Cash for Pirate Bay file-sharers
By Daniel Emery
Technology reporter, BBC News
The new owners of file-sharing website The Pirate Bay say users will be paid for sharing files.
Global Gaming Factory (GGF) paid 60m kronor (£4.7m) to take over the site.
In an exclusive interview with the BBC, GGF's Hans Pandeya said that the only way to beat illegal file-sharing was to make something more attractive.
"We are going to set up a system where the file-sharer actually makes money," he said.
According to Mr Pandeya, GGF's chief executive, the business model for The Pirate Bay would be that it continued to be a file-sharing site. The only difference - at least in terms of content - would be that the files would be hosted legally, rather than stolen from copyright holders.
"We're a listed company so everything we do has to be legal; content providers need to be paid and have their wishes and demands met," he said.
Freebie beater
Mr Pandeya said that one of the biggest hurdles in overcoming illegal file-sharing was that there was zero cost to the users, while legitimate sites required users to pay for content. The only way to make something more attractive than free was to pay users to share files.
"More than half of all internet traffic is file sharing and P2P [peer-to-peer] traffic and buying Pirate Bay gives us one of the biggest sources of traffic.
"We can then use this massive network of file-sharers to help [internet service providers] reduce overload.
"Let's say a popular song comes out. Rather than a million downloads from a site - which would cause a considerable strain on that ISP - we can take that song and put it out on P2P.
"The copyright holder still gets paid, the users still get their file, the ISP doesn't have a million people all grabbing a file and - for the users who share that song - a payment for putting that file on the P2P network."
Mr Pandeya said that while they would be paying content providers and file sharers, there was money to be made from helping ISPs cope with overload.
"We've been working with ISPs for over a year and we can cut their costs - when the system becomes overloaded - by 90%.
"All ISPs have this problem and it is one we can fix," he said.
Computer grid
The company is also looking at harnessing the storage capacity and processing power of the file-sharing community, creating a powerful grid of P2P-linked computers.
"We're talking about next-gen file sharing so you can create revenue from storage and internet traffic optimisation," he said.
However, GGF said that the technology to drive this was still in its infancy.
"This technology is new. For now, we're outlining our intentions and asking users to have faith," said Mr Pandeya
Story from BBC NEWS:
That is NOT the sort of business model I was expecting, given The Pirate Bay's takeover.
...and I have to admit, it does have some promise to it...it might be just the way to deal with file-sharing and keep it running without continuously harming copyright holders.
But I question whether there are issues with it or not.
