Pirate Bay to Start Charging Monthly Fee

[kryyst]

Last month The Pirate Bay was aquired by the Swedish company, Global Gaming Factory. At that time they stated their intentions (http://www.globalgamingfactory.com/) of "introduce[ing] models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid". Well it's now been confirmed. All Pirate Bay users will have to pay a monthly fee to access the site. How much users will have to fork over hasn't been determined, but Bay executive Wayne Rosso says that "the more files people share, the lower it will be" Via Torrentfreak (http://torrentfreak.com/new-pirate-bay-will-become-a-pay-site-090716).

Since Pirate Bays legal troubles began the number and type of trackers showing up on Pirate Bay has already started to decline rapidly. It'll be very interesting to see what's left of Pirate Bay after it goes subscription based. Most people torrent things because it's easy and they don't want to pay. Now they are putting in a model where you'll have to sign up with real identification and give them money. Seems to defeat the target audience for most users.

It'll also be interesting to see what kinds of trackers are left. No more pre-release R5 movies, 0 Day warez will likely also completely disappear. I'm thinking that will probably leave Pirate Bay in pretty much just with music, movies that are legally already out and probably some software and online books.

[rayray]

It'll also be interesting to see what kinds of trackers are left. No more pre-release R5 movies, 0 Day warez will likely also completely disappear. I'm thinking that will probably leave Pirate Bay in pretty much just with music, movies that are legally already out and probably some software and online books.

Honestly, The Pirate Bay was not the first stop for most of this material and what is '0' day on the trackers is typically older than the original sources. The old IRC channel/FTP drop/Usenet methods are still out there and data is actually incredibly easy to get without having to share using a protocol like bittorrent.

[Thrax]

For the vast majority of the downloading public, however, The Pirate Bay is the first stop for this material.

1000 internets to the person who creates a front end for OpenBittorrent, which now holds a 1:1 mirror of TPB's entire torrent library.

[FelixDeSouze]

Yup, agreed Pirate Bay will go down the pan once a fee comes in-play.

[jared]

mininova demonoid etc are still around, probably the next best torrent search sites.

and if you get really adventurous there is still packetnews and giganews as well (irc dc & newsgroups)