As I sat down this morning to begin working on a few small news items, Torrent Freak had dropped a bomb on my RSS: the Pirate Bay has been sold for just under $8 million US.
Swedish gaming giant Global Gaming Factory X will become the new owners, and The Pirate Bay as you and I know it will change forever. A necessary evolutionary step, according to Peter Sunde (brokep).
“We’ve been working on this project for many years. It’s time to invite more people into the project, in a way that is secure and safe for everybody. We need that, or the site will die. And letting TPB die is the last thing that is allowed to happen!”
Why would a legitimate company want to purchase TPB? For starters, it’s one of the top 100 most visited sites on the internet. While I’m not in the habit of referring to $8 million purchases as a bargain, it’s hard to imagine being able to pick up any of the other 99 sites on the list for that kind of money.
It’s also the most widely recognized P2P site around, and its fans and foundations could very well provide the groundwork for, say, a Steam-like distribution system. GGF CEO Hans Pandeya has also stated “[GGF] would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site.”
Sunde assures users that the move isn’t going to kill the site. Surely GGF wouldn’t have spent the money to acquire TPB if they just wanted to let the site fade away into oblivion – which it may well have done at some point anyway if the lawsuits continued. He offered the following:
Back to the current TPB state of affairs: Sunde has also informed Torrent Freak that TPB will decentralize its operations. They will no longer run a tracker, and existing torrents will be removed. Instead, torrents will be hosted remotely and accessed via an API and the workload will be shared by multiple servers.
This hasn’t been announced on the TPB blog yet, and there’s no time table other than “soon.” With more than half of the torrents on the net connected to TPB’s servers, this could have massive implications for the P2P ecosystem.
Or the transition could be smooth as silk.
After all, we never know what the crew of The Pirate Bay have up their sleeves.