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The Pirate Bay acquired by Global Gaming Factory X

by Parm Mann on 30 June 2009, 14:03

Tags: The Pirate Bay

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The Pirate Bay - one of the world's largest facilitators of BitTorrent file sharing - has been acquired by Global Gaming Factory X (GGF), a Swedish advertising company that operates a network of internet cafés and gaming centres.

The deal, said to be worth in the region of 60m Swedish Krona (£4.7m), is due to be closed in August 2009 and will see the operation of The Pirate Bay taken over by GGF.

Despite recent legal troubles - including a landmark lawsuit in April 2009 in which The Pirate Bay's creators were found guilty of assistance to copyright infringement - The Pirate Bay remains one of the world's most popular websites and serves up to four million registered users.

GGF, who now owns the popular piratebay.org domain, states that it has plans to take The Pirate Bay forward with "new business models that allow compensation to the content providers and copyright owners."

Commenting on the deal, GGF CEO Hans Pandeya had this to say:

We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site

The Pirate Bay is a site that is among the top 100 most visited Internet sites in the world. However, in order to live on, The Pirate Bay requires a new business model, which satisfies the requirements and needs of all parties, content providers, broadband operators, end users, and the judiciary. Content creators and providers need to control their content and get paid for it.

Meanwhile, the official Pirate Bay Blog has offered a message of "don't worry - be happy!" to its millions of users. Although many of the 500-odd comments already made on the Blog suggest that users believe the deal to be the beginning of the end for the hugely-popular site, The Pirate Bay's creators offer this message of hope:

It's the same site essentially. On the internets, stuff dies if it doesn't evolve. We don't want that to happen.

We've been working on this project for many years. It's time to invite more people into the project, in a way that is secure and safe for everybody. We need that, or the site will die. And letting TPB (The Pirate Bay) die is the last thing that is allowed to happen!

If the new owners will screw around with the site, nobody will keep using it. That's the biggest insurance one can have that the site will be run in the way that we all want to.

Given The Pirate Bay's recent legal woes - including a one-year jail sentence for a number of founders and a fine of over £2m - the decision to sell may not come as a surprise to many.



HEXUS Forums :: 14 Comments

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Blimey. April was just shy of 3 months ago too.
Talk about rewarding the file sharing industry, that must be a good £500,000+ to each of the 4 behind TPB, combine that with the influx of ‘customers’ to the likes of mininova.org etc aswell!
anyone else thinking of napster right now?
gamer91
anyone else thinking of napster right now?

I'm thinking that another new bittorent site will take its place when piratebay is ruined….
Yep, it's not really going to achieve anything in the long term for anybody.

Except GGFX who will be £4.7m short.