'The Pirate Bay' Sells For $7.7 Million; Firm To "Legitimize" Business Model [View All]

[Turborama]

Source: AHN

Online file sharing website thePirateBay.com has been purchased for $7.7 million. Known for its legal troubles, Pirate Bay will introduce a "legitimate business model" according to its new owners, Global Gaming Factory X.

"The Pirate Bay site 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 that requirements and needs of all parties, content providers, broadband operators, end users, and the judiciary," Global Gaming CEO Hans Pandeya explained. "We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site," Pandeya added.

The Pirate Bay has been the center of file sharing legal complaints for years. As a website, it indexes and tracks BitTorrent (.torrent) files. However, those files can contain copyrighted materials, such as movies, music and software. In April 2009, three of its founders were found guilty of "assistance to copyright infringement" under Swedish law. They were sentenced to a year in prison and fined $3.62 million USD (30 million SEK).

On its company blog, Pirate Bay explained: "TPB is being sold for a great bit underneath it's value if the money would be the interesting part. It's not. 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 internets, stuff dies if it doesn't evolve. We don't want that to happen. If the new owners will screw around with the site, nobody will keep using it. That's the biggest insurance one can have that the site will be run in the way that we all want to. And - you can now not only share files but shares with people. Everybody can indeed be the owner of The Pirate Bay now. That's awesome and will take the heat of (sic) us," they added.

Read more: http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7015648402

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Mininova strangles itself with a filter after TPB's court case and now an imminent Napsterization of Pirate Bay, bummer.