Who doesn't know The Pirate Bay, aka TPB? But, do you remember Napster? How about Bear Share? Kazaa? Lime Wire? Back in the early aughts, programs such as these are what introduced me to a whole lot of fun. For one thing, file sharing is how I learned that nothing absolutely has to be paid for if you can’t afford it, or just flat out don’t want to. I remember the feeling of excitement that came with downloading an album or a movie from one of these programs back in the day. I was young, too, so it was a little tinged with nervousness. That nervous excitement led to a fuck ton of burned CDs (full albums and customized mixtapes) that kept my headphones filled with noise.But these file-sharing programs were also responsible for some of my very first introductions to porn. Actually, it was usually by accident. Maybe you remember searching for a song on Napster – say, Eminem’s “Hi, My Name Is …” and, without fail, the top five results would have some absurdly long and graphic title that somehow included the artist you were searching for, like, ‘EMINEM FUCKS BRITNEY SPEARS IN ASS WHILE MOM WATCHES AND SQUIRTS ALL OVER PIKACHU WITH JENIFFER LOPEZ SHAKING ASS AND NSYNC CRYING IN CORNER WITH DYING DOG OWNED BY MICHAEL JACKSON’S MONKEY BUBBLES WHO IS SMOKING MACAULAY CULKIN’S CUM FROM A PIPE AND CUNT LICKING TINA TURNER WHILE SHE SHOOTS HEROIN IN A DUMPSTER.” Oh, Napster, why did they have to kill you? What strange and beautiful times those were.They may have killed Napster, but they will never kill the spirit of pirating. In its wake, of course, we got all the aforementioned knockoff sites (Lime Wire, Frost Wire, Bear Share, Kazaa, etc.). But eventually, the government came for each of those as well, taking them out one by one. Finally, though, some brilliant nerd found a loophole in the copyright laws, which led to torrenting … an act that, because of this loophole, kind of lives in a legal gray area in many countries.Basically, what makes torrenting a little less straightforward in a legal sense is this: no one person is sharing a large enough piece of a particular file at a given time for it to be considered piracy. Only tiny fractions of the file are being transferred from one user to another at any one time. It is the conjunction of numerous file-sharers all sharing a single file that makes this possible. It is essentially file sharing, but with a crowdsourcing component.If you’ve visited torrent sites in the past, you may have noticed a couple of numbers that may have struck you as mysterious. Each file has a certain number of seeders and a certain number of leechers. This is how no single person shares or downloads enough of a given file for it to be considered illegal piracy. Until, of course, the file is finished downloading from its multiple sources, and you have the full, complete version on your hard drive. But that is next to impossible to track down (and virtually impossible without a warrant … which you aren’t going to have issued unless you are leaking some sensitive documents or costing a company millions of dollars). It’s pretty brilliant, is it not?It becomes even more brilliant when you consider the annals of anal (and, of course, vaginal and oral and every fucking thing else) porn that is available on torrenting sites. Almost nothing on the internet, it seems, is not motivated by porn. So, as I’m sure you could imagine, torrenting sites have just about every porn scene and movie you could hope for. However, it all depends on what torrenting site you use, how active that site’s community is, how porn-forward that particular site tends to be, and whether or not the pornoholics who frequent it are responsible torrenters or not.Think of every torrenting site as a community of sorts. Some communities are more engaged and helpful than others. And within those communities, certain subcultures are more thriving than others. The same is true of a torrenting site. Some sites have a fuck ton of music and movies seeding and available for download, but not much in the way of porn. On the other hand, some torrenting sites are dedicated solely to porn and nothing else. It just depends on what users seed what the most on a given site.Vigilant Pirates on a MissionThe Pirate Bay must be the most infamous torrenting site out there. It gets shut down every 3-6 months or so, but the people behind it are fucking resilient. Every time a government entity shuts it down, they just jump to a new server and a slightly different domain. It is my personal go-to torrent hosting site, especially when it comes to music, movies, and computer programs. The community over there is pretty responsible about keeping those things seeded (movies in particular), and they often have album and cinema leaks well before their official release dates, which is fucking baller.But what of their porn stash? Is The Pirate Bay’s community of seeders and leechers worth turning to when you need to leak something of your own? [I’m talking about cum, dumb ass]. Well, I’m not a big porn downloader, so I haven’t really turned to torrenting for much of my porn in the past … but let’s take a look. It certainly never hurts to have a few backup scenes at the ready for when your internet is down or acting up!Great Site DesignThe moment you land on The Pirate Bay’s website, you will be greeted by a minimalist blank white screen, with nothing but a search bar in the middle and TPB’s iconic pirate ship logo – a sepia-toned silhouette of a pirate ship with, not a skull and crossbones on the sail, but a cassette and crossbones instead. It’s pure punk rock and it always gets me pumped up to do some pirating when I visit the site.You’ll see that under the search bar, there are a few boxes you can check or uncheck. Choose between All Audio, Video, Applications, Games, Porn, or Other. You can also select any combination therein. Below that, you’ll find two search options: Pirate Search and I’m Feeling Lucky, in the classic Google fashion. There is also an informational link on how to download torrents if you need to brush up (quick note: it will require a third-party program … aka Bit Torrent or uTorrent … in other words, you can’t just download the torrents to your computer from TPB; you’ll need a handler to unpack and download the files).What you do from there is up to you. You can treat TPB like you would any other porn site and type in keywords, or if you’re looking for a particular girl or film, have at it. There are a fuck ton of porn torrents on here, so you shouldn’t have too much trouble.Too Many Leeches, Not Enough Seed!Where you might have trouble, however, is in finding a porn torrent with a good enough seed to leechers ratio to download. Unfortunately, TPB’s porn subculture is not the most thoughtful in terms of helping a brotha out. Way too many of the porn torrents, it seems, do not have enough seeders. This is because people will download it and then just delete the file from their torrent client program, instead of allowing it to seed so that others can also enjoy it. It’s fucking annoying, honestly. Especially because it always seems like it’s exactly the porno that caught your attention that doesn’t have enough seeders. Or if there are enough, the ratio will be something like 50:50, which will result in excruciatingly slow download speeds (if it works at all).So, the moral of the story is this: don’t be a leech, seed. Don’t be a dick, share. If you’re lucky enough to find the torrent that you want, be sure to keep it alive for the rest of us! At least for a little while (especially if it’s a new scene). I mean, sure, if you don’t have a supercomputer or something that won’t be bothered by the excess CPU usage that seeding requires, then it might be a bit of a hassle (still, though, I like to seed for a week or so when I torrent anything). But if you have a capable computer that won’t feel the effects, come on man. Don’t be a douche, be a dude!All in all, The Pirate Bay (often misspelled as "piratesbay") is easily one of (if not the) best torrent hosting sites on the web. At least for music, movies, programs, and games. When it comes to porn, however, you might want to look elsewhere. As I said before, it’s all dependent on the community, so maybe a specifically porn-oriented torrenting site would see better results, maybe the users will be more dedicated to the sharing of porn. Either way, happy pirating, and enjoy all the free smut!
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