The Pirate Bay is like a gigantic inch worm. If you cut it down, it’s various pieces rise up and keep growing. As The Pirate Bay prepares to be passed on to Global Gaming X AB, the service is offering the ultimate legacy gift to users. It looks as if an anonymous user uploaded the entire site’s archive in order to ensure that multiple backups exist in case torrents are removed post-purchase. Users who would like to download an archival copy of the site, can access it as a massive 21.3 gigabyte download for free.
According to TorrentFreak, “The backup includes a mock up site and all of the 873,671 torrent files hosted on The Pirate Bay’s servers.” Users who plan on downloading it are warned to be patient as a file of this size will take a few days to download from a limited group of torrents. Nevertheless, given that the file represents 2 million Pirate Bay torrents, it’s actually fairly compact.
Before jumping to it, it may be smart to remind yourself of the legal issues currently facing both the Pirate Bay founders and perhaps more importantly, the non-commercial cases of Joel Tenenbaum and Jammie Thomas-Rasset.
Most recently, the Department of Justice upheld the award of 1.92 million dollars to the RIAA from single mom Jammie Thomas-Rasset. Minnesota woman Thomas-Rasset is expected to pay $80,000 per song for 24 KaZaA files she’d downloaded in 2004. The RIAA has gone after more than 20,000 people for music piracy, but has more recently chosen to focus on internet service providers rather than on non-commercial infringers. Depending on your country of residence, getting caught using the Pirate Bay archive file could be devastating.
If you’re still curious, or you simply want to read the comments, the download page is available here.
