This reminds me of something that didn't happen too long ago: Police hold 10 after claiming to crack online music fraud.

"The group created several songs, had the songs uploaded to iTunes and Amazon, then used thousands of stolen credit cards to repeatedly purchase the songs from these services. It is estimated that they charged approximately $750,000 worth of fraudulent purchases, netting the group over $300,000 in royalties payments."

1. Create a song
2. Buy your own music
3. Profit!

(Except that you'd have to buy them with fake credit cards of course.)

I'm going to keep things simple and use BTJunkie in the future. Half the point of the website involved not having to pay for content, and this reimbursement malarkey isn't going to fix the problem.

Continuing to call it The *Pirate* Bay is disingenuous, and there is little doubt in my mind that this "Global Gaming Factory X AB" bought the website with the sole intention of riding on brand recognition.

Sadly, I'm obviously late to the joke of TPB operators wanting information to be free, then accepting $7.8 million for the site.

But, y'know, fight the man. :-P

As for the offer made in the OP - no, I can't see it working either.

Sooo... Instead of paying $50 for having an internet connection, you pay $47 for having your internet connection completely hijacked by a large corporation.

isnt this what pirates try to avoid the paying and the corprate bullshit just to get what they want

you are i right and this makes me sad. i will dig a grave for it and place it right next to 4chan's

needausername:
So... I won't be paid for my swashbuckling and pillaging adventures?

Dammit! I wanted to Pillage too!

xxdomoxxkunxx:
isnt this what pirates try to avoid the paying and the corprate bullshit just to get what they want

In short, yes. But due to the issues The Pirate Bay have been in over the past few months, you could easily see why they would want to do it.

Also, since it's no longer owned by its founders and is owned by an actual company now, GGF would be in serious trouble if it was still running illegally and could be shut down or become bankrupt unless they started to do things legally.

This is quite possibly the stupidest business plan ever conceived on the internet. And that includes pets.com. Before you go off heralding this as some ingenious step in the right direction, please take a few minutes to try to figure out how this really would work.

One thing to keep in mind: Businesses need to make money. There is no way they are planning on paying people to seed the pirated movies/music/games that make up the bulk of P2P traffic. If this is what you're imagining, you need to come back to reality.

As stated, their idea is to pay users for hosting P2P files. In order to do this, they need to make at least that much money from hosting that file. Which they plan to do by charging an ISP or other company to help take off the strain on their servers. This ISP or company is theoretically hosting the "popular song" and needs to reduce the amount of traffic they get.

Here's a question: Is this "popular song" free to download? If it is, why would they bother hosting it, or paying TPB, instead of just seeding it themselves? It's not like it takes an immense amount of work to set up a tracker/seed for a file download, and that's definitely free. If it isn't free to download, then to distribute it over P2P means it has to be wrapped in DRM, which we all know the people on TPB will be totally for.

This ignores the fact that there are actually a lot of companies that already provide this type of service - they're called CDNs, and every major company already uses them. The biggest ones use Akamai, which is huge and expensive, but also extremely reliable and frequently faster than P2P. Unless TPB can vastly undercut CDN's (and we're talking lower than than $.05/gb in bulk) while providing guaranteed service, it's going to be a non-starter.

I think it's hilarious that the entitled, rage against the machine attitude of the founders dissapears as soon as the machine is offering them lots of money to buy them out.

Does anyone remember what happened to napster? History repeats itself- and the pirates are goingt to move on.

Virgil:
This is quite possibly the stupidest business plan ever conceived on the internet. And that includes pets.com. Before you go off heralding this as some ingenious step in the right direction, please take a few minutes to try to figure out how this really would work.

One thing to keep in mind: Businesses need to make money. There is no way they are planning on paying people to seed the pirated movies/music/games that make up the bulk of P2P traffic. If this is what you're imagining, you need to come back to reality.

As stated, their idea is to pay users for hosting P2P files. In order to do this, they need to make at least that much money from hosting that file. Which they plan to do by charging an ISP or other company to help take off the strain on their servers. This ISP or company is theoretically hosting the "popular song" and needs to reduce the amount of traffic they get.

Here's a question: Is this "popular song" free to download? If it is, why would they bother hosting it, or paying TPB, instead of just seeding it themselves? It's not like it takes an immense amount of work to set up a tracker/seed for a file download, and that's definitely free. If it isn't free to download, then to distribute it over P2P means it has to be wrapped in DRM, which we all know the people on TPB will be totally for.

This ignores the fact that there are actually a lot of companies that already provide this type of service - they're called CDNs, and every major company already uses them. The biggest ones use Akamai, which is huge and expensive, but also extremely reliable and frequently faster than P2P. Unless TPB can vastly undercut CDN's (and we're talking lower than than $.05/gb in bulk) while providing guaranteed service, it's going to be a non-starter.

Yeah, seriously. The whole thing just seems fishy. They are probably hoping that they can still get the current TPB users (pirates) to continue using the website once they have to start paying (costumers). Some that are totally blinded by their loyalty to TPB will do it but the other pirates that like stealing stuff will go steal somewhere else.

Welcome to The Capitalism Harbour.

Thanks for sharing this useful information. It's great.

credit auto

to be honest i didnt read that far in but it doesnt seem like im going to use pirate bay much longer.(their search engine sucks anyways) back to minonova.

The big question is how much are you really willing to pay once it goes sour. We don't even know if GGFX has got approval from copyright holders and even if it does receive approval will it turn into another Napster? Will GGFX share information about its users to RIAA and MPAA? I think any person with common sense will steer clear away from this at all costs.

I don't know has anyone considered the notion that people were visiting the pirate bay because they wanted to... well... pirate?

Regardless it would encourage legal trading and help people reduce the cost of purchase by seeding, helping everyone.

O my goodness.... this plan is so major... there's a very big thing which can happen...
in the event there is a legal issue... since the detail has been obtained, the liability will rest on the initial uploader and will class tpb as the middle man or agent. This is major and may stop illegal torrents... may even include those that are very iffy... this may go either way in terms of tpb's overall performance and rep

CWestfall:
I'm going to keep things simple and use BTJunkie in the future. Half the point of the website involved not having to pay for content, and this reimbursement malarkey isn't going to fix the problem.

Continuing to call it The *Pirate* Bay is disingenuous, and there is little doubt in my mind that this "Global Gaming Factory X AB" bought the website with the sole intention of riding on brand recognition.

Well "The Merchant Marine Bay" doesn't respond as well with focus groups now does it. Personally, apart from having to buy the file in the first place, the whole "share and get paid" aspect speaks of a brand of piracy, in that we're actually getting more booty besides the files. I'm not saying it's a perfect system. I'm not even saying it will work right. I am saying the idea has some merit though.

Virgil:
This is quite possibly the stupidest business plan ever conceived on the internet. And that includes pets.com. Before you go off heralding this as some ingenious step in the right direction, please take a few minutes to try to figure out how this really would work.

One thing to keep in mind: Businesses need to make money. There is no way they are planning on paying people to seed the pirated movies/music/games that make up the bulk of P2P traffic. If this is what you're imagining, you need to come back to reality.

As stated, their idea is to pay users for hosting P2P files. In order to do this, they need to make at least that much money from hosting that file. Which they plan to do by charging an ISP or other company to help take off the strain on their servers. This ISP or company is theoretically hosting the "popular song" and needs to reduce the amount of traffic they get.

Here's a question: Is this "popular song" free to download? If it is, why would they bother hosting it, or paying TPB, instead of just seeding it themselves? It's not like it takes an immense amount of work to set up a tracker/seed for a file download, and that's definitely free. If it isn't free to download, then to distribute it over P2P means it has to be wrapped in DRM, which we all know the people on TPB will be totally for.

This ignores the fact that there are actually a lot of companies that already provide this type of service - they're called CDNs, and every major company already uses them. The biggest ones use Akamai, which is huge and expensive, but also extremely reliable and frequently faster than P2P. Unless TPB can vastly undercut CDN's (and we're talking lower than than $.05/gb in bulk) while providing guaranteed service, it's going to be a non-starter.

If only the world was that rational...

Well it was always clear that it was impossible to beat piracy so this is at least a first step towards making it useful.
Good on them. *prepares to upload tonnes of shit then reap the rewards* >.>

needausername:
So... I won't be paid for my swashbuckling and pillaging adventures?

Disappointing isn`t it??

I can see it now. 5 million new torrents of a single new album/movie/game, & all of them screaming "pick me! pick meeeeeee!!!"...

You'll have a song called Laser Eyes by a band called High Power released, & the first page of TPB would look like:

Laser Eyes First Version!
Laser Eyes High Power
Laser Eyes New Version!
High Power Laser Eyes Dragon Ball Version
High Power - Laser Eyes Hit
High Power - Laser Eyes Hit Single
Underground Hit Single - High Power - Laser Eyes
Laser Eyes Final Version
Laser Eyes High Power Final Final Version 2.0!

Good idea. As long as you share more than you take you'll earn money. Awesome. Just awesome.