Copyright Law

New Pirate Bay to Pay BitTorrent Seeders?

By soulxtc

GGF CEO says BitTorrent seeders would be compensated for making content available to others.

This past Tuesday was a sad day of sorts for the BitTorrent community after Swedish BitTorrent tracker site the Pirate Bay announced it was sailing into safer waters and going legit.

Global Gaming Factory X AB (GGF) bought the site for over $16 million USD in cash and stock and said it plans to use the Pirate Bay to launch ?new business models? that will ensure copyright holders are fairly compensated.

A bit cryptic about what this means before, GGF Ceo Hans Pandeya is now shedding some light on the subject.

“We are going to set up a system where the file-sharer actually makes money,” he told the BBC. He says the only way you can the problem is to “make something more attractive.”

Paying Bittorrent users to seed or share content is definitely “more attractive” I must admit.

Pandeya also said he plans to harness the power of BitTorrent via the Pirate Bay to reduce network traffic strain on ISPs.

“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,” he says. “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.”

He figures that by “helping” ISPs reduce the traffic burden content distribution often places on their networks that they might be willing to then compensate GGF for its assistance.

“We’ve been working with ISPs for over a year and we can cut their costs – when the system becomes overloaded – by 90%,” he added. “All ISPs have this problem and it is one we can fix.”

It’s still too early to tell how successful GGF will be, but it’ll certainly be entertaining to watch nonetheless. Paying people to seed content is a must if they expect anybody to make content available on the Pirate Bay. The only question will be if they can create a viable system and whether or not the amount GGF’s willing to pay is enough to sway users to donate their bandwidth and HDD space.

In my opinion I think it’s just not feasible. It inevitably comes down to what the entertainment industry’s demands are. We have yet to see a viable on-demand movie service and I don’t think the Pirate Bay is the ship the MPAA’s been waiting to sail in and make it available. Copyright holders are what’s key to the future of the Pirate Bay.

Stay tuned.

jared@zeropaid.com

Full post as published by ZeroPaid on July 02, 2009 (boomark / email).