Is this the death of BitTorrent?

The people who run the massive BitTorrent site Pirate Bay (thepiratebay.org) are going on trial for copyright violations next week in Stockholm, Sweden.

BitTorrent is a popular peer-to-peer file sharing protocol which is widely used to share large media files like television shows, movies and music.

TorrentFreak has an interesting article which quotes Raynor Vliegendhart of the Tribler P2P team at Delft University of Technology, who believes that the Pirate Bay’s servers support as much as 50 percent of all the BitTorrent traffic on the Internet.

So the general belief is if they go down for any extended time — or, God forbid, permanently — it could have a huge impact on torrent users everywhere, including leading to the failure of other trackers (sites that coordinate the sharing process) due to overload.

What are your thoughts on the topic? Is this truly the end?