creative riff

The Pirate Bay was once referred to as the most well-known Bit Torrent tracker website in the world. Everyone from member of the Pirate Party to anarchists to hippies to cheapskates filled their hard drives with every known reincarnation of Mega Man X3. Times were golden as stealing involved a quick search and a tiny download. But like all good things in life it was not meant to be.

Other Bit Torrent tracker websites such as the UK’s OiNK and US’s Suprnova bit the dust after government server raids. The fact that The Pirate Bay continued to exist this long is nothing short of a miracle – The Netherlands’ law almost completely ignored torrent tracker sites until recently. The Pirate Bay moved its main servers to Stockholm with the long term interest in purchasing a small, private island with which to be immune from international copyright law. Unfortunately, things didn’t pan out for The Bay as a nine-day trial in Stockholm ended with a guilty verdict for “assisting in making copyrighted material available.” The Swiss court ruled that the four defendants serve a sentence of one year and were fined the equivalent of $3.6 million.

To add greater damage for pirates, software company Global Gaming Factory X AB paid $7.4 million to run the website “legally.” The company intends to utilize the new business model to compensate copyright owners – a Bit Torrent Napster of sorts. How the news will pan out among users is pretty obvious.

According to a statement from The Pirate Bay, “If the new owners will screw around with the site, nobody will keep using it. That’s the biggest insurance one can have that the site will be run in the way that we all want to.”

Well, I suppose the pirates will just move back to Coda.fm or Mininova and not notice any difference at all. Why pay when you can just steal the Blu-Raaarrrrrrrry edition? I’m here til Sunday, ladies and gentlefolks.

Source: The Pirate Bay Purchased

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