Anyone who keeps up to date on the state of P2P has likely heard of the impending sale of The Pirate Bay.  The current site, as well as its hosted torrents have been archived into a neat little package (21.3 gigs).

That said and done, now anyone can restart the floating giant if the new owners decide to scuttle the ship.  Anyone with a server beefy enough to handle the load, that is.

[via TorrentFreak]

With all the trials and tribulations going on in regard to P2P, it make me ponder:

a) How many people don’t understand that when you hit “share my shit” on LimeWire, that your files will be available to the masses?

b) How many people still get on LimeWire and not expect to get the internet’s version of herpies?

c) How many government employees fall into either of these categories?

d) If the number in C is high… are we doomed?

Pirate Bay, as you already know, was purchased by the Global Gaming Factory just under a month ago. At the time the only statements coming out from the new owners were ones that indicated that Pirate Bay was going the way of Napster 2.0, legal and a flop.

In recent reports more information on what form Pirate Bay is going to take is coming to light and it’s likely to be a pretty bold and unusual step for a business model. Quite frankly something not of the ordinary would have to be envoked to appease content providers and keep the way of the Pirate. Hans Pandeya, the chief executive of GGF, has described a system by which people give and take (the core foundation of BitTorrent I might add) and that people who share might end up cost neutral or even in profit. He’s the quote:

“The more you give, the more you get. For the great majority, [the new service] will be free of charge, for a minority it will actually make them money, and for a small portion it will cost them. We know that unless we’re able to create revenues for the filesharers they’ll just move on to the next free site. Filesharers are our best friends.”

Apparently in talks with the music industries ‘big players’ with discussions being ‘positive’ so far (what happened to the rest of the media available?) Mr. Pandeya was confident that the new legal face of Pirate Bay will launch within a month. The goal is to subsidise media consumption through advertising on the site and by localising sharing, reducing traffic across ISPs and therefore reducing their costs. The localised sharing idea actually has large benefits for the consumer as well due to reduced network travel of the content and therefore potentially faster downloads. Whether this will actually work remains to be seen, however. If the service is limited and the costs are wrong users of the Pirate Bay are more likely to jump ship for the next free ride. If they can tread the line carefully between appeasing content providers and users this may just be the break through that people have been waiting for. P2P 2.0 may soon be upon us and from one of the most unlikely sources.

[Via Yahoo News]