Inspirated

The news of Pirate Bay’s change of ownership actually broke out last month, but I was saving a post for it in order to wait for details to emerge about the new “business model”. Now that Wayne Rosso has spelled out his plans, I can finally pay my condolences to fellow pirates. This ship has hit its iceberg.

Wayne Rosso happens to be the guy who — as the title of the linked article pointed out — once compared RIAA to Stalin during his Grokster days. Nowadays he’s busy in getting “friendly with these good guys” since they have been “wonderful” to him. Not only that, he and his new BFFs also conceived a mind-blowing plan to legitimize Pirate Bay’s usage. Mind-blowing in the sense that reading particulars of the failtarded scheme might leave you utterly bewildered as you try to scavenge an ounce of sense in it. Prepare yourself:

As for the new business model, Rosso said The Pirate Bay will offer users all the music they can download for a small monthly fee. Eventually, users can whittle that fee down to nothing by tying their computers to The Pirate Bay’s “cloud” network. For example, a person may dedicate a gig of hardware space to the network and the fee may go from $9 to $5. (Rosso declined to discuss pricing yet so the numbers are made up just for the example).

“The more of your computer resources you contribute to the network, the less you pay down to zero,” Rosso said. “The user is in control.”

To summarize:

• “We are now a paysite. Either you pay with your money, or you loan your PC to us.”
• TPB was such a force because its users thrived as a community based on sharing. Paysite: Noone cares.
• BitTorrent protocol offers no way of tracking payments. Which would probably result in a proprietary client for Windows by TPB for this specific purpose.
• Not only that, but dedicating storage resources to a cloud is not at all same as dedicating processing power in projects such as Folding@home. When you donate your processor to distributed computing, you’re only losing your CPU cycles and some electricity/heat. On the other hand, with TPB your disks’ life will degrade and your internet bandwidth will get maxed out.
• Speaking of bandwidth, how on earth is Rosso planning to sell ISPs back their own bandwidth is beyond me. Also, most of the ISPs forbid home users to “resell” their bandwidth. It’ll be interesting to see what they’ll think of this pay-cloud.

The whole business plan, the whole corporate speak, the whole “going legit” business is mega-fail. TPB was good while it lasted, and I really liked the crew behind the original website. They knew what they were talking about and expressed their views astutely (see: Steal This Film). Still, as is the custom, named entities — regardless of how efficient they are — can never hold off MPAA and RIAA for long. Fortunately, as is customary too, piracy can never be brought down either. As long as *AA continue taking down individuals and services instead of devising better business models, piracy will thrive. Hosting a tracker is not at all something hard to do and the crowd will move on without breaking a sweat. Demonoid, PeerHub and countless others are waiting in line to take the spot. The golden quote of Ambrose Bierce that’s embedded in the blog header says it all:

“PIRACY, n. Commerce without its folly-swaddles, just as God made it.” — The Devil’s Dictionary