News of The Pirate Bay’s impending sale has worried file sharers around the world. Many 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’s launch, 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.

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The sale of The Pirate Bay to a Swedish software company, which plans to revamp the site and launch a new business model to compensate rights holders, has most everyone in the P2P community scratching their heads today. Global Gaming Factory X announced that it will buy the site for roughly $8 million, along with Swedish P2P solutions provider Peerialism, which has been developing BitTorrent-based distribution solutions for P2P streaming and downloads. The plan is apparently to use Peerialism’s technology for the next generation of The Pirate Bay.

Countless file-sharing users are now asking: Where does this leave us? Some are wondering if it will lead to the BitTorrent meltdown that we’ve been hearing so much about in the wake of the Pirate Bay lawsuit. And what will happen to all that money?

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In what sounds like an elaborate April Fool’s prank, the Swedish software company Global Gaming Factory X (GGF) says it’s in the process of acquiring The Pirate Bay, the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker, for 60 million Swedish kronor ($7.8 million), 30 million Swedish kronor ($3.8 million) of which will be in cash. And if that wasn’t enough, GGF says that after the acquisition is completed in August, it “intends to launch new business models that allow compensation to the content providers and copyright owners.”

In addition to The Pirate Bay acquisition, GGF also said it would be acquiring file-sharing technology company, Peeralism, for 100 million Swedish kronor, at least 50 million Swedish kronor of which will be in cash. From the press release:

“Peerialism has developed a new data distribution technology which now can be introduced on the best known file – sharing site, The Pirate Bay. Since the technology is compatible with the existing it will quickly allow for new values to be created for all key stakeholders and facilitate new business opportunities”, says Johan Ljungberg, CEO Peerialism.

According to its web site, Global Gaming Factory X AB has the biggest network of Internet cafés and gaming centers in the world.

The Pirate Bay was on the losing end of a court case earlier this year. The founders were found guilty of infringing copyright law, sentenced to a year in jail each, and ordered to pay $4.5 million in damages to 17 entertainment companies.

Needless to say, this is huge news and creates a tectonic shift in the world of online piracy. We’ll have more throughout the day.

Update: Janko Roettgers’ analysis: 5 Things to Know About The Pirate Bay Sale

Wednesday update: So What Will Become of The Pirate Bay?

It’s betarrrr: The guys behind The Pirate Bay have officially announced the beta test of their virtual private network (VPN), dubbed Ipredator, which makes it possible to use BitTorrent anonymously. All traffic will be encrypted as well, so your ISP won’t be able to snoop on your packets.

Ipredator costs 5 euros ($7) per month, and will initially only be open to 3,000 lucky beta testers. Another 180,000 potential users have signed up for invites, however, and The Pirate Bay team has promised to let all of them in within a month. That’s a pretty lofty goal, however, and one has to wonder whether Ipredator will really be able to meet its users’ expectations.

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Bollywood, wrestling, anime, B-movies, art-house cinema, Asian action flicks and porn, lots and lots of porn — whatever you’re into, there’s bound to be a private torrent tracker for it somewhere. These private BitTorrent communities often work by invitation only and try to stay under the radar of both rights holders and the downloading masses. But does this exclusive approach to online piracy really work?

That’s the question three French researchers are trying to answer. Sylvain Dejean, Thierry Penard and Raphaël Suire from the University of Rennes infiltrated 42 private torrent trackers to figure out what made them tick. The trio published the results of its work in a new study titled “Olson’s Paradox Revisited: An Empirical Analysis of File-sharing Behavior in P2P Communities,” and the paper is good news for long-tail proponents and file-sharing enthusiasts alike.

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The Chinese P2P video vendor Synacast, better known under the name of its video platform PPLive, will announce next week the appointment of former Microsoft exec Vincent Tao as its new CEO. Tao joined Microsoft in 2005 via the acquisition of his mapping startup Geotango, which provided the technology for Virtual Earth. Since then, Tao has acted as senior director for Microsoft’s online services division.

PPLive is one of the largest P2P video-streaming platforms in China, with some 20-30 million active monthly users. Tao relocated from Seattle to Shangai, where PPLive is based, just a few days ago, and he told me on the phone that he’s excited about the Chinese market. “The opportunity there is unprecedented,” he explained. Read more of this story

P2P video startup Vuze quietly launched an adult video download service called StudioHD earlier this year. StudioHD offers an unlimited number of HD porn video downloads for a monthly fee that are subsequently facilitated through Vuze’s BitTorrent client. The company told me that StudioHD is a template for other premium services it plans to launch.

A premium adult outlet seems to be logical step for a company like Vuze, given the popularity of porn on P2P networks, but it’s also another indicator of how difficult it is to monetize P2P. Vuze has raised a total of $32 million in funding. Plans to sell rentals of major TV networks didn’t work out, and Vuze was forced to lay off 24 people last year as well as move out of its costly downtown Palo Alto, Calif., office space. And while Vuze (aka Azureus) used to be the most popular BitTorrent client, it has lost steam to competitors like uTorrent.

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