people launched a website to help people find and access these BitTorrent files. This brought BitTorrent into the mainstream world.

The Pirate Bay was not the first BitTorrent site, but it quickly became the largest and most well-known. For "moral and political" reasons, these young people wanted to promote BitTorrent as a way to fight back against intellectual property protection laws.

The arrest of the Pirate Bay founder has had a positive effect on the site. From 2011 to 2013, the number of unique users of the Pirate Bay site jumped 23.6%. Millions of people now rely on the Pirate Bay to get their hands on illegal copies of Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, and The Walking Dead. In fact, more people in the United States use the Pirate Bay to watch Game of Thrones than watch the show on HBO, the site's creator. In other words, the Pirate Bay's 10 years of existence have ingrained the idea of ​​digital piracy in the minds of the younger generation.

Maybe you can shut down The Pirate Bay, but no one can change the Internet created by The Pirate Bay. Just like when Qvod collapsed, there would be a bunch of similar sites like Xigua, Pioneer, and Jiji. After The Pirate Bay, there is no guarantee that there won’t be Robber Bay and Big Robber Bay.

Can The Pirate Bay Make a Comeback?

In recent years, The Pirate Bay has taken various measures to increase the resilience of the site, from a complete BitTorrent tracking station to a modified, highly portable BT list station. The Pirate Bay has almost eliminated all central servers and distributed the content on virtual servers of 21 cloud service providers. The Pirate Bay once intended to launch a copy of the website file into the earth's orbit by satellite.

Why is The Pirate Bay so vulnerable, given how much time and effort it has spent improving security?

There is a theory that the site's load balancer was damaged after Swedish police breached the site in Stockholm. This has been one of the few bottlenecks for The Pirate Bay in recent years, and was the cause of previous outages. If this theory is correct, The Pirate Bay should be back online quickly. All it needs to do is set up a new load balancer. After all, cloud servers are not centrally hosted.

However, it is not known whether any important information related to The Pirate Bay was seized in the raid, but the Pirate Bay team previously stressed that everything has been encrypted to prevent sensitive information from falling into the hands of others.

Yesterday, Swedish police appeared to have arrested a member of the Pirate Bay crew. The identity of this person has not yet been confirmed, but if this person knows the password to obtain key facilities on the site, it will further complicate the possibility of a Pirate Bay comeback.

After the first downtime in 2006, The Pirate Bay took three days to get back online. This time, the downtime will obviously be much longer than that time. However, as mentioned above, digital piracy has been rooted in the hearts of some people. The downtime of The Pirate Bay has greatly increased the traffic of other BT sites. Large BT sites such as TorrentReactor informed The Pirate Bay that their traffic increased by 5% to 10%.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.