The ongoing battle over legislation like SOPA, PIPA, and ACTA has focused on blocking access to sites like The Pirate Bay and others that provide centralized access to torrent files for users who want to download content. In the midst of all this sturm und drang, however, the makers of one torrent client have been quietly working to make such torrent discovery sites obsolete.

Tribler is a torrent client that’s been around awhile – it’s currently up to version 5.5. Unlike other clients that require you to obtain .torrent files from the internet and then use the torrent client to open them, Tribler operates on a purely peer-to-peer basis. That is, instead of searching The Pirate Bay, IsoHunt, BTJunkie, or one of the other myriad torrent sites, Tribler’s search box brings you results taken directly from peers who have the files you’re looking for available to download. That means that search for and downloading a torrent file is completely decentralized. That in turn means no domains to seize and no websites to shut down, which makes laws like SOPA, PIPA, and ACTA even less likely to have any real impact on piracy than they already were.

Tribler is open source, and is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux.

[Hat Tip: TorrentFreak]