Pirates Bay and Filesharing

Warning: some of the subjects we will discuss in this section are contraversial and may or may not be legal. Movies, software and music are usually copyrighted, and there are good reasons for copyrights. We will just look at the filesharing issues in a non-judgemental way, but do not take this as an endorsement.

History of Filesharing

The first really successful filesharing system was Napster. Napster was a peer-to-peer filesharing system, which meant, when you downloaded a file, it was coming from another Napster user, not from the central Napster server. Napster just had a list of files that were available. To use napster, you would log into the network, search for a file (song), and the software would give you a dozen or so places you could download it from.

The trick here was that if you wanted to download files, you had to also allow uploads from your computer. When the uploads were listed, Napster would also show the reliability and speed of the connection for each available file. Of course, if you wanted to thwart Napster, you could refuse to allow any uploads, but in fact, most people did allow uploads, so the network worked amazingly well. With Napster, you could find most any music, even really obscure songs, really easily.

The music industry hated napster and eventually it was shut down because of the obvious copyright violation issues.

A few other networks were started up that were similar, such as Gnutella and Sad Steve, but none of them has really lasted.

Wikipedia has a good article on Napster.

Pirates Bay

Pirates Bay is a Swedish website that offers filesharing.

Unlike Napster, which was really pretty much exclusively music, Pirates Bay has music, movies, software, and most anything else you could want. Almost everything is "pirated" and pretty much everything on Pirates Bay is a copyright violation. The owners of the site say they are not responsible because the files aren't on their server, and they don't choose them. If users choose to exchange files, so be it. The musi, movie and software companies don't agree, but for now, Pirates Bay remains open.

Wikipedia has an excellent article on Pirates Bay.

How to use Pirates Bay

Go to the website http://thepiratebay.se/ and search for the software that you want to download.

For example, let's look for a copy of the film "John Carter on Mars", which is in theaters right now.

Hit the "search" button and see what comes up.

Let's select one of these movies. I'm going to choose the second one from the bottom.

When I did this an annoying popup promoting some kind of adult dating service scam came up. I closed that and then look at the listing for the movie.

There are a bunch of things you can click on. The way I would download this is the use a torrent client. Click on "GET THIS TORRENT".

Then this window will come up asking which torrent client you want to use.

If you don't have Microtorrent, you will need to download that first. You should not have to look very far to find it.

I'm going to choose "Microtorrent". In fact, it's the only one I have.