Have you been downloading your daily dose of entertainment from one of the torrent sites, only to discover most of them disappear overnight? There is no guarantee on the life of torrent sites these days and at this trend, there might not be many left in the days to come.
Over the past months, we have seen some of the largest and oldest torrent sites, such as The Pirate Bay, Kickass Torrents, YIFY, EZTV, ISOHUNT and others, witness an untimely death, caused by the scrutiny of legal authorities. But these sites haven't been exactly dead, as their revival has always been an option.
Let's take The Pirate Bay for instance. TPB had its share of problems and serious run-ins with the authorities for years. It was originally shut down for over two months after the Swedish authorities raided TPB's HQ and seized all equipments in December 2014. But the following year, The Pirate Bay site went live, albeit with just a waving pirate flag – hinting at the site's return.
Just as predicted, The Pirate Bay came back to life in early-2015. But that wasn't the end of its problems. For a site that was never offline for more than 72 hours since its inception in 2003, recent years have been more challenging than ever. Ever since then, there have been several outages, which casted a sense of unreliability among its users. But the site's prominent presence and dominance in the industry kept TPB at the top of the food chain.
With such uncertainty, users had to keep a backup site for their torrent needs. Kickass Torrents rose to fame during TPB's darkest hours. Rising to the top and maintaining the dominance are two different things. KAT started to feel the heat from the legal authorities, search engines and even ISPs. The climax for KAT was not a lot different from TPB.
In the end, internet users lost several prominent torrent sites such as KAT and TPB by the end of 2016 and even as we surf through the initial 2017 months. The battle is certainly not over, but the bigger question to ask here is whether it will ever be. Will torrent sites live forever or the anti-piracy groups succeed in putting an end to content piracy.
If everything continues at the same trend, we are not fully convinced that the world will be free of piracy. The courtroom battles will continue, and new torrent sites will emerge to fill the gap left by their ancestors.
Even though the loss of these prominent torrent sites has left a massive void in the world of piracy, there are several newcomers to fill that space. But some sites are quite old and have a strong user base, such as YTS, RARBG and others.
Users find it difficult to trust the newcomers in the industry, so they prefer known names. This has even opened opportunities for some notorious hackers to create clone sites of popular ones like TPB and KAT to make some extra bucks or even steal users' information. It gets difficult to identify the original site as it is a common practice to re-launch websites with different domains.
If the authorities have managed to shut down original sites, there are several clones created to offer content to users. Unless the problem is addressed at the source, there is really nothing much to end the widespread of pirated content online. Internet is just open to everyone, which makes it hard to address the issues of piracy on a global level.
