“The Google Bay” Shows Google Just Another Pirate Bay

Following last week’s guilty verdict against the four founders of The Pirate Bay, many have been wondering what makes TPB all that different from any other search engine. Like, say Google?

Well, someone has built a simple site that uses only Google to provide anyone interested with links to torrents ready for download.

I tried it out myself and here are the first few results for a search for “Wolverine”

Not only doesn’t The Pirate Bay come up in the first few hits, but shows just how many sites do exactly what The Pirate Bay does – and Google does it better.

While it is clear that P2P sharing of copyrighted works is a challenge it doesn’t seem like anyone will be successful in suing it out of existence.  Time for a new plan, gang.

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Facebook v. The Pirate Bay Demonstrates Futility of the Fight

Recently, the much-discussed torrent-discovery site The Pirate Bay, added a “post to Facebook” button that allowed users of the social media site to quickly share links to torrents with their friends.

It didn’t take long for Facebook to act to block this ability since many corporate entities (i.e. MPAA, RIAA, et. al.) do not look kindly on the fact that The Pirate Bay facilitates the distribution of links to contents that might be copyrighted.  Of course, Facebook isn’t just blocking links that might infringe on copyright but any and all links to The Pirate Bay including those linking to completely legal torrents.

While it is disappointing that Facebook has taken such a drastic action against a single specific site it is some consolation that the efforts are likely in vain.

The Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak that this is plain censorship and said he will try to come up with a workaround so people can continue to share. “I’ll fix it later today so it will have a link to a redirect site or something,” he said.

Much like the Hulu / Boxee battle that has Boxee easily working around Hulu’s unreasonable blockage time after time.

Considering I can easily link to potentially illegal torrents with, say Google, it seems a bit silly for Facebook to block The Pirate Bay.

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