Let’s say you’re not about to pay $30 for the Blu-ray edition of Blade Runner or Transformers, especially after you’ve already seen the film a dozen or more times on regular DVD. But now that The Pirate Bay, as far as I’m concerned, long gone, what are you gonna do? Will its “reboot” cause you to change your pirating ways, or will you merely move on to the next service and/or Web site?

Man alive is The Pirate Bay finished! Business Week has an interview with Hans Pandeya, the CEO of Global Gaming Factory, the company that’s set to buy The Pirate Bay for nearly $8 million (provided it can come up with the money). What’s mainly discussed it what type of business plan does this man have in store for The Pirate Bay. It’s safe to say that The Pirate Bay will be all but dead in one year’s time.

It’s safe to say that I shed no tears yesterday when, for all intents and purposes, The Pirate Bay ceased to be. Suffice it to say that if Usenet comes under attack next I will not be a happy camper. (I know, I know: The first rule of Usenet is not to talk about Usenet, but bear with the story for a minute.) The RIAA just won a lawsuit against usenet.com, which, as you might guess, is a premium Usenet provider.

My initial reaction to the news that some company called Global Gaming Factory X has agreed to buy The Pirate Bay was, “Pfft, why should I care? The was only garbage on there anyway.” And while that’s still my opinion—there really was only garbage on there—we really ought to recognize that, for better or worse, The Pirate Bay was something of a symbol for the greater “music/movies/whatever wants to be free” “movement,” if you can even call it that.

Stan Lee couldn’t have created a more hated super-villain than the Recording Industry Association of America. It’s the ultimate heel stable. Get this: a woman in Minneapolis, Jammie Thomas-Rasset, has been ordered to pay $1.92 million in damages for downloading and sharing 24 songs. That works out to about $80,000 per song. Clearly the RIAA deserves props. Mad props.

So here’s a tough one. Some kids posted a copy of the Dungeons and Dragons Player’s Handbook 2 on Scribd.com and it was viewed more than 4,000 times and potentially downloaded about 2,600 times. They also found that a nice Polish boy, Krysztof, who posted copies of some modules. The defendants are based in Florida, the Philipines, and Polska.

The Pirate Bay announced a few months ago the creation of IPREDator, a VPN service to be used, I guess, to pirate content a little more stealthily. Well, the service is now in beta. Closed beta, I might add.

Let’s talk hypothetically for a moment. Let’s say you’re the average American (or wherever you’re from), going to school or working for The Man. Let’s say that you occasionally download an MP3 or FLAC from wherever you get such things. Now, do you have $150,000 to give to the RIAA for every song you’ve downloaded? I sure as heck don’t! (I’d need a government bailout, lol!) More importantly, why is $150,000 an appropriate amount to ask for, as Sony seems to suggest? If I can buy a song off iTunes for $1.30, how is it that “finding” that same song could cost me $150,000?

It looks like, in France, men still are born and remain free and equal in rights. That anti-piracy law that we’ve been tracking, known in France as the Hadopi law, is now, for all intents and purposes, pretty much null and void, thanks to the intervention of a court there. Well, the court there, the Constitutional Council. It is the view of the court that “free access to public communication services online” is in line with the rights laid down in the French Constitution. Any effort to subvert that right—say, three strikes and you’re out, and disconnected from the Internet for a year—necessarily conflicts with the Constitution

Those of you in Euroland are probably sick of hearing about the some people in Sweden voted for the Pirate Party, whose raison d’être is to reform copyright law, patents, etc. In fact, enough people voted for the Piratpartiet to give it two seats in the European Parliament. (There’s 736 seats in the European Parliamnet.) Hey, it’s a start!

Don’t expect every country in Europe to follow France in implementing a “three strikes” anti-piracy laws. A report called Digital Britain, which assess the UK’s preparedness to enter the digital era, will be published next week, and inside are methods that the UK could use to combat Internet piracy. One such method: slowing down the Internet connection of file-sharers so as to prevent them from effectively downloading illegal content. (Though, if my UK acquaintances are telling the truth, broadband in the UK is garbage to begin with. It’d be like telling a slug to slow down.)

We’re all pirates because of DRM. That’s the conclusion of a new UK study—and it’s a long one, coming in at 200+ pages—. The idea here is that the DRM schemes imposed by rights owners do just as good a job at restricting people who have legitimate claims to the material as it does restricting those without any claim at all.

What’s another phrase for, “meh, who cares?” That’s what I’m thinking when I read that the MPAA tried to argue in court that making a personal copy of a DVD is illegal under the DMCA. Is it shocking to people that the MPAA would argue in favor of its own interests, possibly at the expense of the your ability to make rip a DVD? No. No it’s not.

Looks like The Sims 3 has leaked, several days before its official release date. Big surprise, right? Like these things don’t happen all the time. It can be found where you usually find these things.

Oh, news flash! Looks like the French National Assembly passed the controversial three-strikes-and-you’re-out law. (Yes, this is after rejecting it about a month ago.) Simply put, if some new state agency catches you illegally downloading three times you’ll be disconnected from the Internet for one year.

Oh, again. There’s another push to disconnect illegal file-sharers from the Internet. This time it’s happening in the UK, where people from the likes of the UK Film Council say file-sharing is costing people jobs and threatening the film industry. Because making movies is soooo damn important, right? How would we live and flourish as a civilization without 17 Again?

RealNetworks is currently entangled in a legal case over a prototype hardware DVD ripper called “Facet.” Described as “TiVo for DVDs,” the $300 box aims to replace set-top DVD players by allowing owners to rip their movie collections directly to a 500GB hard drive for quick and easy access and playback.

Can we be honest for one moment and admit that, yes, there is a difference between the Pirate Bay and Google? Take this new Web site called the Pirate Google. Oh, look, you re-painted the ship’s sails to match the colors from Google’s logo. Very clever! And when you search for something, say, an episode of 24, it carries out a custom Google search with the “filetype:torrent” parameter. In other words, you’re using Google to find torrents.

It’s easy to pirate PSP games, that much we know. But what’s debatable is to the extent that it’s killing, or has already killed, the system. Fifty million PSPs have been sold thus far, yet Sony insists that the “sickening” rate of software piracy has “has taken out a big chunk of [its] software sales.”

Stop the presses! New data suggests that people who illegally download music are more likely to buy music from legitimate sources (iTunes, Amazon MP3, Beatport, etc.) than are God-fearing, non-illegally downloading folks. Such is the claim from a recent Norwegian study. Of course, the music industry has rubbished the claims, as it so often does.