Tim O'Reilly coined the famous saying that obscurity is a much bigger problem than piracy - and it seems that the folks over at The Pirate Bay have constructed a simple experiment to test this aphorism out. It's called The Promo Bay, and it's a system for letting content creators promote their works on the front page of The Pirate Bay in up to three countries of their choosing (for free, of course).

Remember, The Pirate Bay gets a ton of traffic - over 1.8 billion pageviews per month, apparently. If you're an up-and-coming artist who no one's heard of, at some point it has to be pretty tempting to turn that firehose in your direction... even if it means having works distributed for free. In fact, it seems like artists should be lining up for such a program just to get that kind of traffic. Of course, we've seen some artists do deals with The Pirate Bay before - to great success. The new program just seems like a away of making that easier for artists... and doing it more often. But it really does seem to be a quick way of asking the obscurity vs. piracy question in a much more direct and very, very real manner.