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]
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Joined: Oct 2007
Fail
is what this will be. Kinda like when Napster went "legit." Yeah, it's still around, but it's still a fail.