TorrentFreak Wrote:According to gaming company Global Gaming Factory X, it is in the the process of acquiring The Pirate Bay for $7.8m (SEK 60 million). The acquisition is scheduled to be completed by August and will see the site launch new business models to compensate content providers and copyright owners.

Software company Global Gaming Factory X (GGF) says it is in the process of acquiring The Pirate Bay and file-sharing technology company Peerialism. GGF claims to have the biggest network of internet cafés and gaming centers in the world.

The changeover of ownership is scheduled for August 2009, whereby GGF will take over the operation of the site.

The company says that after it has completed the acquisition it will launch new business models so that copyright owners get paid, which is clearly a huge diversion from TPB’s previous modus operandi.

“Wee 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 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,” said Pandeya.

“Content creators and providers need to control their content and get paid for it. File sharers’ need faster downloads and better quality,” he added.

GGF will acquire the site’s domain names and sites for SEK 60,000,000 ($7.8 million) - SEK 30,000,000 in cash and the rest in newly issue shares.

File-sharing technology company Peerialism will also be acquired by GGF for a total of SEK 100 million, of which at least SEK 50 million will be in cash.

According to GGF, Peerialism has developed a new P2P distribution technology which will be used on The Pirate Bay. The technology is said to be backwards-compatible with BitTorrent although details are scarce at the moment.

At the time of writing, shares in GGF are up 155% - this will quickly become outdated, so check here for latest stats.

This is breaking news and this article will be updated constantly - please keep checking back.

TorrentFreak Wrote:The Pirate Bay Will Decentralize Its Operations (Updated)
Written by Ernesto on June 30, 2009

Alongside the news that The Pirate Bay will sell shares on the Swedish stock market come some other significant changes. The site itself will decentralize and stop hosting and tracking torrents. Instead, The Pirate Bay will use a third party tracker and torrent hosting service to serve its users.

pirate bayEarlier today The Pirate Bay announced that it would be acquired by Global Gaming Factory X (GGF) who are listed on the Swedish stock market. So, Pirate Bay users can not only share files but they can buy a share of the site as well.

Perhaps even more significant for the BitTorrent community is the thus far unreported decision to close down the BitTorrent tracker. Up until today Pirate Bay’s public tracker connected more than half of all BitTorrent users but this is about to change.

Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde has informed TorrentFreak that the site will soon decentralize and stop running a BitTorrent tracker of its own. Instead they will encourage their users to use a yet to be launched third party tracker for their torrents.

To decentralize even further, the torrents that will be listed on the site won't be hosted on The Pirate Bay’s servers anymore. In the near future the site will use a new torrent hosting service that will store the torrents for them. This new hosting service will be open to other torrent sites as well and can be accessed through an API.

In the end The Pirate Bay is making these changes to ensure that the BitTorrent ecosystem stays intact no matter what happens, Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak. By decentralizing the different aspects they hope that BitTorrent users will be less reliant on the uptime of The Pirate Bay’s servers alone. The burden will now be spread among several independently operated services.

For now it remains a mystery what GGF CEO Hans Pandeya meant with “Wee would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site.” That’s worrying to say the least.

In addition, GGF also acquired Peerialism who apparently have developed a new P2P distribution technology which will be used on The Pirate Bay. How this related to the new tracker and external torrent hosting remains unknown.

Wee’re trying to get confirmation and more details from GGF as soon as possible.

Update: According to Johan Sellström, the CTO of Global Gaming Factory, the plans have changed after Peter Sunde talked to us. “Wee had discussed closing it down initially so I think that’s why he said so. The plan is to use technology from Peerialism that makes bandwidth utilization more efficient and then it would not make sense to shut it down,” he said, adding. “Peerialism will modify the tracker but it will be backwards compatible. But all this is subject to change if for some reason it would not work. It is our ambition to do so.”

TorrentFreak Wrote:Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde Discusses the Site’s Future
Written by enigmax on June 30, 2009

On the day that The Pirate Bay announced that they will be sold to a commercial company for $7.8 million, Tomas Wennström secured an audio interview with TPB spokesman Peter Sunde. The interview is of great interest but raises even more questions as shockwaves continue through the P2P community.

Today it was announced that Global Gaming Factory X is in the process of acquiring The Pirate Bay for $7.8m (SEK 60 million). The acquisition is scheduled to be completed by August 2009 and will see the site launch new business models to compensate content providers and copyright owners.

Tomas Wennström of What’s Next managed to secure a recorded audio interview with The Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde. In it Peter says why the site was sold, talks a little about the future for the site and touches on the huge disappointment being expressed by the site’s fans. It’s a very interesting interview, although in common with everything else going on today, it raises even more questions.

Some key points from the interview:

GGF approached The Pirate Bay with a deal several weeks ago. TPB considered GGF to be the correct company to bring the project “to the next level” since they didn’t feel capable of doing it themselves. Peter said he feels that GGF share the same values as TPB.

Peter said that TPB have been approached by companies before to sell out, but they didn’t understand the value of TPB. He said the value of the site is to be found in the userbase and nothing else. He added that if a company is interested in buying that userbase they have to keep up spirits or they will find themselves owning something that rapidly decreases in value.

Tomas Wennström said that he found it crazy that TPB would become a listed company. Peter responded that they think the concept is “super funny” and that’s one of the main reasons they are doing this.

Peter said in the past they’ve had to hide the financial details of the site and who is doing what “for legal reasons” but says that in the future there will have to be more transparency about how the operation is run, adding that people now not only have the chance to share files, but also buy shares in the site.

Peter explained that he and the original owners of TPB disposed of the site in 2006. He refused to name who took the site but referred to a single owner in one of his responses, using the word “he”.

Peter noted that the site hadn’t yet been sold to GGF and the company will have to find funding inside 4 weeks. He said he doesn’t know who the financial backers are, but if GGF cannot find the money then everything goes back to exactly the way it was before.

Peter said that the perfect situation would be if the users of the site set up something to buy The Pirate Bay. Certainly, with all the previous fund raising for buying islands etc this might have been a possibility but this has never even been put forward as an option. The idea seems optimistic considering the backlash among the users.

Currently the site is down after suffering a minor DDoS attack, and TPB’s TiAMO told TorrentFreak that the site’s load balancer had crashed .

Peter says running Pirate Bay has resulted in ‘bad pay’, i.e minus SEK 30 million in fines - incidentally an identical amount to the cash payment part of the deal with GGF.

Tomas Wennström put a scenario to Peter - what if GGF screws up and makes all that is good about The Pirate Bay go away - which seemed like a veiled reference to the availability of the usual TPB content.

“I’m agnostic about it, I think it could be true, could be faulty, but whatever happens at least something happens, which is the big thing here. I’d rather see The Pirate Bay die in a chance of becoming better, than just dying.”

For the time being The Pirate Bay crew will assist the new owners in operating the site. In addition a new tracker will be launched as well as a new torrent hosting service.