If an entity is being threatened with extinction it has two options: evolve, or die. The Pirate Bay has chosen the former, shutting down its BitTorrent tracker and moving instead to a decentralized DHT system.

The Pirate Bay

The Pirate Bay is refusing to die. It’s been the largest and one of the most popular torrent trackers in the world for a few years now. But its notoriety and ability to taunt copyright owners meant trouble was never far away.

The Pirate Bay’s legal woes came to a head in February when a three-year investigation into the site arrived in court. By April, the four defendants had been found guilty and it looked as though this was the beginning of the end for TPB.

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KickAssTorrents.com is a new player in the torrent search space creating an easy and currently ad-free way to search for music, TV shows, movies, eBooks, and software.

The torrent portal launched publicly back in February 2009 and in under 10 months has quickly become a serious player in the torrent space.

KickAssTorrents has told WebTVwire.com that it receives over 100,000 visitors each day. A quick look at the traffic growth on Alexa confirms this:

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Sweet Usability

Upon arriving on KickAssTorrents.com you’ll instantly notice the clean design, ease of use, and obvious absence of advertising.

Torrent sites have become the underground playhouse for scammy advertisers promising russian wives, instant weight loss, hot girls in your area, and seedy work from home opportunities.

It is a breath of fresh air to see a torrent site that lacks advertising, but the site is still young and KickAssTorrentz could yet be seduced by the promise of ad-revenue checks.

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Torrent sites continue to be blamed for the many ills of society. But wait, is it not just a case of the technology not being used correctly and the way in which it was intended? VODO thinks so, and is attempting to open up torrent sites for filmmakers to utilize.

Torrent Sites

What are torrent sites used for? Many of you would have answered that it’s pretty much all pirated content being shared via torrents. And while there is a lot of copyrighted material being shared illegally on them, there is also much that is legal and copyright-free.

There are very few companies and organizations who have taken advantage of the technology as a way to distribute content thus far. But VODO is one of these, allowing and encouraging filmmakers to use torrent sites to seed their features and get them out there being watched.

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What do you do if your current policy is failing to pay dividends? Change your strategy and try something new or up the current efforts to even more extreme levels? If you’re the MPAA you do the latter. Oh, and the change the name of what you’re doing as well. Like it matters.

Piracy Peaks

The people who run the big media companies clearly have a vested interest in keeping everything the way it is, or at least was maybe a decade ago.

While piracy has always existed in some form or another, the popularizing of the Internet and the trend for file-sharing saw the “problem” get a little out of control as far as those in charge are concerned.

If It Don’t Work, Don’t Fix It?

The problem is, rather than embrace the new technology or even trying to fight piracy by offering innovative and fair alternative means of obtaining digital copies of movies, television shows, music, games, etc. they try to maintain the status quo. Even though the horse bolted a long time ago.

The latest attempt at locking the stable door is to change the terminology used from “anti-piracy” to “content protection” and to push even harder against illegal file-sharing. Because that will clearly work.

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The Pirate Bay was one of the biggest and most notorious torrent sites around. Loved by users, hated by content owners. The Pirate Bay was well known and highly regarded. But something so good was never going to last.

After The Pirate Bay lost its high-profile court case, the end was nigh. And the founders took the easy way out of the situation, agreeing to sell the property lock, stock, and barrel.

The Acquisition

The people behind The Pirate Bay agreed to sell the site at the end of June for $7.7 million to a Swedish software company, Global Gaming Factory X AB. GGF planned to turn the site into a legitimate business, working with rather than against the same media companies who fought TPB just month before.

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There is evidence to suggest that the wave of new music streaming services are directly influencing the number of illegal music downloads. With that in mind, shouldn’t the TV and movie industries be taking action to ensure viewers have options in place such as free TV streaming?

Illegal File-Sharing

The music, television, movie, gaming, and software industries pretty much see illegal file-sharing and peer-to-peer networks as the devil’s own work. Those who download these media files are the devil’s spawn, while those who make the files available to others are akin to Beelzebub himself. Which is understandable seeing as these activities do undermine each of the industries mentioned.

However, what those same industries and the content owners who operate in them need to realize is that most people only partake in illegal file-sharing due to a lack of other options. Give consumers what they want, which is affordable access to the content they desire, and the problem of illegal file-sharing goes away.

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The Pirate Bay has sold out, to a Swedish company no one has ever heard of. The acquisition has been confirmed but the future of the site is still mired in confusion. Could this be a Napster moment for the file-sharing community, or could this actually be a good thing?

Things happen fast in the world of peer-to-peer torrent tracking. Just a few days after unveiling The Video Bay, a new streaming video site based on open source video standards, The Pirate Bay had even bigger news to announce this morning: it’s selling out.

Sold Or Sold Out?

The Swedish press broke the news story first, forcing The Pirate Bay to confirm the truth in a blog post earlier today. The Pirate Bay has been bought by Swedish software company, Global Gaming Factory X AB.

The price, a cool $7.7 million, is enough to pay the $3.6 million in fines racked up by the four co-founders of the site in their recent court case, and have enough left over to ensure they never have to work again, or at least be able to walk away from the whole thing better off than when they began.

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