Last week the alleged owner of KickassTorrents (KAT) was arrested in Poland, where he faces an extradition request from the United States.
Last week the allegedThe news came as a shock to many of the site’s users and also had a profound impact on the torrent ecosystem at large, particularly in the short term.
TorrentFreak discusses the events and repercussions with several experts on a special episode of Steal This Show. Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde is one of the guests, and he finds it quite odd that the long arm of the United States can reach deep into Europe.
“For me, it’s weird that Poland is arresting someone on the orders of the United States where the person has not been,” Sunde says.
“I have an issue with a country having that much power. I don’t care if it’s the United States, Russia or whatever, but one country shouldn’t be able to just grab people from anywhere in the world just because they do something on the Internet. That’s insanity.”
Sunde and the other Pirate Bay founders had their own criminal prosecution in Sweden several years ago, for which they all served jail time. Their case was also spurred on by U.S. influence, he believes, but it was prosecuted on their home turf instead.
Legalities aside, Peter Sunde believes that the shutdown of KAT shows how vulnerable the torrent ecosystem is. The majority of users rely on a very small group of torrent sites, which are all major targets for law enforcement.
A more distributed system would be much better, according to Pirate Bay’s founder.
“I think maybe people now understand that we shouldn’t just have a few sites. Because everything depends on these sites. That’s the thing I always wanted, a large hybrid of lots of smaller sites instead of one big target like KickassTorrents or Pirate Bay.”
Just setting up basic mirrors isn’t going to cut it in this case. At the moment there are still dozens of KAT copies online, but since they don’t have access to the backend of the original site, uploaders can’t use their accounts.
Also, many smaller torrent sites were relying on KAT’s database of torrents, and these have been faced with a similar problem since last week. A lack of new content.
“If one of the big sites goes down a lot of smaller sites are hit as well because they are just a copy of the original database. We need lots of sites that federate all the data instead of having to depend on the higher-ups,” Sunde notes.
So what’s the alternative? According to Pirate Bay’s founder, more innovation and decentralization is required.
There are already plenty of new technologies that could make torrent sites more decentralized. Zeronet and IPFS, for example. However, according to Sunde the large torrent sites such as TPB don’t really have the urge to innovate.
“IPFS is really good and if everyone started using that instead it would be great. It would be working perfectly with less centralization. The problem is that the big sites like TPB and KAT are not really good at using new technology.”
Without a userbase these new technologies don’t catch on, so that keeps the current status quo intact. The only way to change this is by bringing in something fresh, Sunde says.
“If you look at the big sites, name one of them that has an up-to-date user experience or uses new technology at all. It’s the same shit that’s been around for 10, 15 years. There is no innovation whatsoever that’s visible on these sites.
“We need new voices, new people, new activists and new ideologies in the piracy scene,” Sunde adds.
Millions of people now rely on TPB and KAT to just be there for them. However, that makes the ecosystem very vulnerable without any incentive to innovate. This is why Sunde and others who were involved early, wanted to shut down the site on its 10th anniversary. To make room for something better.
“I’ve been saying for years that I want The Pirate Bay to shut down, and now with KickassTorrents being shut down I hope this will actually inspire people to do something fresh, innovative and something new.”
“To be honest, it’s not really hard to run a torrent site, or set one up,” Sunde says.
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You can hear more from Peter Sunde in the latest episode of Steal This Show (not all comments cited here appear in the episode), which was published earlier today. The episode also features isoHunt founder Gary Fung and U.S. Pirate Party founder Andrew Norton.
