Piracy, Public Access, and Preservation: An Exploration of Sustainable Accessibility in a Public Torrent Index

摘要

The present study explores the feasibility of using torrent networks as potential repositories for popular cultural ma- terials and historical primary source data. Members of the Pirate Parties International have claimed that torrent net- works function in this manner, even potentially as replace- ments for public libraries. The Pirate Bay, the world’s most popular public index for tracking and downloading torrents is conceived as a potential repository. Using an open-sourced dataset based on Karel Bílek’s 2012-2013 snapshot of The Pirate Bay, metadata from 2.1 million torrents are catego- rized by media type and the robustness of given torrents was assessed. Trends over time for features of each media type, such as number of uploads, size, and volume were also as- sessed. The study finds that, in fact, relatively few torrents exhibit long-term survivability, even though the overall vol- ume of torrents in the index shows continuous increase.