The Pirate Kiosk is a local and public backup of the Pirate Bay’s torrent catalog broadcast from a WiFi router, allowing peer-to-peer file sharing without the need for the internet.

A few days ago The Pirate Bay, the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker, announced that it has been sold to the Swedish software company, Global Gaming Factory X AB for almost 8 million dollars.  According to a Pirate Bay blog post, the surprisingly influential owners of the piracy site will be passing the reigns to the new owners without altering the core policies of mocking legal threats and carrying out the most expansive piracy sites on the net.  Last month, the so-called “Pirate Party” even captured a Swedish seat in the European Union’s Parliament which points to the power of Pirate [...]

A study from the BI Norwegian School of Management has discovered that illegal music downloaders may not be as detrimental to record companies’ bottom line as previously thought. The research examined the buying habits of 2,000  online music users, and found that those who downloaded tracks for free (both legally and illegally), were 10 times more likely to pay for music. The subjects often said that the freely gotten music was used to inform their subsequent purchases.
[via The Guardian and Ars Technica]
Photo by: Fredrik Persson/Scanpix/PA