Imagine a peer to peer model where you got paid to seed a torrent, and had to pay every time you leeched. That's what the Pirate Bay could become, and it appears it could be a case of history repeating.
In an article published first in The Music Void, Wayne Rosso, former president of notorious P2P service Grokster and founder of Mashboxx says he has begun working with Global Gaming Factory X, the Swedish firm that recently bought the Pirate Bay, to turn the service legit and legal without changing the user experience at all.
Rosso said, "I'm calling this new model 'resource supported'. In short, the more computer resources the user contributes to The Pirate Bay, the more his content consumption is subsidized. I won't drill down any further due to commercial confidentiality, but it can actually work. And if it does, it will be huge."
If the model actually works the way Rosso makes it sound, not only could it become huge, but it could also solve the problem frequently encountered with Torrents, where the ratio of hosts to downloaders is extremely unbalanced, resulting in painfully slow file transmissions.
What's more, Rosso says the group has been in talks with major labels, and enthusiastically said, "Every one has been supportive and, dare I say, excited. They see that it could really work. I left a label meeting Tuesday unlike any I have ever had. They were fantastic! They are real partners and want to do what they can to actually help us keep all of the Pirate Bay traffic and not tie us up in Gordian knots that would drive all the users away."
Rosso's history in P2P litigation is eerily similar to the situation with the Pirate Bay. He was president of illegal peer to peer service Grokster, which was fined $50 million and forced to close down in late 2005 after the US Supreme Court ruled that P2P services could be held responsible for the illegal actions of its users. After Grokster was shut down, NPD reported illegal fire sharing dramatically dropped in the US, the same way groups reported that Swedish piracy legislation resulted in a global decrease in traffic (an issue also greatly overstated.) Months later, Rosso opened legal P2P service Mashboxx, which strove to be similar to Grokster, iMesh, and KaZaa, and also had major label participation.
But that's where it ended. The service never closed; it just never fully got off the ground, and now Russo looks to be working with the owners of the Pirate Bay to pick up where he left off.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009