The New Pirate Bay: False Economy?

Physorg: New Pirate Bay to be based on give-and-take models.

I've been reading news that The Pirate Bay is to harness it's technology to pay both content providers and users for their content and upload respectively. It's an interesting concept of legalisation. A site once known for its open taunting of legal threats is to be purchased by Global Gaming Factory X and turned legitimate.

It hardly surprises me the owners (who have been found guilty of Copyright Infringement and fined) have considered selling their site. It makes sense. Sell to someone legitimate in order to pay off the fines. This would suggest any earnings of the venture so far are either tied up somehow or spent. Another alternative is that if the owners were found to have made significant sums from the site that they would be taken to court again by the aggrieved parties to recoup their "losses."

What I fail to see is how soon this legal give-and-take model can be up and running. By the time such technologies are put in place I would imagine that the vast majority of the userbase will have moved on to using different torrent sites or other means of sharing illicit files.

Then comes the question of ISPs. Already some have throttled bittorrent packets across their networks. I think that the minute this service is launched those same ISPs are going to start making noise. Why should users make gains by running data across their networks, they'll say!

The micropayment platform with which to pay users will be equally difficult. Sure, you could link the give-and-take platform into a service such as PayPal, but if I were a company like that I'd want to pay out as little as possible. That means I'd want users to sign up, spend a certain amount and only be able to make a predefined amount of money back (say, the price of a movie download). In essence, what you would really want to do is have a method of "paying" users a balance that they would in turn spend on more downloads. Does the long tail apply here? Would a company trying this sort of venture end up coming up against the law of diminishing returns? What then?

It will be interesting to find out what does happen with this. I'll be keeping watch on how The Pirate Bay fares in future. Somehow I doubt I'll get an account with them but if it's all it's cracked up to be I may end up eating my words. Hmm, food for thought indeed...