The Pirate Bay captures the file-sharing crown

It's often said that the fight against piracy is like a game of Whac-a-Mole, when smacking down one site just causes a few more to pop up. But The Pirate Bay is no average mole; the popular BitTorrent site is now the number one destination for file-sharing on the Internet, despite numerous attempts to sink it over the years.

TorrentFreak put together a list of top file-sharing sites, drawing on “several traffic comparison and analytic tools,” including Compete, Quantcast, and Alexa.

The Pirate Bay has been the leading BitTorrent site for some time, but cyberlocker sites such as MegaUpload, Rapidshare, and Mediafire have proven more popular in recent years. These sites allowed users to download publicly-shared files directly through a browser, without using BitTorrent software. A major crackdown on cyberlockers, including the FBI's shutdown of MegaUpload last year, allowed The Pirate Bay to slide into the top spot.

That's not to say cyberlockers have completely faded in the file-sharing world. Lockers account for five of the top ten sites in TorrentFreak's list, including MediaFire in second place.

But the bigger story is that through it all, The Pirate Bay just won't die. The entertainment industry has certainly tried to kill it, securing jail time and fines for the site's founders, forcing Internet Service Providers in some countries to block the site, getting Google to reduce the site's appearance in autocomplete search results and continually trying to cut off the site's hosting services and domain name.

:story: PCWorld