After a few weeks of inactivity and fears on the part of some users, Pirate Bay is finally back up and running. The torrents tracker came back with changes in usability and operation, in order to become faster and more modern, but with that also came something that will create a headache for copyright holders, who will have to resubmit millions of withdrawal requests. content to search engines.
This is due to a change in the structure of download links, one of the novelties brought by the pirate ship administrators. Old URLs, in the format thepiratebay.org/torrent/file_name, no longer exist and have received a subtle but important variation. They now serve by thepiratebay.org/description.php?id=filename.
Little difference to users, as old links shared by any means are automatically redirected to the new format. The same, however, does not apply to search engines, which will index the pages of files as new and will no longer display the old ones, understanding that they, whether they have received requests for withdrawal or not, have left the air and are no longer part of the structure. from Pirate Bay.
The result of this, for copyright holders, is the re-registration of millions of requests for removal of content on Google and other search engines. This is the main weapon of distributors and studios to contain the spread of pirated content, but it is also an aspect that requires great work, since requests must be made one by one.
According to Torrent Freak, the total, more precisely, is five million requests of this type, according to information in the Google transparency report. And these are just requests linked to Pirate Bay’s direct file links, not to mention redirect sites or backup versions of the platform maintained by third parties, who also had their URL structures changed and returned to search engines.
The change in addresses has to do with a modernization of the internal systems of the torrent tracker, which has also gained new forms of content categorization and file registration. On the other hand, the work is still far from over, since the comments on the published content, an important tool to differentiate between malicious and legitimate uploads, is still not working, as well as the service version on the Tor network.
As always, the buccaneers responsible for the pirate ship remain silent, just as they did during the entire period of unavailability of the platform. The idea, of course, is that the work will continue and the functions should be restored soon, but there is no deadline for that. In addition, the platform did not explain the change in the link structure or comment on whether the change has to do with removal requests, which have already begun to reappear on Google and other tools.
