Pirate Bay exec no longer compares RIAA to Stalin
As The Pirate Bay apparently goes legit, the Swedish file-sharing company has hired someone with experience in both legal and illegal file-sharing sites.
New Pirate Bay hire, Wayne Rosso.
(Credit: Waynerosso.com)Global Gaming Factory, the Swedish software company vying to buy The Pirate Bay, has hired Wayne Rosso, the very vocal former president of Grokster and founder of Mashboxx, to help strike licensing deals with content owners. Global Gaming announced earlier this month that the company intends to pay $7.8 million for The Pirate Bay once investors okay the deal.
In an interview with CNET News on Wednesday, Rosso detailed some of what he's been up to on Global Gaming's behalf and provided new details about the company's proposed business model.
In addition to advising Hans Pandeya, Global Gaming's CEO, Rosso has spent several days in London meeting with music executives. Among the organizations he met with are Universal Music Group and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, the trade group representing the music industry worldwide. Rosso said he plans to meet with a wide range of digital content creators.
"We're approaching the record and movie industries, both are at the top of the list," Rosso said. "But eventually we want to talk to (anyone producing digital content)...The Pirate Bay has turned over a legitimate new leaf, so it has to be above board from the first day. That's the only way it can work."
To anybody who remembers Rosso from his days with the now defunct Grokster, the software company that created the famed peer-to-peer program by the same name, it might be hard to see the logic in sending him to make friends with content owners. He was known to compare executives at the Recording Industry Association of America to Stalin.
Rosso said he had a change of heart after founding Mashboxx, a legal P2P service that never really caught on, and working closely with leaders in the music business.
"I've gotten friendly with a lot of these guys," Rosso said of Mitch Bainwol, the RIAA's CEO and other music industry execs. "These are good guys. They've been wonderful to me. Other people in the business have been nice to me but they've had to hold their nose. Some of them took me too seriously. To me it was a f***ing circus. None of that stuff was personal."
As for the new business model, Rosso said The Pirate Bay will offer users all the music they can download for a small monthly fee. Eventually, users can whittle that fee down to nothing by tying their computers to The Pirate Bay's "cloud" network. For example, a person may dedicate a gig of hardware space to the network and the fee may go from $9 to $5. (Rosso declined to discuss pricing yet so the numbers are made up just for the example).
"The more of your computer resources you contribute to the network, the less you pay down to zero," Rosso said. "The user is in control."
The Pirate Bay then plans to harness all that computing power and sell it, becoming a competitor of Akamai and Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
"We hope to introduce a new BitTorrent technology that will optimize ISP traffic," Rosso said. "We can save ISPs up to 80 percent of their resources. Half of the Internet traffic is file sharing and half of that traffic is Pirate Bay."
Rosso first reported the news about his landing at The Pirate Bay on the British blog, the Music Void.
Greg Sandoval covers media and digital entertainment for CNET News. He is a former reporter for The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. E-mail Greg, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/sandoCNET. 
I don't know what crack Rosso has been smoking but trying to charge pirate bay users isn't going to work... the way that site worked was people gave willingly to receive willingly. Pirate Bay was (and for a user base anyway still is) a clan, a group; It was build by Internet users for Internet users --- not by corporations. When you force people to pay, not by there choice it will fail...
The users will go elsewhere and share the content via what we like best, ad based internet downloads. As for the RFID there is a reason they are the most hated consumer company... what other organization attacks the very customers that give them money?
http://consumerist.com/consumer/worst-company-in-america/worst-company-in-america-2007-final-deathmatch-244408.php
Of course, this is coming from a guy who has 214gb of music...and desperately wants his entire collection to be of the highest quality.
So what about that ? Will they delete it all, close the system and distribute only music they "upload" ?
Yeah sure, and that Pirate Bay traffic is certainly not going down after they charge money for it... People go the the Pirate Bay because they want FREE free. If they were willing to pay for their movies, TV-shows, music and warez they would go elsewhere.
Good luck Mr. Bainwol, I don't think you're going to be rich anytime soon.
- by dyingdemon July 17, 2009 11:47 PM PDT
- ha man this is funny this is just another way to try and make money on the constant decline of a site :/
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(20 Comments)personally i see the logic i myself am a registered member of the pirate group and can see teh logic on both sides
there's the user: WE the user get to download and (watch/listen/play/read) whatever we wish for free at HUGE speeds (i can actually download at my fibers full speed with some of these torrents) and the thing is over 80% of these ppl who download (pirate) this data usually go out and buy it or make a contribution to the market if they like it. if they dont they just delete it there ya go problem solved no money lost.
now for the
CONTENT PROVIDER/CORPS : WE the corps and provider need money to keep doing what we doing to make a living and to provide even better material
these ppl (pirates) steal from us taking away our very life flow
and now these providers and such now see that there is a chance to put money back into their pocket by removing a huge threat (TPB)
but then they notice that if they remove it that things will get even worse for them
the users will go from pirating to buy
to full pirate
(if anyone notices this is like the whole internet radio station dispute)
you have a place that provides copyrighted material to a user base who then go and buy the item if they like it (of course there are exceptions no form is perfect)
so a middle man is brought in
you can have your free downloads (hopefully still some illegal ;) ) but to do so you must take some of the strain off of us by giving up some of your resources
so basically its reached a midway consensus (you scratch my back (providers and corps) and we scratch yours (users)
now really i think more info needs to be brought up souch as how much gets taken off for how much system resources
also
the need to rethink the whole selling computing power to other ppl thing
if i am to give up some of my resources for this
I WILL NOT SETTLE FOR ANYTHING OTHER THE TPB i am not signing for that some other company can get the power
but seriously if they make it for TPB only and lets say i give up like 30 gigs of my hdd
and a little extra stuff
imagine if every one did that
basically the TPB would no longer be centralized and could not be sued as you would have to sue some 3million ppl
and imagine if this catches on
and ppl get tired of paying
hehehe just have someone else create a server which does the same thing
and give them the info
now TAADAA you just cut this new TPB's feet out and started a new one that was founded on a free internet dream
ill be honest im gonna stick around just to see what happens
but if they whole we will sell comp power thing does not change and no more info is brought out
i think ill help this new TPB iv been hearing about who actually is doing exactly what the offical tpb is doing but for free
but good luck tpb yoru gonna need it