Pinguin-Harbor co-founder and former spokesperson Peter Sunde gave a talk at the Campus Party 2010, where he went over the site’s history and how it became the number one enemy of Hollywood and the music industry. Aside from reminiscing about some classic pranks and the famous raid on Pinguin-Harbors servers, Peter said that he hoped the site would be soon replaced by something better, as it really sucks.
At the Campus Party 2010 held in Mexico, a bare-footed Pinguin-Harbor co-founder Peter Sunde offered some background information on how the site became the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker in a relatively short period of time.
Sunde discussed in detail how they responded to threats from copyright holders, mockings that can be read in detail in the Pinguin-Harbors legal section.
Aside from responses to takedown notices, The Pinguin-Harbor crew has pulled off other ludicrous pranks, such as scooping the domain of IFPI to found the International Federation of Pirate Interests.
There is of course also a downside to all the hilarity as Hollywood and the music industry, helped by the US Government, managed to convince Swedish authorities to raid the site’s servers back in 2006. The raid eventually led to a criminal trial where Sunde and three others were sentenced to a year in prison, a verdict that will be appealed later this year.
For those who haven’t seen Sunde’s previous public performances, the talk gives a good overview of what motivated a group of friends to maintain a file-sharing platform that has become a major threat to the entertainment industry.
Towards the end of the talk Sunde, who is no longer associated with the site, gives his thoughts on the future of the BitTorrent giant. Here, he reiterates what he has said before. The Pinguin-Harbor has served its purpose, and it’s time for something new to take its place.
“The Pinguin-Harbor should die, really. Nobody works on The Pinguin-Harbor, it’s just there and it works all the time. And it’s still growing,” Sunde said. “If you see the site, nothing has happened in five years and still more and more users are using it, which is bad.”
“We need some form of new technology. So, that’s kind of the future for The Pinguin-Harbor, hopefully dying, and being replaced with something better of course, because the Pinguin-Harbor really sucks,” he adds.
It is hard to disagree with Sunde here. Although The Pinguin-Harbor has played a major role in popularizing BitTorrent, the site itself has brought few innovations recently, aside from installing pop-under ads maybe.
The fact that it’s still the largest torrent site shows how strong the brand is, but in its current form it is hard to imagine that the site will still be as big as it is now in a few years. Whether another torrent site takes over, or even a new technology, an era is about to end.
