Pirate Bay sold, to be based on give-and-take models

[quaxo]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090718/ap_on_re_eu/eu_tec_sweden_pirate_bay

STOCKHOLM – One of the world's largest filesharing Web sites, The Pirate Bay, is going legal through a series of give-and-take payment models that in some cases may even earn its users a bundle of cash, the new owners said Saturday.

"The more you give, the more you get," said Hans Pandeya, chief executive of Swedish software firm Global Gaming Factory X, which announced last month it was buying the site and would start paying both content providers and copyright holders.

The change in ownership was met with skepticism by the filesharing community who feared that, by taking The Pirate Bay legal, its new operators would start charging them for downloading content such as films, music and computer games, which they had previously accessed for free.

In April, four men connected with the site were sentenced to one-year prison terms for abetting violations of copyright law, and ordered to pay a fine totaling 30 million kronor ($3.8 million). At least three of the men claim they haven't owned the site for years.

Pandeya said his company bought the site from a foreign company through lawyers and he doesn't know who the current owners are, but that none of the prosecuted men seemed to be involved.

When the deal was announced, Pirate Bay spokesman and one of defendants, Peter Sunde, said however that he and his associates were pleased with GGF's plans for the site since they felt they couldn't take it any further — lacking both money and resources to do so. Sunde could not be reached for comment Saturday.

Pandeya said The Pirate Bay, whose domain name and related Web sites were bought by Global Gaming Factory X for 60 million kronor, will not become like pure pay sites, such as ITunes Store and Napster.

"For the great majority it will be free of charge, for a minority it will actually make them money, and for a small portion it will cost them," he said.

Pandeya said plans are under way to introduce a monthly fee to be able to use The Pirate Bay, but he said the fee could be worked off by, for example, sharing downloaded content or lending storage capacity to others on their PC's in exchange.

"We know that unless we're able to create revenues for the filesharers they'll just move on to the next free, site," he said. "Filesharers are our best friends."

Pandeya also said other give-and-take packages were in the works, but declined to elaborate, saying more details would revealed in the next few weeks.

The site, under its new management, is expected to be launched in about a month's time. It will also raise money through advertising and by making network data traffic cheaper and more efficient for internet service providers. This would be done by making the filesharing more local, allowing users in the same city to be interconnected as opposed to swapping data across multiple borders.

GGF claims the site will fully address the legal issues that troubled it before because income will be distributed between filesharers, copyright holders and others involved.

Pandeya said that although no deals have been struck yet, his company is currently in negotiations with some of "the world's largest players" within the music industry. "It's been positive," he said, declining to name the companies involved in the talks.

UPDATE
http://tech.yahoo.com/news/ap/20090721/ap_on_hi_te/eu_netherlands_pirate_bay

AMSTERDAM -

The would-be buyer of file-sharing Web site The Pirate Bay has backpedaled in a Dutch court Tuesday, saying that it is uncertain whether the purchase will ever be completed.

Lawyer Ricardo van Doorn says Sweden's Global Gaming Factory X will only buy Pirate Bay if it can turn it into a "legitimate business."

GGF said last month it planned to buy the Pirate Bay domain name and related Web sites for 60 million kronor ($7.8 million), with the deal closing in August.

Van Doorn said Tuesday that it's now conditioned on whether "those assets can be used in a legal manner."

The Dutch court is hearing a civil case brought against The Pirate Bay by a pro-copyright organization.

[evilfantasy]

So this is their "epic win?"

[quaxo]

Added an update to the original post.

[computeruler]

So does this make it legal?  I dont think so

[2x3i5x]

is piratebay somehow going to be earning some revenue that goes to be paying the royalties?

[Quantos]

So does this make it legal?  I dont think so

What's illegal about sharing files?

[BC_Programmer]

the Pirate Bay

[Quantos]

Umm, you may not have noticed, but they have legal files for sharing there.

Judging the book by the majority of files.... 

[BC_Programmer]

you can find a few open source torrents. you just have to wade through the other 99% of files like SUPER COMPACT WINDOZE CD.EXE (40KB) and "Harry Potter DIVX FIRST MOVIE <the word WAND has been dubbed into WANG, SUPER FUNNY!" and of course the classic, "NAKED ANIMAL PICS" because naked zebras are apparently sexy to people more familiar with the caricatured form of the animals, which often wear clothing.

so many attention diverters... 

[Quantos]

I always wondered about that, don't all naked animals have fur?
Or are they like the grizzly in John Candy's movie?

[ThomasTheXPUser]

There are some legal torrents on there, but not many. Some Linux distributions use torrents as a secondary download link or as a main download link to take the load off the servers. I'd personally prefer to download the good old ISO and mount it in VirtualBox