Swedish Software Firm Acquires The Pirate Bay For $7.7 Million | Hacker News Reader

Swedish Software Firm Acquires The Pirate Bay For $7.7 Million

techcrunch.com

82 pointsed31 comments

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

Well, at least now they can pay the fine

"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

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

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..

One must be a fool to believe that they don't get any money at all...

The foreign company certainly belongs to them, and they are trying to cash out twice (once by selling their company and by getting donations from their loyal supporters).

And even if the site belongs to a different party, they are running the site and are responsible doing the copyright violations. You can also not hide behind a company when you are commiting murder.

They committed murder? Providing links to copyrighted material may be considered bad by a lower court in Sweden, but you really can't compare it with murder.

Please learn to read before you write (kleiner PB Lemming). I didn't say they commited murder. I did just say that it doesn't matter if what they did was under the umbrella of a company or not. It is illegal, as it is illegal to commit murder, to print money if you have not the autorization, or to haress somebody etc...

2 things (just so you know why your getting downmodded :))

Firstly the flow of the original sentence referring to murder read as if you were suggesting they were quilty of commiting murder.

Secondly, yes you can hide behinda company - to an extent. In actual fact no one seems ot know the real owners of the site. Brokep and co. maintain it but since 2006 the owner, and thus the person most likely liable, is unknown.

(I have bets on it being someones dog or something)

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.

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)...

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?

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".

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"?

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

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?

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.

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

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".

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."

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

So because one company failed, all companies will fail?

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.

Brand necromancy had to be performed several times before it saw the success of the current incarnation, such as it is. (I don't know how successful it is.) At this point its only connection to the original Napster that established the name is the name. My point? How you account any current success that the name may be experiencing is a very debatable point, depending largely on which of several valid definitions of the relevant terms you choose.

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.

The same goes for Google

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

Now the court can finally raise the fine! :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com