Pirate Bay goes legal

The Pirate Bay Sold To Software Company, Goes Legal
Written by enigmax on June 30, 2009

According to gaming company Global Gaming Factory X, it is in the the process of acquiring The Pirate Bay for $7.8m (SEK 60 million). The acquisition is scheduled to be completed by August and will see the site launch new business models to compensate content providers and copyright owners.

Software company Global Gaming Factory X (GGF) says it is in the process of acquiring The Pirate Bay and file-sharing technology company Peerialism. GGF claims to have the biggest network of internet cafés and gaming centers in the world.

The changeover of ownership is scheduled for August 2009, whereby GGF will take over the operation of the site.

The company says that after it has completed the acquisition it will launch new business models so that copyright owners get paid, which is clearly a huge diversion from TPB’s previous modus operandi.

“We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site,” said Hans Pandeya, CEO GGF.

“The Pirate Bay is a site that is among the top 100 most visited Internet sites in the world. However, in order to live on, The Pirate Bay requires a new business model, which satisfies the requirements and needs of all parties, content providers, broadband operators, end users, and the judiciary,” said Pandeya.

“Content creators and providers need to control their content and get paid for it. File sharers’ need faster downloads and better quality,” he added.

GGF will acquire the site’s domain names and sites for SEK 60,000,000 ($7.8 million) - SEK 30,000,000 in cash and the rest in newly issue shares.

File-sharing technology company Peerialism will also be acquired by GGF for a total of SEK 100 million, of which at least SEK 50 million will be in cash.

According to GGF, Peerialism has developed a new P2P distribution technology which will be used on The Pirate Bay. The technology is said to be backwards-compatible with BitTorrent although details are scarce at the moment.

At the time of writing, shares in GGF are up 155% - this will quickly become outdated, so check here for latest stats.

This is breaking news and this article will be updated constantly - please keep checking back.

The Pirate Bay Will Decentralize Its Operations (Updated)
Written by Ernesto on June 30, 2009

Alongside the news that The Pirate Bay will sell shares on the Swedish stock market come some other significant changes. The site itself will decentralize and stop hosting and tracking torrents. Instead, The Pirate Bay will use a third party tracker and torrent hosting service to serve its users.

pirate bayEarlier today The Pirate Bay announced that it would be acquired by Global Gaming Factory X (GGF) who are listed on the Swedish stock market. So, Pirate Bay users can not only share files but they can buy a share of the site as well.

Perhaps even more significant for the BitTorrent community is the thus far unreported decision to close down the BitTorrent tracker. Up until today Pirate Bay’s public tracker connected more than half of all BitTorrent users but this is about to change.

Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde has informed TorrentFreak that the site will soon decentralize and stop running a BitTorrent tracker of its own. Instead they will encourage their users to use a yet to be launched third party tracker for their torrents.

To decentralize even further, the torrents that will be listed on the site wont be hosted on The Pirate Bay’s servers anymore. In the near future the site will use a new torrent hosting service that will store the torrents for them. This new hosting service will be open to other torrent sites as well and can be accessed through an API.

In the end The Pirate Bay is making these changes to ensure that the BitTorrent ecosystem stays intact no matter what happens, Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak. By decentralizing the different aspects they hope that BitTorrent users will be less reliant on the uptime of The Pirate Bay’s servers alone. The burden will now be spread among several independently operated services.

For now it remains a mystery what GGF CEO Hans Pandeya meant with “We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site.” That’s worrying to say the least.

In addition, GGF also acquired Peerialism who apparently have developed a new P2P distribution technology which will be used on The Pirate Bay. How this related to the new tracker and external torrent hosting remains unknown.

We’re trying to get confirmation and more details from GGF as soon as possible.

Update: According to Johan Sellström, the CTO of Global Gaming Factory, the plans have changed after Peter Sunde talked to us. “We had discussed closing it down initially so I think that’s why he said so. The plan is to use technology from Peerialism that makes bandwidth utilization more efficient and then it would not make sense to shut it down,” he said, adding. “Peerialism will modify the tracker but it will be backwards compatible. But all this is subject to change if for some reason it would not work. It is our ambition to do so.”

Pirate Bay Heads to Davy Jones’ Locker
By David Kravets
broken_pirateThe announced sale of The Pirate Bay to a Swedish software concern Tuesday is the biggest development in file sharing since 2001, when Napster shuttered after a U.S judge ordered it to remove all copyrighted music from its free service.

The founders of 5-year-old Pirate Bay at one time appeared invincible as they stuck out their middle fingers to the establishment, refusing to remove copyrighted material even after receiving takedown notices. With a following of some 20-plus million users, that invincibility — which invited government intervention — careened head on with The Pirate Bay’s four co-founders’ April convictions in a Stockholm court for facilitating copyright infringement.

With the pending $7.7 million sale to Global Gaming Factory X AB, the site will go legitimate as did Napster– meaning the world’s most notorious BitTorrent tracker will not longer point the way to free downloads of copyrighted music, movies, software and games. The myth is over that the Pirate Bay would carry on as an underground site, even if its co-founders lost their appeals and went to prison for a year.

The Pirate Bay, in short, is heading to Davy Jones’ Locker.

“The Pirate Bay is a site that is among the top 100 most visited internet sites in the world. However, in order to live on, The Pirate Bay requires a new business model, which satisfies the requirements and needs of all parties, content providers, broadband operators, end users, and the judiciary,” Hans Pandeya, Global Gaming’s chief executive, said in astatement. “Content creators and providers need to control their content and get paid for it.”

On its blog, The Pirate Bay wrote, “On the internets, stuff dies if it doesn’t evolve. We don’t want that to happen.”

The surprise announcement that The Pirate Bay has walked the plank has sent heads spinning. Many of the site’s users are mocking the decision as an affront to the co-founders’ stated ideal that nothing will take down Pirate Bay, and that content should be free.

“I always had a sneaking suspicion that when Pirate Bay sold their company it wouldn’t be for free,” sethmeyers21 wrote on Twitter.

The Bay’s users are also mulling where to turn for more online freebies. ZeroPaid maintains an updated catalog of torrent trackers that is broken down into niches for adult, anime, games, general, movie, music, software and television.

In the trial’s aftermath, however, the torrenting world has changed, perhaps making it more difficult to follow The Pirate Bay’s initial footsteps.

For example, several BitTorrent trackers across the globe have shuttered. The verdict has emboldened copyright authorities to crack down on torrent sites. File sharing in Sweden, The Pirate Bay’s home, has dropped. Mininova, one of the world’s largest BitTorrent indexers, has also begun moving toward legitimacy.

Following Tuesday’s announced sale, the content industry is cautiously optimistic that The Pirate Bay is taking on water and about to sink.

“We don’t know the details and there are many questions to ask about how this will work in practice, but we would be delighted if this resulted in The Pirate Bay turning into a legitimate licensed service,” said John Kennedy, chairman of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, the world’s leading recording industry trade group that helped bring the criminal case against The Pirate Bay.

Elizabeth Kaltman, a spokeswoman for the Motion Picture Association of America, said the movie studios “don’t have enough information to comment at this time. We of course always support the ever-growing array of legitimate options for consumers to get movies and television shows in convenient and flexible ways.”

After weeks of testimony and delays ending April 17, Pirate Bay administrators Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Peter Sunde were found guilty in the case, along with Carl Lundström, who was convicted of funding the 5-year-old operation. They face a year in prison and millions in fines.

But it’s unclear whether a new Pirate Bay will go the way of Napster obscurity.

Napster once boasted as many as 70 million users and has quietly fallen off the map since it recently became a paid music service. Still, Napster was replaced by the likes of Gnutella, Kazaa, Limewire, and even The Pirate Bay and others.

Will the next Pirate Bay please stand up?