Swedish Software Firm Acquires The Pirate Bay For $7.7 Million

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/30/swedish-software-firm-acquires-the-pirate-bay-for-77-million/

by ed • 17 years ago

82 31 17 years ago

Flankk• 17 years ago

It had to happen eventually. I'd like to know how successful they'll be monetizing a site people visit specifically because they don't want to pay anything.

mkuhn• 17 years ago

The other question is the legal ramifications if the continue TPB's current "illegal" activity and profit from them. I think even in Sweden the legal base there is questionable (after the judgment against the four founders of TPB)...

ErrantX4• 17 years ago

yes this is a bit of a win for the media companies - now there will be a paper trail to sniff around at and the company is leaps and bounds more open to legal action.

I suspect some media company execs are getting quite excited at this. I cant figure it out becuase TPB MUST know that the original model will probably have to die - unless they havent told the whole story?

stse2• 17 years ago

At the press conference they had some vague idea about monetizing search and, with their new protocol, lowering peering costs for ISPs. They also claimed that the file-sharers themselves could get paid for sharing certain files. The investors funding the deal was said to be individuals. It all seems kind of uncertain at this point, but this won't be the last thing we hear about this.

Edit: The deal is not finalized, they still need to confirm funding and get approval at a shareholders' meeting, with the condition that they can use tpb in "an appropriate and legal way".

alexandros• 17 years ago

Well, at least now they can pay the fine

henriklied• 17 years ago

"Unfortunately", no. Not a single SEK goes to The Pirate Bay. Peter Sunde and the rest of the crew has instructed the buyer to put all the money into a monetary fund overseas.

Source (in Swedish): http://twitter.com/brokep/status/2400754726

stse2• 17 years ago

Just wanted to confirm that piece of information. The fund will be setup to support internet projects and activism.

bhrgunatha• 17 years ago

There is a translation of some of the feed on torrentfreak (emphasis added is mine - there may be more to this than meets the eye.)

http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-sold-to-software-comp...

Daniel Goldberg: @ brokep Is this correct? http://bit.ly/1YR0m

Peter S Kolmisoppi: @ danielg0ldberg Yes.

Daniel Goldberg: @ brokep What a thing! Who gets the money? Who owns the TPB?

Peter S Kolmisoppi: @ danielg0ldberg Foreign company, with demands from our side to finance a fund for internet projects. We get no money.

Daniel Goldberg: @ brokep Cool. What do you mean internet project? Will you not have to use the money to cover the damages?

Peter S Kolmisoppi: @ danielg0ldberg Internet Project in the form of political activism, etc. TPB changed hands in 2006 already to not be sued.

Daniel Goldberg @ brokep Congratulations, the scoop! Who is the owner of TPB today?

Peter S Kolmisoppi: @ danielg0ldberg It’s partly why we’ve have been so sure that lawsuits against us is pointless in the end … :-)

Peter S Kolmisoppi: @ danielg0ldberg I do not think that I may say for legal reasons. But they are people we trust. And have conditioned things too..

mmelin• 17 years ago

I'd never heard of Global Gaming Factory X before, but apparently they own both Smartlaunch and CyberCafePro, which are both major products for managing "cyber cafés".

miracle3• 17 years ago

Now the court can finally raise the fine! :)

mlLK• 17 years ago

Apparently traders on the Stockholmsborsen exchange see this buy-out as a good thing. Their stock is sky-rocketing: http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/charts/cha... I wonder if this buy-out will effect how TPB conducts their operation though, I'm assuming it won't.

chris112• 17 years ago

It seems like the founders of TPB have had several projects fail because of lack of funding or support. Their effort to buy Sealand is a good example.

So the foundation could do a lot of good. It has a lot of money now, and the founders of the TPB probably will be able to give projects more attention.

I don't quite see how the Pirate Bay will stay in business then. Very few media companies are going to want to deal with it while it is still offering free downloads of drm free material. Just look at Hulu. While Hulu is a great site, they have limited the site's usefulness because of pressure from corporate partners. And I am sure that TPB will drastically change.

furyg32• 17 years ago

Hulu isn't the best example since the corporate 'partners' are really owners. Still, it's going to be interesting to see if this new organization will buckle to legal threats and pressure.

ErrantX4• 17 years ago

Ah... check out the http://www.globalgamingfactory.com/ site

and the technology company Peerialism, that has developed next generation file-sharing technology

so their going to try and combine TPB traffic with whatever product it is Peeralism have "developed"?

furyg32• 17 years ago

Or maybe their 'developing' wasn't going so well...

ErrantX4• 17 years ago

Perhaps - though their ste (http://www.peerialism.se) is a bit blank initially there IS some reasonable stuff buried in the pages.

That said from what I can see they seem to be selling off their technology in the very recent past so... maybe a bit of both camps?

w1ntermute• 17 years ago

From http://digg.com/tech_news/The_Pirate_Bay_Sold_To_Software_Co... :

Something is very fishy here. I live in Sweden and I checked out this company.

Global Gaming Factory X AB (Ltd, Co.) never registered for "F-skatt", which is a basic permit needed for companies in Sweden to operate under corporate tax laws instead of private laws. Not having this permit usually means that it's a company 1) run under a mother company or 2) that isn't active.

Furthermore, their website consists of this press release and NOTHING ELSE. Their turnover has not gone over $ 750,000 any of the past two years and their total loss for that same time is approx. - $ 2,677,000.

I think this is just TPB playing legal games.

lucumo• 17 years ago

Hmm, I just checked. Their website is there, it's just that the press release was important enough to serve as splash screen.

See, e.g., http://www.globalgamingfactory.com/Organisation.html

taitems• 17 years ago

The title on oursignal included: "and goes legal". That worked so well for Napster..

bretthoerner• 17 years ago

So because one company failed, all companies will fail?

utnick• 17 years ago

napster failed?

It got bought by best buy for over 100 million dollars. It is a great service, I'm listening to the new wilco album on it right now.

mojonixon• 17 years ago

Global Gaming Factory X doesn't appear to be a real company. It seems to just be some legal maneuvering by TPB crew. The punks fight dirty. I approve. This is the real news. "TorrentFreak was informed by TPB’s Peter Sunde that the site will soon decentralize and quit running a properietary BitTorrent tracker, instead encouraging its user base to use a yet to be launched third party tracker for their torrents."

zacharypinter• 17 years ago

One of the guys from TPB shed some more light on the issue over at reddit:

"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."

chris112• 17 years ago

That does make it seem like it will be an improvement. At the very least, it will be more private.

Unfortunately, I don't see how any big media company is going to want to do any major deals with them. I doubt they would sign a contract with someone when they plan on suing the company or customers. But at least hopefully it will help out smaller companies and independent artists.

fatdog789• 17 years ago

Nobody here finds it the least bit disturbing that these guys got a $7.7 million pay day for helping steal copyrighted works?

At a minimum, they've taken $7.7 million out of the pockets of programmers and artists.

These guys aren't heroes. They're selfish whores who discovered the secret to turning downloaders into their willing lemmings.

zouhair• 17 years ago

The same goes for Google

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=dark+knight+filetyp...

Swedish Software Firm Acquires The Pirate Bay For $7.7 Million

Related Stories