The Pirate Cloud

2012: The torrent tracker replaced the name and refused servers

The best-known torrent portal of The Pirate Bay refused in the fall of 2012 use of physical servers and passed to lease virtual at "cloud" providers. Along with this The Pirate Bay will replace the name with The Pirate Cloud.

The administration of the portal in the blog reported about it: "At first we killed trackers, then got rid of torrents (having switched to magnet-links). Now we got rid of servers. Slowly and gradually we get rid of our terrestrial form and we arise at the following step, in a cloud. All attempts of attack on The Pirate Bay will be attacks on everything around and on nothing now".

Failure from real servers and moving to "clouds" is a new step of owners of The Pirate Bay in leaving from under control of the anti-counterfeiting organizations and law enforcement agencies.

The torrent portal will move not all the infrastructure to "cloud": routers and "loading distributors" will be serviced by a The Pirate Bay command, and their location will disappear. It is known that they will be located in other geographical places, than "cloud" providers.

As specifies the blog TorrentFreak, "cloud" providers whose services The Pirate Bay will use are in different places of the globe. Even if they will be able to assume that they obluzhivat the piracy portal, they will not manage to get acquainted with contents of the user traffic or to set the IP addresses of users as routers, distributors of loading and virtual servers will exchange the ciphered traffic.

At failure of provider from service of The Pirate Bay, the portal will be able to address for lease of the virtual server other provider. Administrators of The Pirate Bay report what data transfer between "clouds" occurs simply and quickly.

The Pirate Bay is under the attack of law enforcement agencies on a charge of copyright violation since spring of 2006 when the Swedish police for the first time withdrew its servers. In 2009 the court of Stockholm sentenced four founders and administrators of the website to a large fine and imprisonment for a period of 1 year, and afterwards the sentence concerning three from them was reviewed.

2009: Sale of business after prohibition of the Swedish court

Global Gaming Factory, the Swedish company which is going to purchase The Pirate Bay in August, 2009 announced receiving a number of offers on investments into this purchase from the different companies. One of offers to the amount of $16 million was nominated by the unnamed Russian company which wanted to purchase the scandalous portal completely. According to representatives of Global Gaming Factory, it was the informal offer which the company at once rejected.

Besides, John Fanning, the former chief executive of Napster service wanted to invest $2 million in purchase of The Pirate Bay. Also he offered $10 million for all The Pirate Bay, but both of its offers were rejected.

Heads of Global Gaming Factory published this information in response to the words of Wayne Rosso, the former president of Grokster who cooperated with Global Gaming Factory, but already left the company. He told that acquisition of The Pirate Bay can break as Global Gaming Factory cannot find funds for purchase of the portal. In reply to GGF hurried to show that different investors show even more interest in this transaction, than it was expected, Torrent Freak reports.

John Fanning discussed the offer with Hans Pandeya, the chief executive of GGF, but the parties did not manage to come to the mutually advantageous agreement. "The foundation for legalization of the website is already laid, and contracts with the leading companies in the industry will be signed in the nearest future. Everything goes according to the plan", - SEO of Global Gaming Factory told. Pandeya did not comment on presumable terms of closing of the transaction on acquisition of The Pirate Bay for CNews yet.

The Russian investors, meanwhile, say that it is difficult to assume which of the domestic companies could make Global Gaming Factory so generous proposal. "It is improbable that it someone from large Russian Internet holdings – future The Pirate Bay is foggy, strong pressure is put upon it, and legalization is fraught with loss of audience, - Alexey Kurasov, the expert of Finam considers. - In this plan it is much more logical to invest in one of the Russian torent-portals which, on the one hand, show high dynamics of development, with another - yet did not step in the direct conflict with the law". However, according to Kurasov, this direction all the same in the medium term will be connected with the increased risk, and more effective strategy are investments into other fast-growing segments of Internet business.

"As a result, if the offer arrived, then it was some non-core investor, say, the entrepreneur or the investment bank which decided to try in the new market - continues the expert. - At the same time there is a probability that the offer was not in general, and Global Gaming Factory tells about high interest in The Pirate Bay to support the quotations of the actions".

Operators of the file exchange website The Pirate Bay stated in January, 2012 that it will not store a torrent files any more and completely will pass to magnet-links which are much more difficult for tracing and blocking. Now magnet-links are offered as a loading method by default, and torrents — as additional. According to operators of Buhta, the magnet specification is already rather developed to begin to use fully it.

Unlike torrents, magnet-links do not store lists of trackers, and contain only the file contents hash code used for search of its copies at distributing on distributed a hash tables (DHT). Thus, using magnet-links the torrent client finds distributing without participation of the tracker. At the expense of it creation of obstacles to distribution of the file is at a loss and the expense of capacity of the website of search of torrents decreases. Besides, there are less bases to accuse such website of violation of the law.

Links

Mysterious Russians could purchase The Pirate Bay