After Sale, Pirate Bay to Become Cash Cow?

Submitted by MacRonin on June 30, 2009 - 1:26pm

After Sale, Pirate Bay to Become Cash Cow?: Via Threat Level.

The Pirate Bay has agreed to be sold for $7.7 million, a deal with a Swedish software maker that would ultimately turn the world’s most notorious BitTorrent tracker into a legitimate player.

The move by Global Gaming Factory X AB comes nearly three months after the four co-founders of The Pirate Bay were found guilty of facilitating copyright infringement, and face a year each in prison pending appeals in addition to a $3.6 million fine.

While the site is to discontinue pointing the way to free movies, music, games and software, Global Gaming Factory thinks it can turn The Pirate Bay into a money-making venture.

“We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site,” Hans Pandeya, Global Gaming’s chief executive, said in a statement.

If Napster could go legitimate, so can The Pirate Bay, which claims more than 20 million users. But once bad-boys Napster and BitTorrent went legit, they virtually fell of the map. Whether that will happen to The Pirate Bay is not clear, as the site seems to be moving into an entirely different business model.

Weeks ago, The Pirate Bay began offering a VPN encryption service for $7 monthly and claims 180,000 people have signed up for the service. And over the weekend, it announced “beta extreme” testing of a YouTube-like service that could attract advertising dollars. But demand for such services might fizzle as The Pirate Bay looses its luster.

Global Gaming, which owns internet cafes and gaming venues, also acquired file-sharing company Peerialism of Sweden to compliment its Pirate Bay purchase.

“Peerialism has developed a new data distribution technology which now can be introduced on the best known file-sharing site, The Pirate Bay. Since the technology is compatible with the existing it will quickly allow for new values to be created for all key stakeholders and facilitate new business opportunities,” Johan Ljungberg, Peerialism’s chief executive officer said in a statement.
Pirate Bay administrators Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Peter Sunde were found guilty in April, along with Carl Lundström, who was accused of funding the five-year-old operation.

The April verdicts were on appeal amid allegations the judge who presided over the case was biased because he was a member of pro-copyright groups. That appeal was rejected, however, and the operators are expected to appeal the case on a host of other grounds.

The biggest contention concerns claims by the site’s operators that they cannot be guilty of infringement because Pirate Bay points the way to where copyrighted music, movies, games and software can be had for free, but does not physically host the content.

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