Why the future of file-sharing must include the sinking of The Pirate Bay

Torrentfreak interviewed four former members of Piratbyrån, including me, on the past and future of The Pirate Bay. As for the looking backwards, we gave somewhat different answers about its positive accomplishments and our favourite anectodes from its earlier history. But when asked what the future should look like, at least three of us expressed the view that The Pirate Bay should better be sunk.

Marcin De Kaminski:

Besides still being an infrastructure for exchanging files between internet users, most of the ideas and ideals of the early TPB have been lost.

I would have hoped that the internet community at this time would have replaced TPB with something new and more innovative instead of stagnating in some kind of passive mode where progress is hard to see.

Sara Sajjad:

If I could decide, the site would be shut down in all ways possible. It should never belong to someone or something else than itself, and I don’t want it to belong to the wrong people.

Rasmus Fleischer (that’s me):

I think that The Pirate Bay is in a process of slow decay, which has been obvious for the last three years. Its basic failure was that it become such an icon that people began to celebrate The Pirate Bay rather than to copy it, although being copied was the real goal – not to be the biggest, but to spawn a hydra.

Today the best thing would be to get rid of The Pirate Bay and start over with new solutions for free and decentralized file-sharing, not too dependent on web search engines. To me, such a quest would be in the spirit of the Bay.

Brokep has been saying the same thing for a while now.

As for myself, I am not envisioning the “next level” of file-sharing to be super anonymized and/or encrypted. Of course there will (and should) be darknets, but in order to promote curiousness rather than consumerism, we should rather go in the opposite direction. Which would be the direction of “openness”, if that term would not have become almost meaningless.

I don’t mean open as in open data, not open as in indexed, and definitely not open as in “upload a torrent and watch the metadata being used by a hundred hoax sites”. I don’t mean open as in public, but rather a kind of openness which emerges from the overlapping of online communities, both smaller and bigger. I mean open as in sharing not only a file, but a context.

Talking about innovation can be sneaky. We should just not be narrowly looking forward, because much of what we seek is right behind us in the history of file-sharing, in the days before bittorrent. I would like to see a new standard for file-sharing which could combine the technical features of the bittorrent protocol with the kind of interface we know from certain “older” networks, like Soulseek and Audiogalaxy.

That would include the possibility to browse each other’s folders in search for musical discoveries – a mode of navigation which today seems to be becoming as untimely as hypertext. But since we still seem to need some kind of search, the big question might be how to enable a searching which is not only decentralized, but can also resist spammers and scrapers. It might be technically impossible if you think search as in “one big search engine”, but that might not be necessary. And even today you can easily search for music on Soulseek, find it and download it – without interacting with the world wide web.

There are several reasons to reduce the dependence on web search. Censorship might not be the biggest one. If we want file-sharing to promote independent culture – whatever those words might mean – then there must be alternatives to the emptiness of the search box and to the narrowness of the personal newsfeed.

Let’s invent new shades of openness. First step is to get rid of the imbeciles, like commenter #1 on Torrentfreak, who never misses an opportunity to shout “long live TPB!”