Gaming firm buys The Pirate Bay
p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- Global Gaming Factory says it’s bought The Pirate Bay for 60 million kroner (about $C9,025,310), says a press statement.
And, “Don’t worry – be happy!” – blogs TPB’s Peter Sunde.
“Content creators and suppliers must be able to gain control of their content and get paid for it, ” says TPB’s new owner Hans Pandeya, quoted by di.se.
The deal, said to be half in stocks and half in shares, includes the domain name and related web sites, including www.thepiratebay.org.
Nor is this a spoof.
“Yes, it’s true,” says Peter Sunde on the TPB blog, going on »»»
News reached the press today in Sweden – The Pirate Bay might get aquired by Global Gaming Factory X AB.
A lot of people are worried. We’re not and you shouldn’t be either!
TPB is being sold for a great bit underneath it’s value if the money would be the interesting part. It’s not. The interesting thing is that the right people with the right attitude and possibilities keep running the site.
As all of you know, there’s not been much news on the site for the past two-three years. 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 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. And – you can now not only share files but shares with people. Everybody can indeed be the owner of The Pirate Bay now. That’s awesome and will take the heat of us.
The old crew is still around in different ways. We will also not stop being active in the politics of the internets – quite the opposite. Now we’re fueling up for going into the next gear. TPB will have economical muscles to let people evolve it. It will team up with great technicians to evolve the protocols. And we, the people interested in more than just technology, will have the time to focus on that. It’s win-win-win.
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!
Global Gaming, which says it has the largest network of online cafés and gaming centers anywhere, is also buying a file sharing technology company called Peerialism, according to a Google translation of the di.se post.
It expects to complete the purchase in August, it says.
“Through the acquisitions of The Pirate Bay and Peerialism, GGF will obtain a strategic position in the international market for digital distribution” Pandeya says in the story, stating GGF intends to launch new business models, “that allow compensation for content providers and copyright holders,” it says.
“We will eliminate today’s … pirates,” says Pandeya.
A press conference is skated for today, says di.se.
Stay tuned.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
TPB’s Peter Sunde – TPB might change owner, June 30, 2009
di.se – Listat bolag köper Pirate Bay för 60 Mkr, June 30, 2009
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June 30th, 2009 at 9:01 am
Truly a unforgivable act by Pirate Bay. They were the fore runners for net nutrality and they pull this fucking shit?
How many users are now back stabbed by Peter? Seriously…
This is fucking redicolous.
Goodbye Pirate bay.
June 30th, 2009 at 9:06 am
Yup, one way or another, Big Media always win. To see them pull this shit with extremely lame prosecutions and obviously bent judges really makes me sick.
June 30th, 2009 at 9:12 am
The trial was not against the site, it was against the four people running it.
So, a very bright move!
June 30th, 2009 at 9:12 am
“We will eliminate today’s … pirates,” says Pandeya.
Yeah, right. Stupid fuck.
June 30th, 2009 at 10:07 am
Very bad move , the worst TPB made ever! And theywere more clever than IFPI so far …
Possibly their last moves were unsucessful to persuade the savvy
June 30th, 2009 at 10:12 am
A year at most, then it will be gone. People go will migrate to something new instead. I for one is outta TPB now.
June 30th, 2009 at 10:12 am
“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.”
http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/8wwkp/they_they_sold_the_pirate_bay/c0aow1t
June 30th, 2009 at 10:22 am
Tomas Wennström: “I got a an interview with TPB’s spokesperson Peter Sunde, and in this podcast he talks about how the deal is set up, why Pirate Bay is sold, the heat TPB is getting from some disappointed fans and the future of the site.”
http://www.whatsnext.se/2009/06/30/podcast-with-peter-sunde-on-the-ggfs-accquisition-of-the-pirate-bay/
Cheers!
June 30th, 2009 at 11:01 am
um wow, need more coffee to process this one.
June 30th, 2009 at 11:56 am
One of the most common blog commets there is “cancel my account”.
Looks like another bookmarked torrent site I’m going to have to delete. I
did however keep Mininova as there is still a lot of content they are not filtering.
June 30th, 2009 at 12:08 pm
Downloads tracked by The Pirate Bay, despite often having a great number of seeds and peers on most popular torrents, has always been very slow in spite of the fact that my provider doesn’t throttle. I gave up trying to help others there by making an account so I could comment a long time ago since it would always get deleted within 24 hours for no reason. These are the primary reasons as to why I prefer Demonoid and others. To be honest I’m not at all surprised by this news and in fact predicted it about half a year ago. Everyone sells out eventually. It’s just a matter of time and we all knew theirs was up. Right?
June 30th, 2009 at 12:38 pm
I’ll wait and see what happens.. but it will probably fade away. $ always wins.
June 30th, 2009 at 1:40 pm
While this “looks” bad……what bugs me right now is that surfer has gone silent!
byo & stw
June 30th, 2009 at 2:39 pm
So far there have been 700 plus comments in their blog and more than half of them are asking to have their accts removed, the tpb seems surprised of that but has promised to set up an acct removal function at some point today, so that will most likely be at the end of the week.
In another post i said tpb would be gone within a year, i will change that to 6 months.
Since i am living in the Corporate States of Riaa i used tpb mostly to get shows and films from the scandinavian countries, but i have found a few private trackers that are giving me the same now, so i am not going to miss tpb, it is just a shame that they sell out everything they have said that they stood for just like that. And also, that everyone had to read it via the newswire outlets, and not on their own blog first.
June 30th, 2009 at 8:38 pm
I’m keeping an eye on this one….I keep thinking the TPB guys have something up their sleeves. I think they’re too dedicated to just sell out. Or maybe I just want to think that.
In any case, ultimately, TPB is just a torrent tracker. There are other torrent trackers out there. Contrary to what the MAFIAA (and even many of those that fight them) may believe, the elimination of the Pirate Bay will not stop or even curtail their so-called “piracy.”
June 30th, 2009 at 8:44 pm
I’m not so sure this is such a bad move. Regardless of what anyone’s position is on copyright and filesharing, I highly doubt The Pirate Bay’s founders were hell-bent on depriving content owners of their income. Rather, they sought to embrace modern technology to create a new distribution method that would empower the consumers and correct any flaws or restrictions imposed by the current one, just like many other torrent site operators, software developpers, etc. This new type of business model is the first step towards ending the war between the content cartels and their consumers.
July 1st, 2009 at 5:29 am
Okay, I just gotta say something:
1. If they’ve been trying to run this deal for “years”, then that makes me sorta worried about what their original intention with TPB was, from the beginning. I’ll (probably) read the interview later, but, by the same token, they can SAY a lot of things, but that doesn’t stop the new owners from taking TPB in a different direction. (Contrast the REAL Mp3.com of bygone years, with the corporate-funded shitsmear it’s become.
Or, for that matter, the “New” Crapster — I mean Napster. (God, what a piece of crap THAT is.)
2. I might be kinda paranoid here, but this whole thing smacks of a really elaborate ploy:
First the TPB guys get themselves looking extremely badass and “anti-establishment” by utterly refusing to “play nice” and comply with takedown notices. (REALLY solid move, from a “copyfighter” perspective, but when you look at the “bigger picture”, kinda hollow.
Then, after they basically get declared the “flagship” of torrent indexers and the MOST utterly-hardcore about standing up to the bullshit, we find out that the Swedish government doesn’t think that judge was “biased”, even though he’s a member of a lot of pro-copy”right” groups. Methinks maybe the trial was possibly NOT about “stopping piracy” so much as just drumming up publicity and good feelings for TPB. (Which they succeeded in doing.)
3. Now, we hear that they’re selling TPB to some “gaming” company (or at least it has “gaming” in it’s name), and the first thing out of the new owners’ mouths is about “stopping today’s pirates”. It’s also at least somewhat dismaying that they explicitly mention “copyright holders” as a seperate category from “content providers”.
So, to put it bluntly, it really looks like TPB is — or at least might be — a repeat of KaZaa (big damn honeypot for “Big Media”.)
Somehow this doesn’t surprise me if the TPB guys want to take the money and run, while the REAL TPB is destroyed to make way for more lobotomized, corporate crap. I mean, look at Fanning — first, he creates Napster, then he takes the money and runs, THEN he creates that Snocap thing, explicitly marketed as something to protect “Rights-holders”.
So, sad as it is to say, TPB is probably irretrievably fucked — but the TPB guys managed to cash in, and — like we all figured — they probably won’t even face jail-time after the appeals process. We’ll have fairly conclusive evidence if the “legal problems” start going away really easily.
Sad to say, but a lot of the biggest names in the “copy-fight” scene look to be sellouts.
But, like other folks have said, the “war” will go on — TPB replaced other stuff, and other stuff will undoubtedly replace TPB.
(On the — potential — bright side, the New owners might actually deploy “business models” that aren’t total shit — such as promoting “permissive” licenses like the GPL and Creative Commons. At least that will have SOME use as a hosting/distribution platform, even if one that’s deliberately been “de-fanged”.