Nov 18 2009 I'll Miss You: Pirate Bay Tracker Shut Down

Well folks, it happened. The Pirate Bay BitTorrent tracker officially kicked the bucket yesterday. What does this mean for Pirate Bay users?

Although the site will remain operational for now, millions of BitTorrent users will lose the use of its tracker and will instead have to rely on DHT and alternative trackers to continue downloading.

"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! It's the end of an era, but the era is no longer up2date. We have put a server in a museum already, and now the tracking can be put there as well" the Pirate Bay crew write on their blog.

And what does this mean for iTunes users?

iTunes sucks, there's no porn on iTunes.

HELL YES I QUOTED MYSELF IN AN ARTICLE! I know shit -- I can say things!

The Pirate Bay Tracker Shuts Down for Good [torrentfreak]

Thanks to Bill, who hasn't paid for music since the Green Jellö cassette with 'Three Little Pigs'.

Apr 17 2009 Pirate Bay Founders Sentenced To A Year

That's right folks, the four men (Peter Sunde, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Fredrik Neij and Carl Lundstrom) most intimately linked to The Pirate Bay, a torrent-tracking portal I know absolutely nothing about and have never visited except to take this screenshot, have been found guilty of breaching copyright laws and have been ordered to pay around $3.6 million and each serve a year in the slammer.

The group that controls The Pirate Bay, launched in 2003, says that no copyrighted material is stored on its servers and no exchange of files actually takes place there so it cannot be held responsible for what material is being exchanged.

The prosecution said that by financing, programing and administering the site, the four men promoted the infringement of property rights by the site's users.

Lundstrom's attorney Per Samuelson told journalists he was shocked by the verdict and the severity of the sentence.

"That's outrageous, in my point of view. Of course we will appeal," he said. "This is the first word, not the last. The last word will be ours."

I don't know much, but I do know I wouldn't want to spend a year in Swedish pound you in the ass jail, because that would involve a whole different kind of pirating (read: butt). Also, $3.6 million in fines? I've probably downloaded that much material myself. Sounds reasonable.

Pirate Bay fileshare four jailed for a year [yahoonews]

Thanks to Joshua, Robert, E of R, Sean and Richard, who don't even know what a torrent is. Isn't that right, guys? *wink*