WTF?
Bad news for lovers of free movies, music and TV shows everywhere (myself, uh, obviously not included). After the recent judgment against The Pirate Bay by a Swedish court which ordered its founders to jail and slapped them with multi-million dollar fines, it appears the reality of the situation has caught up with them. A company called Global Gaming Factory X is reportedly about to acquire the site for $7.8M, and turn it into a legal file sharing site that “compensates copyright owners.”
Uh oh. Don’t like the sound of that.
“The company says that after it has completed the acquisition it will launch new business models so that copyright owners get paid, which is clearly a huge diversion from TPB’s previous modus operandi.
“We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site,” said Hans Pandeya, CEO GGF.
“The Pirate Bay is a site that 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 the requirements and needs of all parties, content providers, broadband operators, end users, and the judiciary,” said Pandeya.
“Content creators and providers need to control their content and get paid for it. File sharers’ need faster downloads and better quality,” he added.”
This is a radical move for the site, which has long given the middle finger to the RIAA, the MPAA and everyone else in the world against file-sharing. I think someone sat them down and told them if they kept this up, they’d end up in pound-you-in-the-ass jail for the next 10 to 20 years just so some Malaysian kid can download a bootleg copy of Dodgeball. And it appears whatever has been decided has caused them to suddenly and unexpectedly throw in the towel.
If this turns out to be true (and judging by the odd, cryptic message on the site’s homepage, that appears to be the case), this is a dark day for file sharing everywhere. We can say, “Oh we’ll just move over to Mininova,” but if lawsuits keep going in favor of the corporations, we’ll see all torrent sites hunted down and shot like wild animals eventually.
[via TorrentFreak]
