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Pirate Bay Announces Sale to Swedish Company For $7.8 Million
paulraps writes "The Pirate Bay is to be bought for $7.8 million by Global Gaming Factory X, a Swedish company specializing in internet café management software, the company has announced. As well as taking over the controversial brand, GGF has also bought Peerialism, a small IT company with roots at Sweden's Royal Institute of Technology, which has developed a new file sharing technology. The acquisitions mean that GGF will be at the heart of 'the international digital distribution market,' allowing it to introduce a new pay model for file sharing." Reader pyzondar adds "However, the press statement also states that the deal will only go through 'if GGF and its Board of Directors can use the asset in a legal and appropriate way.'"
This feels a lot like history repeating itself - It's Napster all over again...
Music industry sues P2P service -> service loses -> service turns legit -> becomes irrelevant -> gets replaced by something better, and less centralized.
I'm curious what's going to come next, but I suspect this turn of events will spur on some interesting technical developments.
Paul Leader
What makes you think some company is wasting $8 million and then destroy what they bought?
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
What's to happen regarding the IPREDator VPN service?
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
As soon as Global Gaming Factory X buys it, you can say bye-bye to all the torrents, and worst of all, all the trackers. Which means pretty much the end of BitTorrent as we know it, since most of the pirated content in the world is tracked TPB.
Yeah, and when Napster died, that was the end of mp3 distribution as we knew it. Then came the era of mp3 distribution as we had not known it. After Audio Galaxy died something else came along. Supernova died, Mininova came. Pirate Bay dies, something else comes along.
P2P is like the Borg, endlessly adapting to whatever attack you come up with. Blast it with a phaser? The next one has a phaser shield. Modulate the phaser beam, the next one has modulated shields. Rip its its arm off and use it to club the thing to death, the next one will have sturdier arms that can't be ripped off.
This is actually quite funny because p2p services operate off the same popularity dynamics as normal products and services. Something like McDonalds comes along, it monopolizes the fast food burger market and also serves to suppress the wide-scale popularity of potentially better burger chains. If McDonalds folded tomorrow, we'd see an explosion of innovation and potentially better burgers.
The same inertia works in the p2p world. If Napster was never destroyed, we'd likely still be listening to crappy, half-broken mp3's to this day. People tend to stick with what works, even if it doesn't work well. Kill Napster, now suddenly there's a wide-open market for better clients and protocols to compete in. Kill off one of them, now the next generation can compete. The RIAA is like an incomplete course of antibiotics and the p2p networks are like MRSA. You don't kill 'em off completely and they'll just come back to eat your face.
So, the Pirate Bay is dead. Long live p2p. You know something else is coming.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
No, I don't think they're that naive.
Having thought a little bit about it, what I think the plan is, is this: The shares of GGF (a micro-cap stock) went up a lot on the press release. I think that's the point, and where the money in all this is.
This is a pump and dump scam.
They're betting on not enough people really reading the press release. Wannabe daytraders put money into the penny stock of GGF and are taken to the cleaners. Where the money goes - well, I don't know. To new nebulous "internet projects", somewhere? Maybe.
GGF is under no obligation to complete the deal. All they have to do is claim "no funding" and the deal is off - but not after the owners of GGF stock has been able to sell it at a much higher price than they would've been able to without this press release.
As I said at the start - this is what I think. I have no proof of anything of the above, but I'm just stating what I think this smells like.