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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.'"
hehe, sure sold 'em that bridge.
How we know is more important than what we know.
The technology is legal, some of the files shared may not be. That will depend on your local legal code.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
The tough sell out. As would I. That fine's gotta get paid somehow.
On The Pirate Bay blog the TPB crew gives their side of the story.
Idealism is not dead: The profits from the sale will go into a foundation that is going to help with projects about freedom of speech, freedom of information and the openess of the nets. I hope everybody will help out in that and realize that this is the best option for all. Don't worry - be happy!
>> 'the international digital distribution market,' allowing it to introduce a new pay model for file sharing."
So, it'll be Napster 2. Big corp buys out great service for the tech alone and uses it to further corporate greed.
And here we were thinking the TPB founders were selfless Jedi helping file sharers and making the digital world a better place for all. They SOLD OUT!!!
TPB was nice while it lasted.
The file sharing community isn't the best known for paying for downloads (although studies have shown that they buy more music/films etc), but if this company starts charging for access to TPB or per download, they'd better make sure that they won't reveal any names or info about downloaders. Otherwise all of their appeal will have evaporated.
I dreamed of Freud: What does this mean?
The "owners" of the TPB haven't made a profit: they've asked for payment to a fund for "internet projects" instead. This will presumably be some interesting new political statement.
They also aren't actually the owners as such: TPB was sold in 2006 to a shell company specifically to avoid any legal problems for the founders.
The buyers will find that they've bought another Napster: i.e. nothing but a recognised name, with a value proposition that fades away like fairy gold once the free content goes away. TPB founders start up another interesting project, with boatloads of cash to fund it, and away we go again. If you ask me this is a pretty smart move: the establishment will effectively be funding a new political project around the freedom to share...
Enter Carl Lundstrom. Had the money to put up for badly needed servers. Has seen the rise of TPB and sees the $$$. Sinks in some cash for a few servers, sits back and waits then sells out for a whopping profit.
While it may have originally been done for the spirit that they CLAIMED they had in the trial, it certainly wasn't that in the last couple of years. The lying fuckers even went to court knowing that they were going to sell out not long after and stood there and perjured themselves saying it wasn't about the money. Yeah right.
NOBODY BELIEVES YOU
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
Well, there goes the best of the great torrent sites. I'll bet dollars to donuts that this new company attempts to Napsterize the site, turning into a pathetic shell of its former self.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Just like supernova before em. Well that's the end of that..
Well not really. It will be called something else except they probably won't have a cool name.
Personally I don't really approve of piracy because it hurts Open Source alternatives and wouldn't trust anything downloaded from PB to not have trojans on it these days.
That said, I think as a political movement they are something else. Hopefully that money will be used to help the EU Pirate Party in future elections.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
1. Set up a file sharing website with a cool name
2. Build a domain and brand worth millions
3. Profit!
4. Move to another domain
5. ???
6. Profit again!
??? is probably "GOTO 1"
The following comment was made by krs on another site
To clarify a bit..
TPB has been owned by a company for the last years since the raid so nothing there will really change except the names of the owners. The talk about TPB are going to be a pay site is wrong, the CEO that said that does not know what he is talking about.
Now, the BIG change is that the tracker is going to be outsourced to a new formed company that wont know what they track, just that they connect peers, and the torrent listings will be handed by an other new company that will have torrents but they will not know either content or who is using the torrents. This setup will be practically impossible to take down or find anyone liable to sue.
The 3d party company services will have APIs, so you can on your blog or whatever have your own small torrent listings just as you now pull in twitter feeds. remember how the twitter design totally havoced the iranian attempts to block it as ppl just used another side that pulled in the feeds and read it there instead? well that goes for torrents and TPB to.
All in all, this is not the end of the world as some are seeing it but a rather interesting technical improvement.
And dont worry, not a dime will go to the media industries spectrial prize money what i know of but a really nice fund for doing cool stuff. /krs - co.founder of TPB and PB, not involved in TPB anymore and have no stake in any cash.
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
Something will pop up in it's place. The idealists are misplaced. The rest will just find a new way, but with the lessons learned.
What was the point of going through the court proceedings? Why, money, of course!
Also, as evidenced by Kazaa, Napster, Suprnova, and I'm sure many others that I didn't personally use, taking a free piracy site (sure, sure, pirate bay has a few legal uses, but lets be honest here) and turning it into an "innovative pay model for sharing" just doesn't work. You're fan base does -not- transfer. Apples fan base, yeah, they buy things, iTunes can work. Jimmy down the street downloading bootlegs? Not buying. GGF just wasted 60 million kroner.
"A lot of people are worried. We're not and you shouldn't be either!":
http://thepiratebay.org/blog
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
What's to happen regarding the IPREDator VPN service?
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Wow, having your political party's idealistic figurehead be bought by an internet cafe if kind of a kick in the balls, huh? Does GGF now get a seat in their parliament?
What a waste of money. You can download TPB from bittorrent or any p2p share for free!
stuff |
Napster
After a $2.43 million takeover offer by the Private Media Group, an adult entertainment company, Napster's brand and logos were acquired at bankruptcy auction by the company Roxio, Inc. which used them to rebrand the pressplay music service as Napster 2.0.
In September 2008, Napster was purchased by US electronics retailer Best Buy for $US 121 million.
Napster 2.0
Net revenue for the second quarter of fiscal 2007 was $25.5 million, up 9% from $23.4 million in the second quarter of fiscal 2006. ... ...
Net revenue for the third quarter of fiscal 2007 was a record $28.4 million, up 21% from $23.5 million in the third quarter of fiscal 2006.
Net revenue for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2007 grew to $29.1 million, up 9 percent from $26.8 million in the prior year quarter and up from $28.4 million
On April 3, 2007 Napster reported it had over 830,000 paid subscribers. (@ $5 per month (9.95 per month in the UK), or $14.95 per month (14.95 per month in the UK) for transfers)
September 15, 2008 - Napster is purchased by Best Buy for $121 million
However...
Revenue: $111.08 million USD (FY 2007)
Net income: $36.83 million USD (FY 2007)
May not have worked very well for the original creators or the people that used it, but seems to be working fairly well for the company.
The Swedish news site Realtid.se is now running an article that make this sound less than promising, even if you wasn't bothered by the concept presented in this (Slashdot) article.
Please excuse the Google Translate machine translation, but it should still be readable:
http://translate.google.se/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=sv&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Frealtid.se%2FArticlePages%2F200906%2F30%2F20090630101501_Realtid980%2F20090630101501_Realtid980.dbp.asp&sl=sv&tl=en&history_state0=
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
TPB, as a community is atually probably quite safe. Between DLing from trusted people, and the comments that warn quickly if it's a scam.
And I am willing to bet sites the TPB are a far bigger concern to the mdia companies that software. Of course my view is probably skewed as I run Linux, so have no interest in bootleg software.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
I feel like CDNs are almost a dime a dozen at this point, and are typically structured very differently from the way TPB is. I dunno, I feel like this may have been a bad investment for someone, with things like shows on YouTube, Boxee, Hulu, Amazon.COM on-demand, netflix watch instantly, etc, the peer to peer ship may have begun to sail at this point. Not saying it wont still be huge, but when I think of my average non-tech savvy friends, many of them have stopped using torrents all together and have not looked back.
From the press release:
Completion of the acquisitions are primarily subject to GGF obtaining financing for the acquisition
So to summarize: they're buying a company with unknown business model and unknown future legal status, for money they don't have.
I don't see that working out. Usually you at least make sure the seller has something to sell, and the buyer has the ability to buy, before you announce a sale. This is just fantasy so far.
See what this phrase did to us? Free Software was about freedom, giving the users choice, and all those warm and fuzzies. Open Source can be hurt if the users decide what they want.
P.S. I've seen more trojans from Sony and retail games.
You are assuming the people were accustomed to, or at least had heard of the open source alternatives before turning to piracy. Usually that isn't the case. I don't think people accustomed to open source software turn to pirating their commercial alternatives that often.
If it has a Trojan on it, it's safe, right? That's what they taught me in health class.
And that is bad why? The pirate bay may have swung the pendulum too far against copyright/IP law but that is a natural and just reaction to immoral laws. Most people would have respect for IP laws if they weren't so severely imbalanced. Yes some would still break the law but its hard to argue that a 5-7 year term for copyrights/IP with severely limited options to extend is immoral. While it's easy to call the current system of lifetime plus 20-70 years as immoral. When you might die of old age before the creative works made during your *grandparents childhood* is public domain, its easy to dismiss stupid laws like that.
The Goal: A long simple life filled with many complex toys.
If they are proven guilty and even then they walk away with a lot of money.
I don't know about you, but I'd trade 1 year of prison for 1M Euro. Especially if you have a good prison (like we have in Slovenia) where you can learn something while you wait.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Indeed, the party is over. The site has been defeated.
This is a massive victory for the *AA organisations. There is little doubt that the site is being sold to pay off the colossal fines incurred as a result of the Pirate bay trial.
Fortunately, you are utterly, utterly wrong about this. The TPB has been set up as a legal entity in such a way that it's founders can't access that money (they were sued personally), so they won't be able (or willing) to pay the fine with it. The company buying it is essentially investing in a foundation that will develop new products.
The only possible way for P2P to succeed, and with it a free internet, is for the system to become totally and utterly decentralised. Nothing else will suffice. There can be no one site, no one client, no one port, no one encryption method that can remain to scuttle the entire project. It must be, like TCP or SMTP, an ideal which no one controls yet everyone can use. It must not be tied to a single person, or webhost, or legal system. If it is, then the weakest link in the chain will shatter under the weight it will be forced to bear.
Oddly enough, this is exactly the kind of thing they're planning to develop.
We obviously have a different idea of honesty. They have used the legal system to protect what is essentially a political project, and disconnected themselves from it financially so it *cannot* be stopped, no matter what happens to them. They are quite open about it. They are not allowed to make any money from TPB and won't benefit personally from this sale.
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.
there's a surprising amount of content on TPB
There is nothing "on" TPB, and that fact is a major part of their defense. They only link to content hosted by others, they don't host anything themselves. Like an ISP, they disclaim responsibility for the legality of the content. They are not in the business of being IP cops.
impossible to say what percentage of files on The Pirate Bay is illegal
No, that's easy to say: 0.
Please don't make this mistake. We can hardly expect the legal world to get this right if you and the mods slip up on this important distinction. That Napster did host content is what the copyright maximalists used to take them down. This time, lacking that argument, the copyright maximalists seemed to have gotten their way (so far) by co-opting the judges. They don't have any legal basis. Judges are proving too easy to co-opt by playing on fears over change and disruptive technology. The judge for Napster really lost it when she exclaimed that they "created a monster". All she really did was show the copyright maximalists that the legal world was full of plums ripe for the picking.
is a No CD patch/crack legal?
I wish I could say that of course that's legal. But the DMCA stupidly criminalized much of that. So, best I can suggest is that a crack is a tool that has many legitimate purposes as well as the obvious illegitimate purposes.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
His name is Brokep over twitter here is what was said,
@brokep I think people are seeing the fact you lost the case and pretty much sold up afterwards as a bad thing.The money is talking here.
brokep@gully666uk so either there is 60M in a fund, or there is no site and no money. What's the preferred deal? We have no energy left.
@brokep You have done well to keep it up, but people mostly have reacted badly.Its pretty similar to napster and we know how that went.
brokep@gully666uk Yes, we're trying to avoid just that. It's just a site, we need to take the icon status away so lots of sites can replace that.
@brokep I applaud your stance , whether it succeeds only time will tell.You created the icon by taking on the riaa sadly they are winning.
brokep@gully666uk They're not winning. A cannon is now being loaded with money.
@brokep Let us both hope the cannon isn't firing blanks.Good Luck with your future endevors.
brokep@gully666uk Thanks. I'll need it. People hate me now for wanting to pause the 6 year free work we've been doing. Feels unfair.
gully666uk@brokep Everybody deserves to be paid for working.It's a fine line between love and hate.It's the way of the web sadly people expect allot
brokep@gully666uk I'm glad people have high expectations. But we're not that many people. And we've been fighting for a long time. We need help.
@brokep I hope you now can get the help you need.Me i am only one person with very little so from that point of view i understand why.
I think he makes some good points myself.
I wouldn't hold Pidgin up to the same pedestal as Apache... I use XFCE as my preferred desktop, and went as far as to install parts of KDE so that I could use Kopete over Pidgin. On a Netbook... Pidgin sucks *that* much. Seriously. Try using some of the alternatives, and you'll see how badly designed its interface is, and how limited its features really are.
how many features do you need? I think that's WHY I like Pidgin. It has nothing that I personally would consider fluff.
But it's always fun to try something new so what alternatives would you recommend?
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
Easy, if someone wants crop/scale/adjust some images, then they want some sort of image manipulation program. Say 3 options they run across are:
Photoshop clearly has more features, but the average person also won't use most of them and would not pay $700 for it. Obviously it would make sense to use GIMP or Paint.NET. Now, when piracy comes into the equation, the comparison becomes:
Paint.NET and GIMP kind of lose their appeal, don't they? Piracy hurts both free and proprietary software.
So now can we get off this delusion that the owners of the pirate bay are heroes somehow out to protect our rights in the face of evil corporations?
The production costs for WALL-E: $180 million.
Double that for marketing and distribution.
The number of studios producing CGI feature animation at this level: 1.
The Amazon price for the three-disk Blu-Ray edition of WALL-E with BD Live and digital download copy: $24.99 Wall-E
That is - at least theoretically - 150 GB of content for about one half the cost of one month of broadband cable.
Pixar's return from the geek who links to Pirate Bay: $0