Out-Law News 2 min. read
01 Jul 2009, 2:13 pm
Swedish company Global Gaming Factory (GGF) has agreed to buy the site, which has been at the centre of political, legal and cultural storms all its life. It was the biggest repository of links to pirated content, though it hosted none itself. Its founders were found guilty earlier this year of facilitating copyright infringement in Sweden.
GGF said that it wanted to use its software and The Pirate Bay's millions of users to establish a new, legal peer to peer (P2P) file sharing network that could help to ease traffic pressure on internet service providers (ISPs).
GGF chief executive Hans Pandeya told a news conference that he wanted the network to be used to traffic copyrighted music, but that he wanted it to generate income so that copyright holders could be paid for any music sent from one user to another.
Pandeya wants his technology to create a new, ultra-fast network of file sharers who could distribute large files around the internet. People would pay for this network to distribute their material and users who allow their computers to form part of the network would be paid under GGF's plan.
The plan also includes the possibility of Pirate Bay carrying advertising to generate income that could be passed to copyright owners. GGF plans to make copyrighted material available for free, paying copyright owners from its income from advertising and network operation.
"We want to introduce new business models that would enable content providers and rights owners to get paid for content that pirates come to the site to look for," he said in an automatic translation of a Swedish statement.
"The Pirate Bay is among the top 100 most popular sites in the world, but it needs a business model that meets the needs of all parties, including content providers, broadband operators, music seekers and the judiciary," he said. "Content creators and suppliers need to be able to control their material and get paid for it while users need to be able to download faster and with better quality."
GGF said that it had also acquired a university spin out company called Peerialism, whose data distribution, distributed storage and P2P technology will be used by The Pirate Bay as the basis of GGF's new kind of network.
While Pirate Bay users accused the site's owners of being motivated by greed, they said in a post on the site that cash was not their motivation.
"TPB is being sold for a great bit underneath it's value if the money would be the interesting part. It's not," they said. "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 internet, stuff dies if it doesn't evolve. We don't want that to happen," they said.
The four owners were convicted of facilitating copyright infringement earlier this year. They were ordered to pay a £2.4m fine and sentenced to a year in prison. They are appealing the ruling.
Sceptics may think it unlikely that the music industry, which has spent 10 years pursuing pirates and piracy websites through the courts, will be quick to cut deals with the web's most notorious piracy-enabling site.
Just last week, though, the head of the UK's record label trade body the BPI said that he wishes the industry had done more to work with, rather than against, early file-sharing technology company Napster.
"In 1999 Napster developed a great digital service, but did so at the expense of music, while the music business protected music at the expense of progressing online digital services," he wrote in a column for the BBC.
