News of the Pirate Bay’s impending sale has worried file sharers around the world. Rights holders on the other hand seem to be somewhat optimistic, hoping that the deal will put an end to the world’s largest file-swapping platform. But history has shown again and again that the demise of popular P2P sites and systems doesn’t lead to less file swapping. On the contrary, the gap is oftentimes filled with more sophisticated systems.

It’s been 10 years since Napster, and some record company executives seem to have slowly realized that they should have struck a deal with the original music-swapping service instead of pushing users to Gnutella, Kazaa, eMule and eventually BitTorrent. Letting the Pirate Bay with its up to 25 million concurrent users die could be another mistake just as big as the failure to embrace Napster. Granted, saving and monetizing the Pirate Bay may be close to impossible, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth trying. Continue reading on Newteevee.com.