News written by Petteri Pyyny (July, 2009)

Ten major movie studios have joined the Swedish legal-threat frenzy and have sued The Pirate Bay. The studios, including Disney, Warner Bros, Sony Pictures and Columbia Pictures have demanded a court order in Stockholm, Sweden for TPB to cease and desist helping its users to share movies whose copyrights are owned by the studios in question.

"We've been forced to seek a court order demanding that they stop the spreading of these roughly 100 films and television programmes", the studios' attorney in Sweden told to The Local, Swedish online news service. Studios' request for injuction involves TV shows such as House and Grey's Anatomy and movies including Matrix and Harry Potter series.

Studios name the TPB admins as the defendants, including Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Peter Sunde, as well Black Internet AB.

"They’ve been sentenced to prison for criminal activities but haven’t stopped carrying out those activities", studios' attorney told in an interview.

It is so rare nowadays to see any cool web-based service to be first available in Europe rather than in the U.S. that Spotify is really worth mentioning even for just that (yes, we'd really, really like to get Hulu..). However, this music streaming service that has been dubbed as the "music piracy killer" and has received almost universal praise from its users, is finally planning to expand to the United States in Q3 or Q4 of this year.

Spotify is a music streaming service with quite massive selection of music, available in Ogg Vorbis format (using q5, appx. 160kbps encoding for its free service and 320kbps for its premium service), with simple-to-use GUI and ad-supported monetization model. Spotify's ads run less frequently than what you'd expect with commercial radio and you can get rid of the ads completely by signing up to their premium service (that costs €9.99 per month or €0.99 for 24h period).

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.