Petteri Pyyny
17 Jul 2009 4:23
Recently Global Gaming Factory, the company who announced that they'll acquire The Pirate Bay, hired a former Grokster exec Wayne Rosso to assist with the company with its future plans for TPB. In an interview with CNET News Wayne Rosso outlined GGF's plans for the notorious torrent site.
According to Rosso, GGF plans to build a massive "storage cloud" on top of TPB that would use individual users as storage system's nodes. Apparently users can opt out for being part of the decentralized storage system, but then they'd have to pay a monthly fee for the service. More resources the user is willing to commit for the service, the cheaper the monthly subscription fee will be.
"The more of your computer resources you contribute to the network, the less you pay down to zero," Rosso said.
GGF's plan is to harness the resources users are willing to allocate to the cloud service and sell that computing power and bandwidth to 3rd party companies, essentially creating a service that could be used as a content delivery network (system that most large sites -- including ours -- use to deliver static content, such as images, software downloads and stylesheets, faster to the end user) or even as a web hosting cloud. As the service would use P2P technology, it could bring massive savings to ISPs, as the delivery of content to an end user would be provided from the closest possible "node", most likely from an user within the same ISP network.
Company also believes that it has a chance to work together with music and movie industry and Rosso says he will meet a range of reps from content companies to get them support the service. Whether the company plans to turn the TPB into a legal-stuff-only P2P network or to get an agreement in place that would somehow subsidize the content providers, is still unknown.
But it seems that the story of TPB as one of the world's largest torrent trackers is about to end. Whether it'll mean that the story of TPB as a whole is reaching its end or not, is something that we will find out in the near future.