Upload a Torrent to The Pirate Bay
The Pirate Bay is a Swedish file-sharing website that hosts magnet links and torrents. While notorious for facilitating the sharing of commercial content without the copyright owner's permission, it's also a popular website for sharing legal content via torrents, and you may choose to distribute your music, photos, ebook, or anything else on the site. Many content authors have found that releasing their content for free via torrents allows them to gain widespread publicity, which can be beneficial for those seeking further recognition of their work.
Contents
Steps
- Create an account on The Pirate Bay. You can fill in the required information by clicking on this link. Please enter in a username, email address, and password. At the bottom on the form, type in the digits and letters your see to prove you are human.
- Once registered and logged in, scroll down and click on this link to upload a torrent.
- Browse for the torrent you would like to upload. If you only have the content you wish to upload but have not yet created a torrent for it, follow the steps in the wikiHow article How to Create a Torrent.
- Select a torrent name. Usually it is fine to leave this blank, as it will use the name you used when saving the torrent file.
- Select a category. The categories offered are Audio, Video, Applications, Games, Porn, or Other. The Pirate Bay has certain restrictions on what can be uploaded into each category. For instance, if you are uploading a torrent into the Music category but it contains a text file with information, you will receive an error message. Such torrents should be categorized under Audio > Other.
- Choose whether you would like to upload anonymously. If you are leaking something or otherwise feel you would face retribution, you may choose to remain anonymous. Perhaps you are just humble and would like to give your work to the online community without receiving any recognition.
- Add tags to your upload. Although optional, the addition of tags helps people find your torrent when searching. Suggestions for tags include the name of the work, your name, and/or the genre of the work.
- Write a description. Describe what you are uploading, what it contains, where one can find more information, and any other information you find relevant.
- Double check what you have written. The Pirate Bay no longer allows editing torrent descriptions, so if you make a mistake, you will have to request that your torrent be deleted and then re-upload it.
- Seed your torrent for at least a few days until other users have begun seeding it.
Tips
- You may wish to share a part of your content or a limited version as an enticement for users to buy the full version. For books, you may wish to give away an excerpt, or for games, a demo.
- If you're getting an odd error or otherwise have an issue, your question may be answered in the Frequently Asked Questions.
- It may help to look at other torrents in the category into which you are uploading your torrent to see what kind of information is included, inside the torrent and in the description. It is often smart to include a readme.txt with the information you placed in the description, so people will get the information even if they download the torrent from a different website. However, this may not be allowed in some categories and may cause a "Error: Filename error" message to be displayed.
- Some BitTorrent clients such as µTorrent allow you to use a feature called "Initial Seeding", which tries to help a peer complete the download as soon as possible to gain more seeds.
- From time to time, The Pirate Bay is taken offline due to hardware failures, police activity, or denial of service attacks. In addition, the website may be unavailable due to content restrictions in some countries. Consider uploading your torrent to other popular torrent websites or allowing people to download it directly from your own website or a .
Warnings
- If you lose one of the original files or they are corrupted before someone else can completely finish downloading your torrent, it will forever be dead, as no one will possess a complete copy of the data. Note that The Pirate Bay only possesses limited information about your torrent, and in some cases only the torrent hash, a string of characters used to identify the file. The Pirate Bay will not host a copy of your data.
- Make sure that you own the copyright to the work you are uploading, it is under a license such as Creative Commons that allows sharing, it is in the public domain, or that you have permission from the copyright owner. If not, sharing it is probably illegal where you live.
