Yeah seems kind of like a futile effort, even the piratebay is (somehow) still online to this day.

Do you really believe that? Stuff like that is really troublesome to keep alive. Piratebay is hardly the thing is was, and it's a torrent site, which is relatively easy to host. A better example would be rarbg, which is not alive anymore. They only exist because of almost fanatical dedication of some highly productive individuals, god bless them. Even if they don't get into serious trouble, it's still a hassle to avoid getting into trouble and work with actual content, not just host a bunch of torrent-links other people provide. So, at some point they'll lose the desire to do that, and I am not so sure that there always will be somebody to take post.

In fact, I even worry a bit about what will happen to Linux when Torvalds finally passes away, and for sure Linux depends on him much less so than all those pirate resources on the people who maintain them.

What happens when the key leadership retires/dies? No one has ever found a solution to this problem. It is not novel nor simple, and certainly not exclusive to any group, project, or institution.

look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Gradually scale back your [great] leadership and find people to do well defined small parts of it. The dynamic flexible structure becomes rigid and decays much more slowly.

Eventually even the top tasks can be strictly defined and frozen in time.

I mean it's not literally about the piratebay or libgen, or napster or whatever. I think historically it's true to say that it never really mattered how much effort they invest in destroying piracy. The fact that storage gets cheaper, yet text won't grow in size over time also makes me rather optimistic. Piracy was also always a decentralized effort by like-minded individuals, it's about the idea, you can arrest people, seize a name and people die, but an idea will never die.

Piracy of books in particular has been around since the 17th century btw, if that helps to convey why I'm not worried.

the running joke is to call it the organization.

i coin a protocol in 2005 and in 2007 i•ve combined 6 torrents into one archive. Clearly Im an upstanding member of the organization.

> A better example would be rarbg, which is not alive anymore.

There you go, ruining my evening again. Hope you're happy, making an old man cry.

tpb is not really still extant

In a sense it doesn't anymore true, in another I just downloaded a recent Ubuntu ISO just this week from it. You get what I mean.

Is there a reason to get Ubuntu from anywhere other than the torrent found at ubuntu.com?

Perhaps ubuntu.com is blocked in your country.

Lookup Linux iso in the urban dictionary

I'm sure it's less popular, but I heard you can google pirate bay proxies and get on there in 2 minutes. Not that I would ever do such an immoral and illegal thing, depriving publishers of their hard-earned dollars! But from what I've heard you can still get any recent media and a lot of older stuff.

With old torrents, nothing compared to its heyday. I wonder where people get the esoteric stuff from now. 5-10 years ago it used to me newzbins and demonoid

> I wonder where people get the esoteric stuff from now

I don't know what DHTs it's pulling from, but BitMagnet lets me find LOTS of cool, obscure stuff.

It keeps the lawyers employed