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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Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last 12 months, you’ll know that The Dark Knight has been absolutely huge this year. But the Batman movie is also the most pirated movie of 2008. Does this put answer Hollywood cries that piracy is killing its business?

The Dark Knight – Huge Success

Let’s be clear here – The Dark Knight has been phenomenally successful. It is the second highest grossing film of all time, with only Titanic managing to take more than the $1 billion the latest Batman film has already managed.

But the success story doesn’t end there. The Dark Knight also sold 3 million copies on DVD on its first day of release in the U.S., Canada, and the UK. It also managed record Blu-ray sales. And there are plans to re-release the movie in theaters around the world early next year for those who missed out the first time around.

The Dark Knight Pirates

The Dark Knight has also been a big player on the piracy scene this year. The first pirated copy made its way on to the Web just 38 hours after it was released. The fact that Warner Bros. saw this as a victory shows how rattled the movie studios are by the speed and efficiency demonstrated by online pirates time after time.

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The MPAA has had a slight change of focus and now wants to educate instead of irritate with a central website to help people find legal downloads, but is it doomed to fail?

This is an attempt to draw people away from the piracy realm. While this seems like a step in the right direction the issues of excessive DRM and over-pricing will likely make it an ineffective strategy. People will continue to be drawn to piracy when it offers a better service than the legal alternative.

The MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) is the organization charged with protecting the rights of movie studios in the US, and seeing as that’s where Hollywood is, that’s a pretty large chunk of the worldwide movie industry.

Fight Or Promote?

Since the emergence of the Internet as a viable source for obtaining copies of movies, a large part of the MPAA’s fight has been online, promoting legal sources of movie downloads, while trying to inhibit illegal sources.

Attack on illegal sources such as torrents and peer-to-peer clients has included legal shut-downs, filtering college campuses, and that whole sorry TorrentSpy mess.

Now, rather than going after what it deems the bad guys, the MPAA has decided to instead focus on promoting the legal destinations for movie downloads. To that end, it is in the process of setting up a one stop shop for legal sources such as Amazon, Netflix, Apple iTunes, and others.

The Dark Knight is breaking all box office records but it’s not all good news for its distributer Warner Bros.

The popular Torrent site, The Pirate Bay, has jumped in to taunt the movie industry over its ability to provide the movie for free.

The hype surrounding this film, the sequel to Batman Begins, has been incredible, with people of all ages soaking up the brilliant reviews and then going to see what all the fuss is about.

Not everyone will visit the cinema to see it though, preferring instead to find an illegal copy of the movie on the Internet, probably in the form of a torrent. Even those that watch it at the cinema may still download a pirated copy to re-watch the movie at home rather than waiting for a DVD release.

The Pirate Bay Fosters Publicity

The Pirate Bay, the largest BitTorrent site on the Web, knows the potential of this movie and is using the hype surrounding the release of The Dark Knight to foster some publicity.

It seems peer to peer companies in China are making big money, both by way of venture capital investments, and an increasingly profitable amount of advertising dollars.

One current example is Chinese P2P company Xunlei (a P2P download manager – the Chinese equivalent of Vuze) is in talks with US venture capital companies to raise a final round of $100 million. This would add to the $30 million it has already raised, including $5 million from Google.

Advertising & Traffic Upturn

According to iResearch, PPLive and PPStream, two Chinese companies that stream TV using P2P technology, are also seeing an upturn, with advertisers increasingly signing deals with the sites, which goes hand in hand with millions of users watching video streams on the sites.

The MPAA is becoming increasingly like the RIAA, in its attempts at going after organisations, and individuals, who share (or allow the sharing of) illegal files over the Internet.

TorrentSpy was once a stalwart participant of the BitTorrent communications on the web, but found today that its future was soon to be short lived

It emerged earlier this week of the website’s defeat amidst the powers of the MPAA in court. 

The judge presiding over the case involving the link farm “made a default ruling in favor of the MPAA…(saying) the site’s operators had tampered with evidence.”

There were a bunch of stories a while ago about TorrentSpy and the bunch of seemingly mixed signals that were routinely being sent from the site to its users.

At the time, no-one knew whether or not it was safe to venture there any more.

This was after rumors about alleged records of visitors IPs being kept and forcefully transferred to the lovely folk over at the MPAA.

You may also be aware of the many still unanswered questions floating about the blogosphere about the torrent-site-vs-Big-Media battle waged oh-so-unscrupulously in weeks and months past.

Well, yesterday Wired.com was so kind as to publish a story by David Kravets about a major component of the TorrentSpy debacle.