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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 "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...
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)
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
The only people who still think they are selfless Jedi are those who paid no attention to their trial. When they went to court there was tough talk all over the internet, here for sure, about how they would stand up for file sharing. There were all sorts of IANAL assurances that they did nothing wrong and didn't need to hide any of the details of what their site does. The TPB guys were gonna stick it to the copyright holders just like they did in that correspondence they posted on their site.
But when it came to cases they all claimed they really didn't have anything to do with the site. One guy all he did was keep it up and running by wrenching servers. Another guy was just a spokesman. Nobody stepped up with any RMSesque ramblings about the ethics of copyright. They ran and hid from the truth of it kust like every other internet commando would do if it were his neck on the chopping block.
What's to happen regarding the IPREDator VPN service?
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
What a waste of money. You can download TPB from bittorrent or any p2p share for free!
stuff |
??? is probably "GOTO 1"
Then you'll never get to the profit part ...
---
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.
Either way, surely this is the death of The Pirate Bay. It's followed the pattern of being something underground, to becoming something well known amongst the technically literate, to something known by the populace at large, to being discussed by governments, courts and the media to being absorbed by the corporate world.
Like social networking sites like Friendster to Myspace which are in decline or are terminal, the internet crowd is fickle, and will move on to the next big thing at the drop of a hat. Nothing is stopping you.
A comment above from Reddit pointed out that the site has been in ownership for a year now, and that trackers are down to 17 million.
What's replacing it in some sectors seems to be watching tv/movies online, the gray sites that act like iPlayer that link to movies hosted ni China etc. I know quite a few people that use those regularly, that wouldn't necessarily have used torrents before. And sneaker nets are as alive and well as ever.
A lot of other people will think like you, and we can expect to see the pirate bay's traffic to fall, and other trackers to rise in the coming weeks. Whether it recovers or not is a different matter.
I dreamed of Freud: What does this mean?
If it has a Trojan on it, it's safe, right? That's what they taught me in health class.
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.
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"
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.