01/07/2009

The infamous file sharing website Pirate Bay has been sold to the Swedish Global Gaming Factory (GGF) for an estimated SEK60m (€5.55m). The announcement was made yesterday in Stockholm by GGF CEO Hans Pandeya.

Last April, the four creators of Pirate Bay – Frederik Neij, Gottrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde – were found guilty of promoting copyright infringement. They were sentenced to one year in jail and ordered to pay SEK30m in compensation to film and music companies.

Asked to comment on the sale of his website to GGF, Sunde told news agency AFP: “We feel we can’t take Pirate Bay any further. We’re in a bit of a frozen situation where there’s not much happening and there are neither people nor money to develop things. The sale means things will shift gears for Pirate Bay.”

GGF is a listed company specializing in internet cafés and gaming centre software. They said that they would use Pirate Bay’s high visibility (over 20 million visitors and one billion page views per month) to launch new business models that would allow compensation to the content providers and copyright owners.

“Pirate Bay is a site that is among the top 100 most visited Internet sites in the world. However, in order to live on, 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. Content creators and providers need to control their content and get paid for it. File sharers need faster downloads and better quality,” said Pandeya.

In a separate deal, GGF acquired shares in Swedish Peerialism AB, a Swedish software technology company developing solutions for data distribution storage based on new p2p-technology. With Pirate Bay and Peerialism, GGF intends to reinforce its position in the international digital distribution market, where file sharing represents more than half of today’s global Internet traffic.