DarkAngel Blog

Sta facendo il giro del mondo la notizia che thepyratebay.org e’ stata venduta. I recenti guai giudiziari dei suoi fondatori, condannati a un anno di carcere e milioni di dollari di multa dal tribunale svedese, hanno dichiarato che piuttosto che vedere la loro creatura (20 milioni di utenti, e rientrante nella classifica dei 100 siti piu’ visitati al mondo) morire, preferiscono si evolva in qualcosa che possa continuare ad esistere.

La vendita, in corso (almeno fino a poco fa, visto che ora il sito risulta irrangiungibile) per $7.7 milioni di dollari alla Global Gaming Factory X AB, portera’ alla baia lo stesso modello che fu per NAPSTER… solo materiale legale a pagamento.
Considerando che la multa affibbiata ai fondatori dal tribunale svedese ammonta a $3,6 milioni di dollari, rimarra’ anche qualcosa in tasca a Peter Sunde  c.

Quello che mi chiedo e’.. l’industria e’ veramente convinta che cambiare il modello di business di un sito P2P in un sito legale a pagamento, produrra’ loro un qualsiasi tipo di introito?

Quelli che utilizzano(/avano) la baia fino a ieri sera, continueranno a farlo pagando quello che scaricano?

Immagine: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

The announced sale of The Pirate Bay to a Swedish software concern Tuesday is the biggest development in file sharing since 2001, when Napster shuttered after a U.S judge ordered it to remove all copyrighted music from its free service.

The founders of 5-year-old Pirate Bay at one time appeared invincible as they stuck out their middle fingers to the establishment, refusing to remove copyrighted material even after receiving takedown notices. With a following of some 20-plus million users, that invincibility — which invited government intervention — careened head on with The Pirate Bay’s four co-founders’ April convictions in a Stockholm court for facilitating copyright infringement.

With the pending $7.7 million sale to Global Gaming Factory X AB, the site will go legitimate as did Napster– meaning the world’s most notorious BitTorrent tracker will not longer point the way to free downloads of copyrighted music, movies, software and games. The myth is over that the Pirate Bay would carry on as an underground site, even if its co-founders lost their appeals and went to prison for a year.

The Pirate Bay, in short, is heading to Davy Jones’ Locker.

“The Pirate Bay is a site that is among the top 100 most visited internet sites in the world. However, in order to live on, The Pirate Bay requires a new business model, which satisfies the requirements and needs of all parties, content providers, broadband operators, end users, and the judiciary,” Hans Pandeya, Global Gaming’s chief executive, said in astatement. “Content creators and providers need to control their content and get paid for it.”

On its blog, The Pirate Bay wrote, “On the internets, stuff dies if it doesn’t evolve. We don’t want that to happen.”

The surprise announcement that The Pirate Bay has walked the plank has sent heads spinning. Many of the site’s users are mocking the decision as an affront to the co-founders’ stated ideal that nothing will take down Pirate Bay, and that content should be free.

“I always had a sneaking suspicion that when Pirate Bay sold their company it wouldn’t be for free,” sethmeyers21 wrote on Twitter.

The Bay’s users are also mulling where to turn for more online freebies. ZeroPaid maintains an updated catalog of torrent trackers that is broken down into niches for adult, anime, games, general, movie, music, software and television.

In the trial’s aftermath, however, the torrenting world has changed, perhaps making it more difficult to follow The Pirate Bay’s initial footsteps.

For example, several BitTorrent trackers across the globe have shuttered. The verdict has emboldened copyright authorities to crack down on torrent sites. File sharing in Sweden, The Pirate Bay’s home, has dropped. Mininova, one of the world’s largest BitTorrent indexers, has also begun moving toward legitimacy.

Following Tuesday’s announced sale, the content industry is cautiously optimistic that The Pirate Bay is taking on water and about to sink.

“We don’t know the details and there are many questions to ask about how this will work in practice, but we would be delighted if this resulted in The Pirate Bay turning into a legitimate licensed service,” said John Kennedy, chairman of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, the world’s leading recording industry trade group that helped bring the criminal case against The Pirate Bay.

Elizabeth Kaltman, a spokeswoman for the Motion Picture Association of America, said the movie studios “don’t have enough information to comment at this time. We of course always support the ever-growing array of legitimate options for consumers to get movies and television shows in convenient and flexible ways.”

After weeks of testimony and delays ending April 17, Pirate Bay administrators Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Peter Sunde were found guilty in the case, along with Carl Lundström, who was convicted of funding the 5-year-old operation. They face a year in prison and millions in fines.

But it’s unclear whether a new Pirate Bay will go the way of Napster obscurity.

Napster once boasted as many as 70 million users and has quietly fallen off the map since it recently became a paid music service. Still, Napster was replaced by the likes of Gnutella, Kazaa, Limewire, and even The Pirate Bay and others.

Will the next Pirate Bay please stand up?

FONTE: Wired.com