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.