Life after PirateBay
A Sunday session at this year’s South by Southwest Interactive festival featured a Skype interview with PirateBay founder Peter Sunde, who last August announced plans to step away from PirateBay. You can pick up all of the tweets for the session using #piratebay.
A few of the notes I made while watching:
Can the new PirateBay be shut down? “No, it’s like Hal."
New tracker lists are making PirateBay less vital, and piracy will only become harder to “stop”.
“I wouldn’t want a copy of the PirateBay source code, because it sucks”.
Will we use BitTorrent in 10 years? “It doesn’t matter; we’ll be using something.”
An audience comment described Sunde as “interesting but impractical”; he agreed.
And my favorite: “Porn isn’t stupid; it’s useless ... If I was hungry, I wouldn’t get a pizza and watch it”
Along the way, I asked if Piratebay is familiar with the O’Reilly study that show sales growth correlated with initial seeding (alas, the answer is no). I followed up with a question about how much PirateBay did to collect and share the results of similar studies.
Sunde explained that the entire site is managed by three people, and they didn’t have time to read and collate studies. Sounds like an opportunity for the rest of us.
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