Pirate Bay's legacy
Wednesday, July 22, 2009 | 03:56 PM ET
By Paul Jay, CBCNews.ca. There are conflicting reports from the Netherlands this week over the future ownership of The Pirate Bay website, which gained a reputation as a hub for illegal file-sharing until four men connected to it were convicted in a Swedish court earlier this year.
But the bottom line remains the same: for file-sharers, the party is over...or at least has moved to some other kid's house.
The Associated Press reported Tuesday that a lawyer represting the TPB's new would-be owners -- Sweden's Global Gaming Factory X -- would only purchase the site if they could turn it into a "legitimate business."
Lawyer Ricardo Dijkstra told the AP the sale was conditional on whether "those assets can be used in a legal manner."
Over at CNet, however, Global Gaming's CEO Hans Pandeya said "nobody is uncertain about anything" and that the company had every intention of following through on their plans to purchase TPB for 60 million kronor.
Dijkstra made his comments at a civil court case brought against TPB by a Netherlands-based group funded by copyright holders. GGF was named as a defendant in the case, even though they had yet to complete their purchase.
Whether GGF follows through with its plan -- which involves potentially charging fees to download licensed content -- is likely beside the point for the site's former users.
A quick perusal of the Pirate Bay website has shown two blog posts in the last month (one a nonsensical musing about building a moon base) and hundreds of angry users accusing the founders of selling out, though it is still not clear who actually owned the notorious file-sharing site in the first place.
With similar sites capable of filling the peer-to-peer file sharing role that Pirate Bay once helped facilitate, I wonder how they will be remembered when this whole ordeal is all said and done?
Will we remember the fight they fought, or the cavalier way they fought it?
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Comments
CHRoNoSS
canada
"illegal file-sharing"
um get the facts right its not illegal to share a file or a digital copy. The art is not stolen just copied. Falls under copyright law and most cases civil NOT criminal law.
Canada has a cdr levy that allows for the download onto said disks, and said levy has garnered over 400$ million since its inception.
Lessening the terms on copyright is the goals of many today as it will allow innovation and spur technological and economic growth.
Hording and controlling such prevents many innovators and many form getting things to you cheap and affordable.
While i never used the bay, i have used other bit torrent services and even made my own version 5 months before it was conceived and it even had better encryption to protect its users.
Remember p2p is not about file sharing really it is about marketing and if you can't give something away, how are you going to sell it?
Posted July 22, 2009 07:22 PM