All press is good press.  Stuff like this happened with "regular" currency all the time, and Bitcoin is no different.  Scammers will be scammers, regardless of their medium.

I'm interested to see when the first "Bitcoin seizure is impotent" style story emerges, you'd think that Pirate would be technically adept enough to have put some ill gotten gains into a brain wallet.

Also, is it at all confirmed that "Trendon Shavers" really is pirateat40? My immediate reaction (when it was exposed a scam) was that Trendon Shavers was either an outright joke name or a real person whose name pirate thought sounded like some kind of pirate-play-on-words, and used his identity as a decoy. It was a fairly elaborate con, despite what the smug 20/20 hindsight-ers say (although I did think it sounded dubious at the time, but didn't join the debate, not sure I was even signed up to bitcointalk).

Probably good press!

When people read he got 700000 bitcoins and at that time, 2011 or 2012, it was worth like 4 or 5 mil and now it is worth like 70 mil, I think people will want to give another look at bitcoin.

There is no one answer to this.  Some will become interested and lookup bitcoins and learn for themselves.  Some will automatically assume all btc is a scam.  Some will ect. ect.

Overall its a good thing.  Regardless more people will become interested.

That was what I was thinking.  It does not seem to have affected the price today but who knows.  It is still some more press.