New Pirate Bay Will Become a Pay Site
Written by Ernesto on July 16, 2009
http://torrentfreak.com/new-pirate-bay-will-become-a-pay-site-090716/After Global Gaming Factory (GGF) announced its intention to buy The Pirate Bay, the public was left wondering what the site’s future would look like. Today it was confirmed that sharing on the new site will come with a cost, as the new owners plan to charge the users of the site a monthly fee.
Thus far the plans revealed by GGF concerning the future of the site and tracker have been rather vague and uncertain. However, today the freshly appointed Wayne Rosso - who has previous experience with failing P2P services - came out with a few crucial additional details on the site’s future business model.
For years The Pirate Bay’s users have been able to share files without censorship or charges, but this is all about to change. Rosso said that under the new management, the 3.7 million Pirate Bay users (or whatever userbase remains) will have to pay a monthly fee to access the site.
The money collected from user subscriptions and advertising revenue will then be used to pay off the copyright holders. The exact monthly fee is yet to be decided, but Rosso did confirm that the more files people share, the lower it will be.
“The more of your computer resources you contribute to the network, the less you pay down to zero,” Rosso told Cnet. “The user is in control.”
In addition, GGF hopes to cut deals with ISPs. “We hope to introduce a new BitTorrent technology that will optimize ISP traffic,” Rosso said. “We can save ISPs up to 80 percent of their resources. Half of the Internet traffic is file sharing and half of that traffic is Pirate Bay.”
Rosso conveniently fails to mention that a Pirate Bay where users have to pay for access will not be generating much traffic at all, so this part of GGF’s business model has to be rethought. BitTorrent does not depend on The Pirate Bay, and new trackers have already lined up to take over its job.
Details about the actual acquisition of The Pirate Bay are still scarce. Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak that GGF will get the domain names for thepiratebay (under all the tlds they exist) and a copy of the code and the database. If all goes well the transfer of ownership will take place at the end of July.
GGF has to raise $7.8 million in funding in order to buy the site. After that, the share holders - who’ve seen a drop in the stock price after the announced buy-out - have to vote in favor of the deal.
