Years from now, when the history of BitTorrent-related Internet piracy is written, there will have to be at least one chapter devoted to The Pirate Bay. It showed up just as the likes of Suprnova and LokiTorrent were being shut down, and quickly became the go-to place for, shall we say, the less savvy BitTorrent user. It also became a symbol of the copyright reform movement, though the site’s cavalier attitude toward any sort of authority ultimately led to its undoing. (The whole “we’re untouchable!” gimmick the site had played up was, we can now say, ill advised.)

Oh, God. Well, it looks like Global Gaming Foundation X, the company that wanted to buy The Pirate Bay, has approved the acquisition. All the financing is in place (the deal will be financed by GGF itself, which means that nobody else wanted anything to do with the deal), and GGF is ready to roll, officially. Total price: 60 million Swedish kroner, or about $8.3 million. In the immortal words of Greg “Opie” Hughes, “Good luck, bro.”

Scratch one Web site off that “alternative to The Pirate Bay” list. Mininova has been ordered by a Dutch court to remove all links to copyrighted items from its servers, or face fines to the tune of €5 million. You get the feeling that the era of BitTorrent as we know it is about to end, don’t you?

You need only one word to describe The Pirate Bay. It comes from the Ancient Greek, is six letters long, and entered the English language in 1884, some 120 years before the Web site’s founding. When The Pirate Bay starts to compare its struggles to those of Western Europe during World War II—you know, the struggle against Nazi Germany—only one word is needed. That word is hubris, and if it were possible to die from hubris, The Pirate Bay would have already expired. Hopefully there’s no such thing as copyright in Heaven (or Hell).

Potentially bad news for you UK readers. An amendment to the big Digital Britain report would kick off “hardcore copyright pirates” from the Internet. The amendment would require ISPs to tell repeat offenders to knock it off, or else. The cost for doing this—it’s not exactly inexpensive to keep track of copyright infringement, mail out letters, etc.—will be burdened by both the ISPs and rights holders.

You know how on the Internet, after something particularly stupid happens, someone says, “I lol’d”? Well, I lol’d after reading the following two sentences: “There is uncertainty surrounding the purchase of file-sharing website The Pirate Bay (TPB) by Swedish-based Global Gaming Factory (GGF). Trading in GGF shares has been suspended and there are reports that the firm’s chairman—Magnus Bergman—has resigned.”

And now, the 900th note on Internet piracy written in the past week. It would appear that the UK is inching closer to a law that would require ISPs to disconnect people who download music, movies, etc. illegally. The proposal, currently making its way through the back rooms of the British Government, could well be placed before the Parliament during its next session.

So here’s an interesting look at Internet piracy you may well enjoy. The English Premier League complained the other day that illegal Web streams of live games (from Justin.tv and the like) were eating into its profits. No profits, no Premiership, was the implied threat. Then explain this to me: WWE ran a pay-per-view event in June called The Bash, and it marked the first time the company aggressively pursued illegal Web streams (again, from Justin.tv, Ustream, etc.). According to the company’s recently released financials, by way of the latest Wrestling Observer newsletter, The Bash was the third least purchased pay-per-view event “in years.”

Another day, another fun video. Today’s is “To Catch a Pirate,” a clever parody of the hit American TV show that’s “devoted to the subject of identifying and detaining those who contact people they believe to be below the age of consent over the Internet for sexual liaisons.” Only this time, we’re dealing with filthy pirates. Software pirates, to be exact. Makes sense: the BSA is behind the video.

Son of a gun-diddily-un. Just as I’m about to leave the house to fix my uncle’s broken computer—doesn’t it suck being “the computer guy” in the family?—I come across this great interview. It’s from The Sound of Young America, a public radio program based in L.A., and is with the music critic of the Chicago Tribune, Greg Kot. It’s basically about the state of music in America today, and how the RIAA screwed itself over the past several years. Good stuff. So good, in fact, that I just bought the guy’s book, Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music, from that Barnes and Noble e-book store.

Sweden’s anti-piracy law, IPRED, seems to be working, insofar as various Internet traffic monitors have seen a significant downturn in piracy. The day after the law went into effect, Web traffic fell by some 30 percent, and now, several months later (the law went into effect on April 1), an ISP there says piracy-related traffic is still “free-falling.”

Here’s a tip: this isn’t 1998, and you shouldn’t go around making “Web pages” that are filled with Nintendo ROMs. If you do, you could end up like the Japanese guy who’s now facing two years in prison and a $96,000 fine.

Another day, another RIAA trial victory. Joel Tenenbaum was ordered to cough up $675,000 to the record labels. It works out to $22,500 per song he downloaded off Kazaa years ago.

You might like to know that The Pirate Bay has been ordered to shut down in the Netherlands. That is, courts there would like to prevent people from inside the land of orange from accessing the site. Of course, The Pirate Bay, when they found out* about the case, denied all wrongdoing.

Not for nothing, but it looks like the sale of The Pirate Bay may well be in jeopardy. You’ll recall that the site announced last month that it had found a buyer in Global Gaming Factory. The deal was predicated on the ability of GGF to come up with nearly $7 million, which now doesn’t look all that certain.

Friends, you cannot go anywhere on the Internet without running into the OEM version of Windows 7. This is the same version of the operating system that’ll be loaded onto your Dells, your HPs, your Lenovos, etc.

Remember yesterday when I noted, by way of TorrentFreak, that the RIAA had all but considered DRM to be dead? Not true! Not true at all.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Is the company that announced plans last month to buy The Pirate Bay now getting cold feet? A lawyer representing Global Gaming Factory X said in a Dutch court today that GGF would only buy The Pirate Bay if it could turn it into a “legitimate business.” And while we’re at it, I’d like to announce that I plan on purchasing the New York Knicks, but only if I can turn it into a winning baseball team.

So it looks like the hot, new trend is to buy the name of old peer-to-peer applications, then “resurrect” said application. Such is the case with Kazaa, which was the biggest P2P application in the post-Napster extravaganza of the early 2000s. Anyhow, someone out there plans to bring Kazaa back—legally, of course.

The chief spokesman for the RIAA, one Jonathan Lamy, has gone on record to say what any normal, not-on-the-RIAA-payroll person has been saying for some time now: “DRM is dead, isn’t it?” Yes. Yes it it.