Wednesday, Nov 18, 2009    Text size: 

The standard-bearer for online file-sharing and piracy has shuttered its torrent-tracking service, which locates torrent files — small text files that instruct file-sharing applications on where and how to find and download actual media files.

That doesn’t mean the site is dead, though. Instead, the Pirate Bay’s four chieftains have simply dispersed the site’s functionality elsewhere.

According to Peter Sunde, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Fredrik Neij and Carl Lundstrom, distributing their site’s torrent-tracking abilities was a part of the plan.

"Now that the decentralized system for finding peers is so well developed, TPB has decided that there is no need to run a tracker anymore, so it will remain down,” the four announced on their company blog. “It's the end of an era, but the era is no longer up [to] date. We have put a server in a museum already, and now the tracking can be put there as well."

Besides keeping the Pirate bay working, at least nominally, what does this mean for online piracy? Protection.

According to tech analyst Nate Anderson, decentralizing the Pirate Bay’s torrent-tracking functionality goes toward neutralizing one of the main legal arguments against it.

“It … allows The Pirate Bay to better make the argument, which it tried in court earlier this year, that it is really just a search engine for [torrent] files — like a specialized Google,” he said. “One objection to this argument was that TPB actually ran its own tracker and therefore helped to facilitate the actual downloads.”

Sunde crowed about the development on his Twitter page.

"To make it totally clear, [the Pirate Bay] is not closing,” he said. “[The Pirate Bay] closed the tracker because new technology has evolved to not need it. Less problems."