Mashable ran an article earlier today that reminded me of our discussion about BitTorrents and the movement away from centralization last class. The title might be a bit purposefully misleading to grab attention (“End of an Era: Pirate Bay Tracker Shuts Down”), but the content goes into more depth about what this means for people who torrent, particularly those who frequent The Pirate Bay.

Yes, seeing Pirate Bay slowly being shut down, part by part, may be sad, but the beauty of this is that little has changed in the site’s operation for the end user. You can still share and download files on The Pirate Bay, even if the tracker doesn’t work.

And, bringing it home to what this means in the context of Copyright, Commerce, and Culture:

If they succeed, it will be a lot harder for organizations such as RIAA and MPAA to sue the owners of such sites, while the actual process of file sharing wouldn’t change much for the end users.

For anyone who’s been following the Pirate Bay trial (and I know a few of us have been), it’s interesting to consider Pirate Bay tracker shutting down as a sign that lawsuits of this ilk may soon become more difficult for recording and movie industries to pursue. While the site’s original owners have been found guilty for facilitating the breach of copyright law (a verdict they plan to appeal), this case — and the news of the further success of decentralization in torrenting — offer up a way to understand the “future” of file-sharing by looking at its tumultuous past, all the way from the Napster ruling in the early 2000s.