Pirate Bay sold, to go legitimate
updated 09:50 am EDT, Tue June 30, 2009
Pirate Bay sold for $7.8m
Swedish gaming company Global Gaming Factory X (GGF) on Tuesday announced it is in the process of acquiring The Pirate Bay for $7.8 million. With the process due to be concluded by August, it will see GGF introduce new business models to and make the site legal and keep its owners out of courts. The new owners will also sell shares of The Pirate Bay to investors. GGF will also buy Peerialism and introduce its P2P distribution technology on The Pirate Bay. At the same time, The Pirate Bay will stop hosting and tracking torrents and use a third-party tracker and torrent hosting service.
GGF CEO Hans Pandeya said the new way of running the site will keep content providers and copyright owners compensated. He also hinted this would result in file sharers getting better quality and faster downloads.
The P2P tech from Peerialism will apparently be backwards-compatible with BitTorrent but no concrete details about how it will work are yet known. Torrents listed on the site will not be hosted on The Pirate Bay's anymore, but on an unnamed torrent hosting service instead. This host will also offer its content to other torrent sites and be accessible via an API. Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde said this will ensure The Pirate Bay is more stable, with BitTorrent users relying less on the site's own servers but several independent services.
Half of the $7.8 million for The Pirate Bay will be paid out in cash, while the rest will come from freshly issued shares. Peerialism will be purchased for $13 million, with at least half being in the form of cash.
GGF says it has the largest Internet café and gaming center network in the world. [via TorrentFreak]
Fail
06/30, 10:29am reply
is what this will be. Kinda like when Napster went "legit." Yeah, it's still around, but it's still a fail.
Woode
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Joined: Oct 2007
Sell out
06/30, 10:38am reply
I guess it is rather hard not to sell out when someone offers you 8 million dollars.
You are right Woode, this will fail. The new owners hope to use the name of Pirate Bay to their advantage.
lamewing
Forum Regular
Joined: Aug 2004
Site is down already
06/30, 10:42am reply
The site is already down. Say goodbye, this will fail and that is pretty much the end of Pirate Bay. See ya!
b9robot
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Joined: Feb 2009
underpants gnomes v2.0
06/30, 10:52am reply
1) move to country with notoriously weak copyright enforcement
2) open a massively popular .torrent file site
3) sell out for PROFIT!!!
how much you wanna bet a new "pirate bay" opens up shop in somewhere like Russia where they don't give two figs for US copyright law which enriches US media companies?
climacs
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Joined: Sep 2001
....
06/30, 12:00pm reply
guess they think they can make money off its name. They just wasted millions of dollars cuz this will fail and badly.
Athens
Addicted to MacNN
Joined: Jan 2003
Dr. Who meet Dr. Zhivago
06/30, 12:01pm reply
Where am I going to get my Dr. Who specials from?! No, I can't wait a year or two for them to come to BBC America, I need my cheezy Sci-Fi Zero Day!!!
jbruner
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Joined: Jun 2003
The site is NOT down.
06/30, 02:08pm reply
Site still works fine here.
Anyway, I certainly didn't see this one coming! However, if the site is just going to be turned into 'something else' then it just wont be the same place and people will head elsewhere in less time than it takes you to blink.
I never used it much anyway. It was far too 'watched' It was kinda asking for trouble to use it..
I do admire the way TPB's creators went up against the powers that be so fearlessly though! It always made for entertaining reading. I don't know if those guys have serious balls, or are just plain stupid!
Either way, if this story is true, they won't see much of that money. Numerous legal firms will be clambering after that very quickly.
Grrr
Grizzled Veteran
Joined: Jun 2001