Some large discussion has been happening lately on the fact The Pirate Bay sold last week to a company called Global Gaming Factory X. This is pretty big news as the icons of file-sharing on the web seemed to give in to the force of financial woes related to their recent trial. With The Pirate Bay seeming to pull a Napster and legit media sales on the horizon, the open source community of The ‘Bay are furious. Demands for a system to deactivate accounts and separate all ties to The Pirate Bay are coming at the site admin in large numbers, unrelenting. To the average person, it would seem that the good ol’ days are over and the sun might actually be setting over at The ‘Bay. 

But I have a different take on the whole situation. Yes, this could be the end of www.thepiratebay.org as we know it… but in a recent interview Rasmus Fleischer points out a very interesting fact: 

The web site that the visitor of the domain is directed to could be said to be ownable, in the sense that any new owner can change its contents. But it is also copyable, meaning that the “original” version can pop up again at another domain name. Actually, it is very simple to copy. You can fit all of The Pirate Bay, including the software and every torrent, on a USB stick.

A single USB stick, you say? that’s small. that’s really small. In fact, I’d say it’s small enough to easily be made into a .torrent file and put up on the web to be distributed at whim. So, with that in mind, I get the sneaking suspicion that a backup of the site will flood the internet if the previous owners aren’t happy with the way the new owners are running it. That’s if they don’t just let the dog off the chain right off the bat. 

Just imagine that after all this strife and struggle and law to put a leash & collar on The Pirate Bay…  All the money, effort and controversy that’s lead up to this point when the IFPI, MPAA and RIAA have thrown resources at it like the world was about to end and struggled to emerge victorious and start to feel the relief that The Pirate Bay is about to close it’s doors?  Imagine that overnight, 5 to 50 to 500 to 5000 more Pirate Bay Clones show up, every last one of them identical in capacity and functionality to the original Pirate Bay, all sharing the same trackers and databases. 

Copy & Paste. Such a simple concept, but so infinitely versatile when put into practice. People need to realize that once you let something loose into the web, it’s going to exist and migrate from user to user in an organic and unstoppable way that I don’t think that the world has actually realized is possible, yet.