Pirate Bay To Offer VPN For $7 a Month

Death Metal sends along an Ars Technica piece about The Pirate Bay's plans for a virtual private network service to help ensure its users' privacy. "The Pirate Bay is planning to launch a paid VPN service for users looking to cover their tracks when torrenting. The new service will be called IPREDator, named after the Swedish Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED) that will go into effect in April. IPREDator is currently in private beta and is expected to go public next week for €5 per month. ... IPREDator's website says that it won't store any traffic data, as its entire goal is to help people stay anonymous on the web. Without any data to hand over, copyright owners won't be able to find individuals to target. ... The question remains, however, if any significant portion of The Pirate Bay's users will decide to fork over 5 Euro per month solely to remain anonymous. It seems more likely that the majority either won't care, or will simply start looking for lesser-known torrent trackers to use."

Comments

Might Actually be GOOD for the Movie Industry

[A. B3ttik]

Suppose this takes off and TPB starts raking in cash.

This shows that even Pirates are willing to fork over money and pay for the products if the service is good enough and the price is low enough.

Netflix already has similar Pay-for-Unlimited-Access plans between $8 and $20... and if TPB is successful, I predict that more distributors will move to this service model.

Imagine Blockbuster or Amazon or iTunes saying: "Take whatever you want. Movies, music, ANYTHING. $20/month." They'd make a fortune. Hell, if you threw games in there, I'd personally pay like $100/month.

Asking for trouble (technical, not legal)

[Andy Dodd]

The whole point of P2P is to use the bandwidth of each client as a server in addition. This relies on a network being distributed without a central bottleneck.

VPNing in to TPB will introduce just such a bottleneck, killing performance. Or have they figured out a way to do point-to-point VPNing between all registered users?

What VPN technology are they using? How does it work?

Re:Hmmmmm.

[Colonel Korn]

Seriously, what is the sole purpose of Pirate Bay?

Share Linux distros or share copyrighted material?

You can yell "can be used for legal purposes" or "cannot be proven" or whatnot until your face is blue, but will not change the truth.

It turns out there's no "sole purpose" of TPB. 80% of their torrents are legal, but probably the majority of traffic is not. To some people the most important purpose of TPB is to force a showdown that might help to change unjust laws.