After several weeks of absence, The Pirate Bay became accessible again through its main .org domain last weekend.
At first sight the site looked more or less the same but there are some significant changes, both under the hood and in appearance.
Many users immediately noticed that the site doesn’t work well with several ad blockers. Whether this is a bug or a feature is the question, but it was both frustrating and annoying for some.
“Your adblock may block important javascript components, check that main.js is loaded or the webpage won’t work,” a message on The Pirate Bay warns. And indeed, whilelisting this file appears to resolve the problem.
The Pirate Bay’s search results are also presented differently. While it’s still possible to order by date, size, seeders, and leechers, that’s not immediately obvious to everyone. Again, this was cause for some confusion.
It’s safe to say that every new design comes with drawbacks and other changes people have to get used to. However, there’s also a structural change that will be harder to overcome, one that mostly affects copyright holders.
With the new Pirate Bay design also comes a new URL structure. Instead of the old torrent pages that were accessible through thepiratebay.org/torrent/12345, the format has now changed to thepiratebay.org/description.php?id=12345.
Other URLs, including categories, the top lists, and user pages, all updated as well. To give another example, the 100 most-active torrents on the site can now be accessed from thepiratebay.org/search.php?q=top100:all, instead of the old thepiratebay.org/top/all.
For users, this isn’t a problem. All old links simply redirect to new ones. However, for copyright holders, it’s an outright disaster as it means that they will have to resend all their takedown notices. And we’re not talking about a few thousand here, but many millions.
Looking at Google’s transparency report we see that copyright holders have asked the search engine to remove more than five million URLs. Pretty much all of these notices have been rendered useless.
For example, this 2012 takedown notice from Paramount Pictures removed the link to The Pirate Bay’s top 100 video torrents. However, after the update, the same page reappeared under a new URL. Another consideration is that Google is just one search engine, so the same applies to other search engines too.
While that’s already quite bad, it’s really just the tip of the iceberg. In addition to the millions of URLs of thepiratebay.org, there are also hundreds of millions of Pirate Bay proxy URLs that have changed. All the notices for these sites have to be resent as well.
While search engines need time to pick up all the new links, the first takedown notices are already trickling in. As shown above, this also includes proxy sites.
It is safe to say that The Pirate Bay’s updates are having a more significant impact than it may seem at first sight. While it’s not entirely clear what motivated the changes, they are likely intended to make the site operate more smoothly.
At the time of writing, however, there are still some issues. Comments are not working, for example, and the Tor site is also offline. We tried to get more info from the Pirate Bay team, but thus far we have yet to hear back.
