It has just been announced that world in/famous torrent tracker site, The Pirate Bay (TPB) is to be sold to Global Gaming Factory X AB, the owner of Entropia. The community using the site does not seem to be too happy about it if we are to judge by the comments on TPB blog:
"Way to sell out for the money :D
Where is your ideals gone now friends?
Ha, I cannot believe I supported you guys.
Same old same old. Where will it end?" driver779
"I'd say this is the death of PirateBay, they wanna make PirateBay a legit place if I understand the news being spread around.
Thats is done by removing all the illegal files (90%+ of the torrents?)
And this will make most people go away too." Mith0s
I have heard the sum of 60 million Swedish Crowns (30 in cash and 30 in stocks) being accepted for the sale of the site. TPB 'heads' are speaking abut a transfer and new impetus in the operation. I am not sure about this and I tend to agree with many of the comments on the blog site. However, TPB was always a limited thing and the end was in some way inevitable. I am disappointed that it was the private sector which stepped up and took over the machinery of TPB. It should have been made a research object for the people of Sweden to be used to develop new web applications and architetcures.
The collected resources of TPB (those that survived the legal onslaught of the past three years) is now passing into the hands of entrepreneurs. The business community perhaps has a better idea of the worth of such network ventures that TPB represents. The law however restricts what can be done with such a developed network structure. I have seen this recently in my experimentation with Spotify, another Swedish innovation that attempts to deliver unlimited streamed music over the net. While Spotify does deliver music, its network possibilities are extreamly limited. One cannot share play lists within the program (email of links is the only option), link to other users, watch other users for tips and so on. In effect one is alone on Spotify. TPB is/was a community and that was its strength and greatest weakness in the eyes of the law. By allowing for a horizontal spread of network connections users were/are able to share things. How this can be adopted to a legitimate business model by something like Global Gaming Factory X AB will be interesting to see.
