Earn Money The Pirate Bay Way!

The new owners of The Pirate Bay have an interesting plan to attract and keep users: They’re going to offer people money to use the service.

It was revealed yesterday that The Pirate Bay, the most notorious file-sharing website on the internet, had been bought out by Swedish company Global Gaming Factory X AB for $7.8 million. Global Gaming Factory CEO Hans Pandeya said his plan to make the site legitimate required a “new business model” which would satisfy copyright legalities and ensure content creators and providers were paid for their work. The obvious problem facing Pandeya is that the idea of paying for digital content is anathema for the vast majority of Pirate Bay users.

What’s the plan, then? Create a system that’s even more attractive than free, he told the BBC. “We are going to set up a system where the file-sharer actually makes money,” Pandeya said. He intends to pay Pirate Bay users to be part of a massive peer-to-peer file sharing network that will distribute content legally while helping reduce strain on internet service providers.

“More than half of all internet traffic is file sharing and P2P [peer-to-peer] traffic, and buying Pirate Bay gives us one of the biggest sources of traffic. We can then use this massive network of file-sharers to help [internet service providers] reduce overload,” he said. “Let’s say a popular song comes out. Rather than a million downloads from a site – which would cause a considerable strain on that ISP – we can take that song and put it out on P2P.”

“The copyright holder still gets paid, the users still get their file, the ISP doesn’t have a million people all grabbing a file and – for the users who share that song – a payment for putting that file on the P2P network,” he explained.

The revenues necessary to pay file sharers and content providers could be made from ISPs who pay the new Pirate Bay to help them cope with overload, Pandeya said. He claimed his company could reduce costs at overloaded ISPs by 90 percent. “We’re talking about next-gen file sharing so you can create revenue from storage and internet traffic optimization,” he said.

But he also acknowledged that not everyone would be willing to accept his claims at face value. “This technology is new,” he admitted. “For now, we’re outlining our intentions and asking users to have faith.”

Thanks to The Shade for the tip.