The Pirate Bay - The world's largest BitTorrent tracker So what will become of The Pirate Bay (the biggest repository and tracker for illegal peer-to-peer downloads using the BitTorrent protocol) as a business model, I wonder? Will its content disappear to be replaced a much-reduced legal fare, or will it metamorphose into a semi-legal distribution center that will have some kind of fee per use, or at least per frequent use? Or will it just quietly disappear into obscurity, along with the company that bought it?
I haven't been taking much notice of this case recently, but hands up, I have used TPB in the past. I'm not a big game player and generally use this 'service' to find the odd older and more obscure music tracks from 50's, 60's etc for various uses. I have seen films that were downloaded using torrent services. Some were exceptionally bad having been taken on a small movie camera from the back of the cinema. Others are better quality (VHS tape) but are often split into a lot of small files (40-60) that require extra software to build them back into a fuill length film. I treat the setup as I would a public library; to get hold of a short section of film to view it and consider if it is worth buying my own copy. Often, the 'clip' has been deleted as rubbish content or I've bought an original because I could see a little bit more than a two minute trailer containing the best bits. The authorities have tried to make an example of TPB as a supplier of illegal sources of software, but let's face it, there are dozens of similar torrent sites world wide. Toorgle, a branch of Google (search engine) is dedicated to help users find these torrents so must be judged just as guilty in the supplying of information to acquire illegal software, music and movies. I think any attempt to provide legal content for a fee will certainly not be as successful as they hope. The regular (ab)users of torrent sites will simply move their business to another provider and the people who would genuinely pay for the service will have to be convinced that a new service is going to be better than the one they are using at present. I don't believe the problem will be solved in this manner. If the new company can't afford to buy the latest releases due to a falling membership fees (obviously caused by reduced stock) they are just putting off a spiralling collapse at some later date. Then a new torrent site may rise out of the ashes to which everyone will subscribe (especially if it is free of charge). Well that made some sense to me when I re-read it.
I never use things like that any more. I used to download a few movies years ago when it was all new and exciting, but stopped when I realsied I was ruining films I'd like to watch properly on a bigger screen by watching crap quality versions on my PC instead, then not buying the proper dvd because I'd already seen it. Now I just wait for them to become cheap in Tesco or Morrisons and buy them. I think perhaps I'd lean towards hoping they keep going somehow, Pirate Bay and such, but I'm not that interested really.
Well, considering the fact that torrents and other forms of illegal movie/music/etc download mediums have been providing DVD and HD quality releases and lossless format music, not just the crap versions, for several years now... it doesn't really ruin the experience anymore.
BBC NEWS | Technology | Cash for Pirate Bay file-sharers So it really is going to be the way of Napster 2.0, except with a lot more focus on the existing filesharing traffic... which is important. They're trying to please everyone here, legal licensing for the copyright holders, turning illegal filesharers into a legal huge distributed data storage and transfer network, and thus offloading bandwidth usage on international lines - which makes ISP's happy. Interesting. Perhaps even brilliant. Will it work out, though? Hmm. I actually like the idea of a legal service that can offer you *everything* you may ever wish to download, and you get paid to keep it for distribution from your PC to others near you... that's basically the old "download ratio fairness" system of Bittorrent turned from a "the more you upload, the faster you can download" tally to "the more you upload, the less you pay" tally... There's potential.
I do have to put my hand up to using mininova to download tv shows. I only use TPB when MN gives me the poos cos of its bad search formatting... You get good quality and after much experimentation and a lot of wasted time I have discovered the good upload providers... i.e. eztv or vtv. But all this wouldn't be necessary if I could watch the shows on tele. we have a digital recorder so recording and watching later is not a problem but Oz tv stations treat us like crap. e.g. the 4th season of Bones (my secret guilty pleasure) they showed the first 2 episodes then reruns for 8 weeks then 1 new episode, then reruns for the next 4 weeks and then started showing new episodes again. Meanwhile the series finished months ago in the states and with a bit of effort on my part I downloaded HD versions which I have lent to my sister who also got jack of being screwed by the station. When will they realise that they are only shooting themselves in the foot by treating fans like crap?
