Submitted by In what you can certainly call a surprise move, The Pirate Bay has been sold. Global Gaming Factory has announced that is has purchased the torrent search engine for 60 million Swedish Krona (7.8 million USD). They plan to build a business model around The Pirate Bay where content providers and copyright owners get compensatation.
As we all know, The Pirate Bay is a torrent search engine where users can find torrents of all sorts of content. Even thought the website itself doesn’t host any copyrighted content, they did lose a landmark copyright infringement trial in Sweden earlier this year, with the judge imposing a massive fine and 1 year in jailtime.
You’re probably not the only one who has never heard of Global Gaming Factory before. According to the press release they have “the largest network of Internet cafes and game centers and provides software”. Together with TPB, they also purchased Peerialism, and they plan to make TPB work in such a way that users get faster and higher-quality downloads, while at the same time compensating content providers and copyright owners.
“We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site,” said Hans Pandeya, CEO of GGF, “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. File sharers’ need faster downloads and better quality.”
So, the big question on everybody’s lips… Did the The Priate Bay owners (what do I do with that double definite article?!?) sell out? Will this be the end of TPB as we know it? According to a blog post on the team’s weblog, we’ve got nothing to fear. “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,” the The Pirate Bay founders write.
Furthermore, “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.” Time will tell whatever that means.
A surprising turn of events, and the comment on the blog post and elsewhere on the internet are anything but happy. People see this as the end of The Pirate Bay, and seeing for instance the whole Napster thing, that’s not a stretch. Time will tell whatever comes out of this, but there’s little to worry about. For those of us in who live in countries with sane laws, there are countless alternatives.
This makes the Pirate Bay group less creditable in my eyes.
Especially after their bold claims of not being profitable at all. In fact, the Pirate Bay is worth several millions, at least their are people willing to pay them.
Yes, at least now, the PB crew earned a decent amount of money with PB. That is, mostly with illegal downloads. They made money on the content of others. That is a fact now, even while you still may root for them or torrent trackers in general (I do, from a civil rights point of view).
People buy highly unprofitable companies for millions all the time. This hardly proves anything.
If we’ve learned anything from the dot.com boom it’s that there is very little correlation between what a company is ‘worth’, in any absolute sense of the word, and what some schmuck is willing to pay for the company.
I agree.
But judging from past experiences this will be the end of TPB as we know it.
It is really time to build a decentralized fast anonymous file sharing system.
I think anonymizing the content is the way to go. OFFsystem has some interesting ideas. It just needs more work/or a restart.
Japan is far ahead in that regard, but most of their systems are closed source. No go for me.
Why? BitTorrent is still useful. Besides, if TPB falls, Demonoid is still around.
There’s hundreds of other torrent search engines. Always have been and always will be.
Bit-Torrent is.
As is Gnuttella (spelling?) – the open-source protocol Limewire is built upon.
Lets also not forget usenet – in fact this has been around as long as the world wide web.
There’s no shortage of ways to obtain content – it’s just there’s always going to be a trade off between popularity and content. ie: The less popular you are, the less content is added – and the more popular you are, the higher risk you have of content removal / getting shut down / fake content by copywrite holders to track IPs.
Not heard of OFFsystem, but I can’t see how you can truly anonymizing the content.
For one, it’s impossible for users to download content without an IP address being flagged up at some stage in the process.
And 2ndly, it’s impossible to completely mask the content being downloaded as, if users can search trackers then so can copywrite holders.
The closest you could get to anonymizing yourself would be using a proxy in a country that doesn’t have copywrite law nor western treaties. And by heavily encrypting all data packets to and from the proxy.
Reading helps and your friend Google will help you with that:
http://tinyurl.com/kjonwo
..and if you read my post then you’d realise that OFFsystem is irrelevant to my point that decentralised P2P systems already exist and true animosity is impossible.
so thank you for googling for me, but it really doesn’t alter me original point in the slightest.
You are wrong.
True animosity is very possible
And you still didn’t read the OFFsystem link. In OFF a download can mean anything. In a democracy where the benefit of the doubt still exists no one can punish you for downloading stuff that can mean anything.
I did read it, but i still don’t see how it’s possible to have true animosity on the internet when the internet (to use a poor use of the term) needs to send data back to you.
At the end of the day, you have to be identified to recieve the data.
Now it doesn’t matter how much you scramble the data nor bounce it off a million peers, it’s still, ultimately, traceable.
And in the rare case it’s not worth the time, you can still go after the people who proxied the data as they technically downloaded and uploaded copywrite data.
So ultimately, someone still gets identified.
True animosity doesn’t work so long as you need to send and recieve data.
Thus the only way to stay completely invisible online would be not to go online.
Edited 2009-07-02 19:57 UTC
The word is anonymity, I was joking when I repeated it.
And if you read the link then you didn’t understand it.
Flagged IP? TOR, take a hit on transfer rate but blows away the IP address. Given an encrypted protocol similar to https, your transfer packets won’t be wide open either. Anonymized and secured. Most are not going to accept the transfer rate reduction though.
You still have the tracker to contend with but who is searching for what can be made pretty anonymous also. The real problem applies to hosting sites who must provide the tracker and have an identified IP. In that regard, they are distributing copywrite content so they accept the risks involved.
That’s all very good and well, but what if the people hosting the data are the copywrite holders?
They then have a list of IP to chase after.
Sure, the IP addresses might not be the originating requestor, but I bet many countries would still grant law suits against those redistributing copyrighted content via a distributed networks regardless of whether the PC owner had knowledge of such activities or not (though, if he’s running such software, chances are he has illegal data of his own that he wants to hide)
Edited 2009-07-02 20:06 UTC
The money directly goes to an nonprofit organization which is founded this very moment. If they would keep it, it still would be more than a million less than they would have to pay for compensation (if they privately owned any money of that deal).
Great work, Sherlock. You uncovered their secret master plan to lose $1.5 million. Those greedy bastards!
A bold claim. I believe it when I actually see it. You should do the same.
That’s actually what I would expect. If somebody builds a business on my property, should he pay _less_ compensation than what he earned with it?
And do you think sucessfully getting sued was part of the business plan?
Think, then post. I do not even state that their secret master plan was to earn big money with Pirate Bay. What I do state, however, is that a major part of the TBP defense in court was the claim they would never earn, but only lose money with TPB. Now they earn a big amount of money with it, and this is a contradiction. It stays a contradiction no matter who they throw this money at or how much compensation they have to pay.
And btw., I still believe the court ruling was wrong.
It makes me sick seeing how punny nations like swedish make a good money while others going to hell. Obviously they sold it for 60million korona which would make the owners enough money to retire cause the average makes like 30K SEK/month.
“The profits from the sale will go into a foundation”
like hell it will. On this world foundation means organized crime and I strongly doubt the authors would throw away all that money.
The only reason why they not rotting in jail already isn’t the publicity but the money. As long as you have money you can do whatever you want buy the f–king law.
Bye bye TPB
TPB is falling down, falling down, falling down.
TPB is..
Adios TPB
The world got complacent by allowing TPB to dominate the tracker indexing services.
Now we can finally get a truly distributed torrent indexing system into play.
TPB has never dominated. It has always been one of many, and for a lot of people, has never been the best. There are still plenty of public tracker indexes out there.
Edited 2009-06-30 11:42 UTC
According to TorrentFreak PirateBay is responsible for more than half of all connections between Bittorrent users. [1] Downplaying their importance for the current Torrent network is not adequate given the numbers.
[1] http://torrentfreak.com/p2p-researchers-fear-bittorrent-meltdown-09…
Shouldn’t that either be Kronor (the plural of Krona) or even better, Swedish Crowns, which is the literal English translation of name for the Swedish currency?
Yes it should, or you could the the standard abbreviation SEK.
Um, at what point do any of you see that the Movie and Record companies have a point? Are we all entitled to just get whatever we want for free? Shouldn’t we be willing to pay some amount to pay the Movie and Music creators a licensing fee, maybe?
I think I get that there are a lot of odd, stupid laws and contracts out there that do not allow me, for example, to buy something made in Cuba or England or Romania because the RIAA does not have a proper contract out there or the Writers Guild doesn’t get a cut, and I see where I might go out and download it because I am simply not able to buy it, but is The Dark Knight really so expensive that you can’t buy it? Come on!!!
Yes!
…is The Dark Knight really so expensive that you can’t buy it? Come on!!!
Well, downloading books, movies and music for personal use is not illegal in The Netherlands. We pay a fee on empty media like CD’s and DVD’s to compensate artists.
So yes, I’ve downloaded movies and watched them. Strangely enough, when my bf and I like a movie, we will buy it just to own that piece. On the other hand, if something is dreck that shouldn’t have seen the light of day… it’s mostly fat chance…
The Dark Knight is definitely on the “to buy” list.
There is a try before you buy aspect to it – there’s a lot of schlock out there that can be entertaining once, but isn’t worth money to me or to others.
Which is kind of the legal issue, are they losing a sale or not.
With movies anyhow, there is that delay between theater release and the DVD coming out. Some get there own copy early then buy the DVD when it’s finally made available. It’s more of a grey area but it’s another situation to consider.
There is also content format to consider. One may own the DVD but torrent down a format more friendly to a mobile media player. iTunes greatly reduces that need but it wasn’t always so and iTunes does not support all mobile players.
In the last discussion, one fellow dusggested a trade in where you buy the DVD/license then later trade the disk in for a blueray/license. To gain an increase in quality this makes some sense. If it’s simply to allow the consumer a different format; I think I’ll stick to ripping my legally obtained audio disks to mp3 rather than paying for the same license twice when fair use already applies. Of course, in the US, this was illegal until the Mallenium Act was adjusted.
What about stuff u can’t buy outside US? Or even in the US? Are they entitled to discriminate while the technical burdens are no more? There are no “legal” possibilities however unrealistic the price would be for people of China or India.
This was unexpected, as a long time piratebay user i find this really strange, but i guess we will have to wait and see
Mininova.
Things get bought and sold all the time, specially things that are popular and specially in times like ours. But they do not just disappear, being sold they start something new (sorry if I sound too optimistic for those who take it too tragically). The question is what this TPB abbreviation is now going to turn into (is it going to be something like GPB)and what this change will mean to us mortal beings?
Edited 2009-06-30 14:34 UTC
We have seen what happened to Napster.
TPB will still be around, but it will be horrible and useless, like Napster is now.
Exactly what I was thinking – the Bay is dead, long live Demonoid? Put a fork in it, it’s done.
It’s certainly worth millions as is, problem is the proposed changes will instantly make it worth nothing.
Edited 2009-06-30 17:24 UTC
Yeah, in a way it’s completely ridiculous.
Everyone will move to another indexer as soon as TPB becomes dangerous or unusable.
I don’t know if there’s a definitive English rule about companies with ‘The’ in their name, but I usually shy away from the double-the. Generally I try to word the sentence a different way to make sure it’s clear:
Instead of ‘Did the The Pirate Bay owners sell out?’
Maybe: ‘Did The Pirate Bay’s owners sell out?’
(That would work for any company as well; for example: ‘Did Microsoft’s owners sell out?’)
Perhaps someone should simply patent the business practice of “the starting of a company name with the word ‘The”? Should be a slam-dunk with the USPTO.
Then the issue would become a trivial case which does not impact us much. 🙂
Edited 2009-06-30 15:00 UTC
It seems that TBP will get Napsterized.
Ha ha. They were pitched like innocent poor freedom fighters over here. While they were earning money with showing porn advertizing all over the place.
Never found anything worth of downloading there, just mass culture junk.
I find it hugely funny given that on Arstechnica there is the head of the UK music trade group BPI who admited that going after Napster many years ago was a stupid move:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/06/british-music-boss-…
The reason I don’t buy music on line is simply because one is for the same price obtaining a product that is of inferior quality. The only way they could ever get me to purchase on line stuff is if they provided music world wide on day one (not dropped out over the year), lossless DRM free downloading and at least $5 less than the cost of purchasing a CD in a store.
The law suit might have shut down pirate bay but it fails to address the underlying reason for why people use it over purchasing legitimate copies of music. Those who advocate law suits remind me of the ‘tough on crime’ people who never address the causes, prevention, and rehabilitation. They want a simple answer quickly than willing to acknowledge that they are in part to blame for what we see on the net.
According to today’s business newspaper here in Sweden this is far from a done deal. The owner of Global Gaming Factory admitted in an interview that not only do they not have the 60 million SEK they’ve offered, but they don’t know where they’ll be getting it from either. He said they have some interested investors and that he’d be willing to sell of some personal assets to help raise the money, but it all sounds very vague. According to their last quarterly report they made 900K loss on 1 million SEK of sales and have 1.5 million SEK in liquid assets, so they have to raise basically all of the money from outside investors.
The other interesting piece of information was that no one knows who will actually will be getting the money from the sale. All that is known is that TPB owned by a foreign company which nobody knows anything about. So if the deal goes through it will be interesting to see who actually walks away with the money.
Here in the U.S. any software developer, studio, etc.. that had content spread on PB would be able to recover in civil court any proceeds from the sale. By actually profiting from this, I would also go so far as to say that a RICO case could/should be made against them.
So all this talk about freedom this and freedom that, just like everyone else what freedom meant for them was the freedom to make money off of other’s work. So sad they got so many naive little kiddies swallowing their B.S. But PB fought the good fight right, for all of our freedom? Well no, it is idiots like these fools that do more harm than good. So did PB pay taxes on all the money they made? Did they provide employment, health benefits? Exactly what did they really provide back to society other than giving a chance for spoiled little brats who find themselves entitled to what is not theirs. All this talk about defending artists, and fighting patents and copyrights is complete and utter bullshit that the ignorant young ones have bought hook and sinker. So will they now provide even a small compensation to individual developers, small business, independent artists? Not on your life. The idiot crowd tried to make this out to be David vs. Goliath, big evil corporations against a few guys fighting for our freedoms. Well they were not fighting for my freedom, they were only fighting for the opportunity to leech what was not theirs, no different than any other criminal organization.
Yes I am sure there will be others, although maybe not as dumb as to flaunt what they do. And while this goes on, we can certainly expect the same people downloading everything they can get their grubby little hands on to continue complaining and whining about DRM, copy protection etc..That is until some grow up and figure out what has been apparent to most.
Who is “them”?
The company that bought TPB, the people who work for TPB on a day to day basis or the foreign faceless corporation that apparently actually owns TPB. All three options provide obvious legal difficulties.
Since it seems to be a bad time for bittorent I hope the people will change to more modern, more distributed, more secure and even anonymous protocols.
Or maybe there will be more people running bittorrent trackerless, but IMO there are better protocols, but most of them have too few implementations and so it’s hard to try new or different things.
Break the law, embarass your country, and sell the company to earn millions.
Gee, sounds like Sweden’s learning the American business model.