Those who have followed The Pirate Bay over the last decade know that it was founded by the Swedish pro-culture organization Piratbyrån.
Piratbyrån, which translates to Bureau of Piracy, was formed by political activists and hackers in the early 2000s, many of whom had already launched other web projects challenging political, moral and power structures. The group’s members were all friends of friends and in common with The Pirate Bay, there was virtually no structure.
A member who served as an early spokesperson of both Piratbyrån and The Pirate Bay is Tobias Andersson. While Tobias was not active in technical operations, he was a founding member of the site.
Tobias’s involvement has been on and off throughout the years and nonexistent for the last four, a period in which he and his wife had their first child and the focus switched to family life.
Last year he asked the current admins if he could use the front page of The Pirate Bay for an idea of his. That project soon became The Promo Bay, a platform which enables independent artists to expose their work to tens of millions of users from all over the world.
After years of relative anonymity, Tobias is now stepping into the light, not to take credit, but to announce his final “resignation” and to send the site a final message.
The Pirate Bay founder, who spoke last week at the 14th International Forum on Free Software in Porto Alegre, Brazil, tells us that he will also quit his volunteer work on The Promo Bay. At the same time he encourages the others to follow his lead and shut down the site.
Tobias believes that in the near future The Pirate Bay will no longer be able to fulfill the important role it has today. And for other technologies to be able take over, it has to go.
“No, I’m not kidding. I mean it. The Pirate Bay in its current form must end. It is not built and meant for what is coming. The future copy fights will need something better, safer, faster. Something that does not depend on a few persons’ will to sacrifice themselves. The world needs something that is impossible to take down, no matter what raids, laws and scare tactics they will throw at you,” Tobias says.
“I believe that The Pirate Bay hinders the creation of something new. Not actively, but it has made people too comfortable by always being there – by not giving in to threats and so on. If The Pirate Bay would decide to quit, I’m sure something new and better would spring to life quite soon. Sure there are other sites than The Pirate Bay, but it’s the biggest and hundreds of other sites depend on its torrents.”
The concept of centralized BitTorrent sites is vulnerable to pressure from outside, and with increasing enforcement efforts it becomes harder and harder to maintain. 
New domains are still easy to come by, but the hosting situation is already getting problematic.
Tobias believes that the problems only will get worse when other industries start to feel threatened as 3D printing matures.
“With the MPAA and the RIAA and their likes, there haven’t been any serious problems. There’s actually been more downtime for the site due to drunk admins, than downtime due to raids. But when car manufacturers, oil companies and nations start feeling threatened, we’re going to need something better. Something that is independent and that holds ground, regardless of raids and repression.”
The Pirate Bay founder stresses that he believes that The Pirate Bay has done a lot of good things, from offering support to artists to providing a library of information for people in oppressive regimes. However, this doesn’t mean that the site should continue down the same path – quite the contrary.
“Don’t get me wrong, I love The Pirate Bay. The memories I bring from working with it will last forever. And I DO believe the site have been bettering the world – and still is. But if The Pirate Bay is this important now, you understand why we need something better soon,” Tobias says.
Whether the current admins of The Pirate Bay agree with Tobias remains to be seen, but it’s not the first time that one of the founders has called for the site to die. Three years ago Peter Sunde came out with a similar message.
“We need some form of new technology. So, that’s kind of the future for The Pirate Bay, hopefully dying, and being replaced with something better of course, because the Pirate Bay really sucks,” Sunde said at the time.
So is the end near for the almighty Pirate Bay? Time will tell….
