Just found - The $675,000 Mixtape - while reading the background to this thread.

There is something definitely amusing about their 'two fingers up' to authority attitude.

http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090814/the-pirate-bay-stil...

Having lived through the 70's punk scene, (although it must be agreed that on the whole it was a pretty contrived marketing plan) and appreciated the youthful, anarchic energy of it, I sort of wonder why most young people (here in the UK) seem so incredibly conservative. Are they really Thatchers children, more concerned about brand identity and affiliation that turning the world on it's head?

The Pirate Bay team seem to be 21st c. punks to me, even though I'm sure they see the $$$ at the end of the tunnel.

For the 21st century punks go to London or Berlin, the punk scene is alive and well.

Wouldn't all of the torrents be more-or-less useless without the tracker?

And by "more-or-less", I mean "completely".

From the description on TPB: "Remember that all torrents from TPB now have the new tracker openbittorrent.com included, so they will continue to track even after the TPB tracker shuts down."

Even without that, DHT would help.

I was hoping to see the code not the torrents. sigh

The tracker is open-source beerware: http://erdgeist.org/arts/software/opentracker/

21.3 gb... pfft, I download that in an hour

EDIT: JK, please don't sue me

Well, as long as there aren't any "Harry Potter" torrents in there, I think you will be fine.

Wouldn't that be JKR? ;)

Actually I think he is right, JK implies two proper nouns. I should have put "jk" or "just kidding."

The ladder, not everyone knows your favourite abbreviations. AIWJPTTPAP.

heh... I was hoping for a dump of their database. This is just a crawl containing basic info about each torrents.

What info is in their database besides these torrents that would be valuable? They don't touch the actual files being shared. I doubt they log anything interesting; if they do, no one's ever going to see it. It would be a huge mistake for them to hand over visitor stats.

Well, you'd have to hit the trackers to pull all the current seed/leech ratio data yourself, if you want to find the living torrents amongst the muck. Things such as number of .torrent downloads, the "PirateBay-verified release" flag, and the comments (yes, there are comments) would also be useful in filtering through them. However, all this stuff would probably be invalidated by the time someone actually wanted to use the backup...