Pirate Bay Retires the World’s Largest BitTorrent Tracker: Via Threat Level.

Operators of the The Pirate Bay shuttered the site’s BitTorrent tracker on Tuesday, six years after it was founded.

Trackers — the servers that bootstrap each BitTorrent download – are no longer necessary with enhancements like DHT and PEX that allow peers to locate one another without accessing a central server, site operators wrote in the Bay’s blog.

“Now that the decentralized system for finding peers is so well developed, TPB has decided that there is no need to run a tracker anymore, so it will remain down!” reads the announcement. “It’s the end of an era.”

“This is what we consider to be the future,” the Bay wrote. “Faster and more stability for the users because there is no central point to rely upon.”

The changeover, first reported by TorrentFreak, does not decommission Sweden’s The Pirate Bay, whose four co-founders face a year in prison for facilitating copyright infringement. The site continues to host and index torrent files in a more streamlined fashion. But with its tracker gone, The Pirate Bay is no longer computationally involved in each downloader’s transaction.

Speculation in the Swedish press suggests that the change might be related to an October decision by a court in that country requiring the site to either shut down, or remove all unauthorized copyrighted works. The Stockholm district court said two of the site’s four co-founders, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Fredrik Neij would be fined up to $73,000 if the Bay failed to comply.

On appeal, Svartholm Warg recently argued that the proposed $73,000 fine should be nullified if the tracker is shut down, according to Swedish media.

Another co-founder, Peter Sunde, said via a Twitter post that proposed fines had nothing to do with the move. “#tpb closed the tracker because new technology has evolved to not need it. Less problems!”

The October ruling came months after the four co-founders were found guilty in Stockholm of facilitating copyright infringement, were fined millions and ordered jailed for a year — all of which is pending appeal. Tuesday’s tracker action does not affect those convictions.

Monique Wadsted, a Motion Picture Association attorney who helped prosecute the four co-defendants in a joint civil-criminal trial, said removing a tracker does not absolve The Pirate Bay.

“The prohibition relates to various different things and it’s not enough to just remove one of them,” she told Swedish media.

Read Original Article:(Via Threat Level.)