The thought of piracy online has had more than a few comparisons to piracy of the high-seas variety. Indeed, The Pirate Bay's logo is a massive pirate ship with a cassette tape and crossbones on the sail. But now, perhaps taking a cue from those old pirates of the Caribbean and the like, The Pirate Bay has put together a new tool for users looking to get around all those ISP-level blocks to find torrents and the like in the form of PirateBrowser, the equivalent of a blockade runner for the ISP blockades.

PirateBrowser is a browser with its roots in Firefox 23, but it is pre-configured to bring a Tor client into use as well as offering several different proxy configurations geared toward beating various censorship-related measures. However, it's worth noting that, at last report, the PirateBrowser system really doesn't convey anonymity online, but rather allows users to get access to blocked sites. The Pirate Bay itself elaborated that the PirateBrowser system was “a simple one-click browser that circumvents censorship and blockades and makes the site instantly available and accessible.” 


Pictured: The Pirate Bay logo

The PirateBrowser is available for Windows devices only, at least for now, but reports indicate that Mac and Linux versions are set to arrive down the road. Several of the blocked sites in question are even preloaded as bookmarks in the browser, as well as alternative .onion addresses as backups, and the whole thing is set to be offered without adware, toolbars or anything else that might get in the way.

What's more, this isn't even the top of the line as far as anti-censorship browsers go. Reports indicate that The Pirate Bay is actually working on a substantially improved model, this time a browser powered by no less than BitTorrent (News - Alert). With that functionality in play, it will allow—at least, theoretically—sites to both exist and update without central servers. This would render it virtually impossible to block the sites in question. As to when such a browser would emerge, there's no release date on hand yet, but reports indicate that alpha versions are already being tested, so a full version—at least a beta version—may be out sooner than expected.

One of the great universal truths of online development, expressed in a Harry Turtledove novel, is “what one can do, another can undo.” The ISP-level blocks worked for some time, but it was likely a foregone conclusion that one day a way around these blocks would be found by those who wanted access to the blocked material. Online piracy is the kind of thing that's hard to stop with technological solutions, as those who want access to the material in question are most likely to find a technological solution to counter the technological solution. This goes back a long time, even to the days of VHS tape copying, as one solution would be unveiled and its counter would follow in rapid fashion.

Comcast recently began to examine a new and perhaps interesting solution to some breeds of piracy by offering potential pirates a way to purchase a movie or television show directly at the browser level, though this really only addresses some issues of piracy. Still, the more potential causes that can be removed, the lower the overall impact of piracy becomes. The Pirate Bay's PirateBrowser demonstrates that piracy will likely always be part of the online environment, and that technological solutions are likely to be of limited impact against other possible answers to this issue.