As you read this, the Pirate Bay could be back online, providing you can find it through the barrier of ISP blocks that try to stop UK residents from accessing it. Or at least, stop UK consumers accessing it with one click.
The site's history of enabling global piracy isn't anything to be particularly proud of, but the excitement surrounding its return tells us one thing – whatever you think of what it does, it does it well and has the fans to prove it.
It has been a slight inconvenience not having the Pirate Bay around. Using advert-plastered alternative torrent sites that outright lie about what they contain is a nightmare. Unfortunately it's the only option, as trying to find legitimate ways to watch the weekend's US telly or ripped VHS content from the 1980s can be nigh-on impossible – even in the streaming, globalised world of 2015.
Those who are into piracy, or have a keen interest in acquiring legal back-up copies of physical media they already own, know the Pirate Bay's still the model media portal.
It's no great looker and there's no revolving HTML5 carousel, but that's part of its appeal as well.
A search box and an unstyled list of everything that's available is vastly more usable than all these dynamic interfaces modern media businesses are pushing out to aid the "discovery" of their content.
The BBC's spent millions redesigning the iPlayer portal, with the end result being that it's now slightly harder to find the mundane BBC4 documentary about the history of gnomes I'm looking for than it was before. The Pirate Bay, with its functional, coded-by-amateurs layout, works better, and is quicker. So I'll still look there first every time.
Likewise, Spotify's great and very clever, but the desktop app's clunky and the web player is overly complex. Why go through that when you can stream everything straight to a folder, for free and without adverts between Girls Aloud's greatest hits?
This must be the place
If I want to watch, say, Total Recall again tonight, where should I go? If I could remember the name of the distributor or studio, perhaps I'd try looking at the particular streaming site they're aligned with. But I know it'll be on a torrent site, in the resolution of my choosing, and it'll fly down at maximum bandwidth.
How is it that a hacked-together torrent site run by unpaid admins and populated with content by the general public can beat the official big media resources hands-down when it comes to accessibility and content choice?
The Bay is also properly international – not offering a curated selection of content designed to adhere to the media giants' demands in each territory, as Netflix does. Not split so one half can serve ads to the US while another can be free to the UK, all the while arbitrarily expiring the availability of everlasting digital content seemingly on a whim, as happens on BBC iPlayer.
The Pirate Bay has one list of everything you can get. Now. And it's always there. Imagine a world in which legitimate media was like that.
Take the Pirate Bay legit by having Universal, Sony and the rest clone it and populate it, and you've got the answer to all piracy problems.
Add a £4.99 compulsory license fee to the cost of a broadband connection and stick everything that's ever been recorded or filmed on one massive, bulletproof, utilitarian server, that works all the time, even if we're on holiday in somewhere exotic like France, and we'll be happy.
Piracy won't be crushed until the official options do a better job of competing with the speed, ease of access and global reach of the underground.
Good on Netflix for not (yet) annihilating VPN connections, but why make people go there in the first place? Adding these pretend international boundaries is only making thieving the new films and telly off the old torrent sites even more appealing.
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