BitTorrent Under Siege?

The "Internet piracy trial of the decade" (according to the Times of London) is going on right now in Stockholm, and few of us stateside seem to notice. The popular website The Pirate Bay and its three administrators are being sued by a coalition of entertainment companies and the Swedish government. If found guilty, they will have to pay millions of dollars in fines and shut down the site. Oh, and BitTorrent will probably stop working for a while.

What?!

I also had no idea how important The Pirate Bay was to the BitTorrent ecosystem. Right now it is handling over 50% of the protocol's traffic. (You might have to click on the image below to see what I'm talking about.)


The worry is that if The Pirate Bay is shut down, P2P traffic will spill over to smaller trackers, who in turn will become overwhelmed and fail. (Keep in mind this should only affect public torrents -- private ones should not be affected.)

The implications here are anyone's guess. The vast majority of public torrents traffic unauthorized content. Will these users turn to legitimate sources, or just wait for another torrent site to replace the Bay? And (in my mind) more worryingly, will BitTorrent still be a viable option to distributors of legitimate content, like open-source software and public television programs? Even Michael Moore released his latest film using BitTorrent. But the more the public associates the protocol with piracy, the less likely it will be used for anything but piracy.