The big news this morning is that the Pirate Bay is closing down their torrent tracker for good. After launching the torrent tracker back in 2003 it quickly became one of the worlds largest Bittorrent trackers on the Internet, with some 25 million peers using the service. The Pirate Bay was launched by a few friends in Sweden and was never supposed to turn into a business, and never really did (probably the ultimate open source project).
Despite this success, The Pirate Bay operators today decided to pull the plug and close down the tracker permanently. The evolution of the BitTorrent protocol has made trackers redundant they say, as BitTorrent downloads work well with trackerless solutions such as DHT and PEX.
“Now that the decentralized system for finding peers is so well developed, TPB has decided that there is no need to run a tracker anymore, so it will remain down! It’s the end of an era, but the era is no longer up2date. We have put a server in a museum already, and now the tracking can be put there as well,” the Pirate Bay crew write on their blog.
Additionally, Torrentfreak has learned that The Pirate Bay operators are talking to other Bittorrent site ownwers to encourage them to follow suit and completely ditch torrents in the future. BitTorrent has reached a point where trackers and torrents are no longer needed to download files successfully. Supported by all of the major BitTorrent clients, DHT and PEX can handle the transfers and Magnet links can easily replace traditional torrent files.
There are still other services for users who dont want to go trackerless just yet, which include OpenBitTorrent and PublicBitTorrent.
Its really sad to see the end of this famous tracker, however times change and technology moves on, and all credit to The Pirate Bay team for trying to push the move even quicker.
A while back, the Finnish government announced that it was making high-speed internet access a legal right for all of its citizens. They have a point in making such legislation.
Because the Internet is playing a bigger part in work, education and society everyday it’s essential that everyone has access to it. Now the Swedes are adopting the same approach by promising their citizens 100 MB broadband in just over ten years. Imaging how many movies you could download with that!
In all seriousness though, I think this is great news. When the web grows more complex and starts to broadcast SuperHD videos (due in the next few years) we’ll need a seriously fast connection to keep up. At them moment, the base connection in Sweden is 20kb/s which is extremely slow. You’d have to go back to 1998 to get an internet connection that slow by using dial-up. I don’t even want to imagine loading a web page with that – let alone download a movie.
So come 2010 all the Swedes will be downloading ABBA at lightening speed!
With the emergency of the Pirate Party in Sweden in which won a European Parliamentary place at the last elections, I just wanted to run through what countries currently have a Pirate Party.
Have you ever wanted to know what was happening in the startup world in Scandinavia? Well I thought I would let everyone know about my favourite blog ArcticStartup. ArcticStartup is a technology blog letting everyone know what is happening in Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland and Norway. The blog itself is kept up to date by some of the best technology journalists in Scandinavia and they also have a great Wiki site attached which keeps tracks of all the companies involved.
Im always a very big fan of reading what is happening from technology companies all over the world and not just in the USA!
It has been confirmed by the guys at The Pirate Bay that they are in the process of selling their site. Gaming company Global Gaming Factory X is in the process of acquiring The Pirate bay for $7.8 million (SEK 60 million). The acquisition is scheduled to be completed by August and will see the site launch new business models to compensate content providers and copyright owners.
The story was broken by Torrentfreak and they are going to keep updating everyone once new information comes to light.
Global Gaming Factory X will not just acquire The Pirate Bay site but they will also acquire the file-sharing technology company Peerialism. Global Gaming Factory X claims to have the biggest network of internet cafés and gaming centers in the world, so this technology will be a great addition to their company.
Global Gaming Factory X is also very interested in changing The Pirate Bay’s business model which will allow the compensation to the content providers and copyright owners.
“We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site,” said Hans Pandeya, CEO Global Gaming Factory X.
“The Pirate Bay is a site that is among the top 100 most visited Internet sites in the world. However, in order to live on, The Pirate Bay requires a new business model, which satisfies the requirements and needs of all parties, content providers, broadband operators, end users, and the judiciary,” said Pandeya.
File-sharing technology company Peerialism will also be acquired by Global Gaming Factory X for a total of SEK 100 million, of which at least SEK 50 million will be in cash.
I find the amount of $7.8 million to be a little low, based upon The Pirate Bay having similar traffic numbers to Mininova which have 727 million pageviews per month. If each pageview could be monetized at $1.00 CPM (per 1000 views), then The Pirate Bay would be making $727,000 per month.
I noticed this very interesting report on the linchpin from the Pirate Bay. What side to the story do you take? Is there company illegal or is it all fair game (until all governments unite and join forces in terms on internet laws).
The big news this morning is that the Pirate Bay is closing down their torrent tracker for good. After launching the torrent tracker back in 2003 it quickly became one of the worlds largest Bittorrent trackers on the Internet, with some 25 million peers using the service. The Pirate Bay was launched by a few friends in Sweden and was never supposed to turn into a business, and never really did (probably the ultimate open source project).
