Chilano

Since The Pirate Bay sold out to the Swedish firm, Global Gaming Factory, there hasn’t really been a lot of information about what GGF’s plans for the torrent site would involve. In a recent blog post by Wayne Rosso of the now infamous Grokster service, a little more has been revealed about how GGF are changing The Pirate Bay and what that means for its users.

The new business model will involve TPB turning into a legitimate site, where content owners are paid for the content that they allow to be distributed via torrents listed on the site. Since the current advert revenues generated by its users are nowhere near enough to cover those kind of sums, users of the site will apparently be charged a monthly fee for access. Interestingly, users will be able to reduce this monthly fee if they allow their computer’s resources to be used by TPBs network. Supposedly the more resources a user contributes, the more their monthly fee can be reduced.

While details of precisely what the network of user computers will be used for are pretty slim, it seems like TPB will be offering cloud services that would compete with Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud and Akamai. However, it’s unclear whether the network is going to be using computer resources for processing information, or bandwidth resources for helping to deliver content.

Regardless of what TPB do with the computer resources in their user network, it’s debatable whether their users will actually stick around to use the service, since we just have to look back at how unsuccessful the relaunches of Napster, Kazaa and Grokster have been at retaining users. If the music and film industries ever hope to win this battle, they ultimately need to recognise that the world has changed and they need to change too.