Meh, who cares. I'm surprised it (the tracker) lasted as long as it did really. Anyway, the majority of pirates I know appear to have moved or be moving on to the likes of megaupload and rapidshare and such anyway, it seems.
I don't really care for TPB, I don't think it provided anything useful for me. Bittorrent is a useful tool for sharing things like isos, but I don't need TPB for that.
Of course not, but I haven't heard much buzz about torrenting things in quite a while. A few years back, there was always people going on about it. Now the latest fad seems to be megaupload and rapidshare style sites.
That can only work for so long since those services are centralized. If a large amount of copyrighted material is distributed illegally through those services, they will be targeted very quickly by the content industry and either be shut down, or forced to screen all material.
Anecdotally and from personal observation, piracy through these channels seem to be huge. There have been some new records released recently, and when I was searching for reviews of them, some of the top Google results were actually links to rapidshare and its ilk.
The only reason RS and MU are still around is because they aren't (and never were) the 'real' problem. If the casual pirates move there (as a result of TPB) you're right, it's an easy kill for the industry.
dkersten, rapidshare/megaupload have been around, and been used for years by pirates and for pron. Any uptick recently in usage is temporary, the real top-tier pirates stopped using BT and TPB years ago, and are already two or 3 moves ahead (think private, secure networks for top end distribution).
Actually, I'd argue that the real top-tier pirates never used bittorrent in the first place but always used private networks. There was a guy I went to uni with who was into that stuff and he sometimes mentioned getting zero day releases minutes after they were made available. I doubt think he ever cared for BT.
I don't really care for TPB, I don't think it provided anything useful for me. Bittorrent is a useful tool for sharing things like isos, but I don't need TPB for that.