The Pirate Bay’s Oldest Torrent Turned 22….

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In an era of instant streaming and expendable pirate sites, The Pirate Bay is somewhat of a relic. The site has weathered more than two decades of legal pressure, and while traffic is a fraction of its peak, it remains online. Even more remarkable, several torrents from March 2004 remain active today, outlasting the very servers they were originally hosted on.

The Pirate Bay was once the leading pirate site, with a hubris matching its millions of monthly visitors.

After the verdict that sent its founders to prison, the site slowly started to decay. The option to comment or register as a new user eventually broke down, and aside from promoting a fishy token, public outreach ground to a halt.

Despite this downward spiral, the site continues to live up to its official tagline: the galaxy’s most resilient torrent site. Where TorrentSpy, Mininova, isoHunt, Torrentz, KickassTorrents, ExtraTorrent, RARBG and TorrentGalaxy all fell, The Pirate Bay continues to serve many millions of monthly users.

The galaxy’s most resilient BitTorrent site

It’s safe to say that The Pirate Bay witnessed quite a bit of change. When the site launched, roughly 10% of the world’s population was connected to the Internet, and in the United States, the majority of all ‘world wide web’ users were still using a dial-up connection.

At the time, all popular entertainment was consumed offline. People interested in watching a movie could use the Internet to buy a DVD at one of the early webshops, or sign up with Netflix, which shipped discs through the mail. However, on-demand access was simply not a thing. At least, not legally.

With enough patience, file-sharing software allowed people to share large video files, and BitTorrent excelled at this, as transfer speeds typically picked up with more demand. This is why torrent sites popularized the on-demand downloading of movies and TV-series for millions of people.

Pirate Bay’s Oldest Torrent

Today, most files shared on The Pirate Bay in the early years are no longer available. BitTorrent requires at least one person to share a full file copy, which is difficult to keep up for decades.

Surprisingly, however, several torrents have managed to stand the test of time and remain actively shared. Earlier this week, the site’s longest surviving torrent turned 22 years old.

While a few candidates have shown up over the years, we believe that an episode of “High Chaparral” featuring Uri Geller has the honor of being the oldest Pirate Bay torrent that’s still active today. The file was originally uploaded on March 25, 2004, and several people continue to share it today.

22 Years Later

At this point, the torrent in question appears to have reached a cult status, with pirates sharing the release simply because it is the oldest torrent on The Pirate Bay. Despite the record, however, the Swedish TV series is shared without permission of the creators.

Revolution OS & The Fanimatrix

There are also other pirate releases on The Pirate Bay that continue to thrive. On March 31, 2004, someone uploaded a pirated copy of the documentary “Revolution OS” to the site, which is alive and kicking today.

“Revolution OS” covers the history of Linux, GNU, and the free software movement, which was a good fit for the early Pirate Bay crowd. Thirteen years ago, we spoke to director J.T.S. Moore, who wasn’t pleased that people were pirating the documentary but was nevertheless glad to see it hadn’t lost its appeal.

Fast-forward to the present day, and Revolution OS still has plenty of interest, with more than 33 people actively seeding the torrent.

While these torrents are certainly dated, they’re not the oldest active torrents available on the Internet. That honor goes to “The Fanimatrix”, which was created in September 2003 and, after being previously resurrected, continues to be available today with dozens of people seeding. We’ll check back in 2028 for its 25th anniversary.