TorrentFreak

Hollywood and the major music labels frequently describe The Pirate Bay as a piracy haven that ruins their businesses. On the other side, however, there are many independent artists who would like nothing more than to be featured prominently on the world’s largest torrent site. For the latter group The Pirate Bay team have just released a new platform where artists can have their content promoted on the site’s homepage, free of charge.

In a month The Pirate Bay will no longer offer downloads of .torrent files. Instead, the largest torrent site on the Internet will only provide so-called magnet links to its visitors. The first step in this direction was made today with The Pirate Bay replacing the current default torrent download links with magnets. Could this be the end of an era?

Continuing a long-standing New Year’s tradition, we present an up-to-date list of the world’s most visited BitTorrent sites. At the start of 2012 The Pirate Bay continues to pull in the most visitors, followed by Torrentz and KickassTorrents. The six-year-old TV-torrent distribution group EZTV appears in the list for the first time, ranked 8th.

A new plugin for WordPress allows anyone to set up a fully functioning BitTorrent site in just a few minutes. Whether it’s a totally public torrent index or a private torrent tracker with strict ratio enforcement, WP-Trader supports it. The project was born when the developers recognized a huge demand for a simple script that even relative tech novices can set up.

Following the High Court ruling ordering UK ISP BT to block Usenet indexing site Newzbin2, it was only a matter of time before that momentum was capitalized upon by the movie and music industries. Today a coalition of companies led by the BPI demanded that BT also block The Pirate Bay, either voluntarily or by consenting to a court order.

It’s one of the longest existences in the entire file-sharing space and bar none it has been the most eventful. We’re talking about the life of The Pirate Bay, the world’s most resilient BitTorrent site. Today the site celebrates its 8th birthday, a massive achievement which may not ever be bettered in terms of longevity, sheer volume of members and material distributed.

With a new college year just around the corner, students will be expected to dig deep to pay for all the latest textbooks to accompany their chosen course. These books are not only crucial but also very expensive, a situation that hasn’t gone unnoticed by the administrator of a textbook-focused torrent site. His plan is to break up a publishing monopoly and educate the masses, regardless of how deep their pockets are.