Trading in The Pirate Bay bidder stopped over deal funding

Less than a week before Global Game Factory X (GGF) is due to purchase The Pirate Bay, the deal appears to be spiraling rapidly towards Davy Jones' locker. Swedish stock market authorities have halted GGF trading on suspicion the company doesn't have enough money to close the deal. The stoppage came as an anonymous TPB user …

[Steve Evans]

down and down...

The longer they string this out, the smaller that database is going to get.

Give it a month and I'll be able to buy TPB with my remaining credit card balance.

[Anonymous Coward]

I is what I is.

"Many TPB freeloaders", we prefer to called "freetards", thank you very much.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't get it...

Fair enough, start a P2P distribution service that users subscribe to but why use the Pirate Bay as the foundation? The 'customer' base is pirates, hence the name.

Also the content would need to be scrubbed for cracks and a mechanism put in place to replace keygens & register etc, that is as easy as using a keygen otherwise they will be charging for an inferior service.

I've not heard of anything so daft in my life.

Surely if anyone could pull this offer Amazon would have already done it, no?

[Jenkins]

openbittorrent tracker for the win.

Also, some other recent PRQ related developments seem intriguing; though there has been so much noise/bleating generated by the ubiquitious freetard commentariat on sites like Torrentfreak/pirate blogs and so on, that it is rather taxing to attempt to sort the wheat from the chaff, as it were.

Still, as events unfold I imagine a clearer pirate related narrative will present itself. Somehow I doubt it will involve mass freetard→paytard conversion...

[George 24]

What did you expect

The Pirate Bay pirated.... who would have thought that TPB would have the customer base to think of such thing...

[Stephen Baines]

Debt collectors called in...

From The Local http://www.thelocal.se/21610/20090821/

"Hans Pandeya, the CEO of Global Gaming Factory (GGF), the company planning to buy The Pirate Bay, has been reported to the Swedish enforcement service (Kronofogden) for mounting unpaid debts.

Johan Sellström, a Swedish IT pioneer and former board member of GGF, has reported Pandeya to the service asserting that he is owed more than 6 million kronor ($840,000), according to a report in business news website DI.se.

Johan Sellström has also confirmed that he is considering suing Pandeya for the money he claims he is owed as the enforcement service procedure can take time, he told the newspaper."

[Anonymous Coward]

thanks Jenkins!

"mass freetard→paytard conversion"

Ha ha ha ha ha!

[Anonymous Coward]

pirates

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_Meier's_Pirates!

From the page:

The game tests a wide range of skills: hand-eye coordination during the fencing sections, tactical ability during the land and sea combat phases, and strategic thinking, for everything from choosing a wife to deciding when to divide up the plunder.

Of course, this might be totally irrelevant.

[poladark]

Inaccuracies?

Some inaccuracies are perhaps worth commenting on in this article:

The content was uploaded uploaded on the Pirate Bay on 2009-AUG-15 and the suspension of trading on 2009-AUG-21. The uploading is clearly unrelated to the suspension of trading on AktieTorget. Furthermore, Aktietorget is not an authorised stock exchange. AktieTorget is an Over-the-Counter (OTC) marketplace, specialising in smaller and/or more risky financial instruments.

Since about 60% of the stock is owned by mr Pandeya and his family the suspension of trading is likely to have little impact on the company itself. It has been speculated that the whole Pirate Bay spectacle has been a scheme by mr Pandeya to hike up the price of the stock and make a fast buck in hard economic times. Since the company is already under suspicion of insider trading this doesn't seem so far-fetched.

[jubtastic1]

Saw this coming

Suprised TPB fell for it, whole thing looked like a set up from the off. Score 1 for the content holders, pirate bay closed and owners shown to have been chasing profit, even though it will never materialise.

[Winkypop]

Freetards, who us?

Rules:

#1 If you don't want stuff copied, don't make it in a format that is so easy to duplicate.

#2 Don't put stuff on the interwebs

#3 Stop sniveling about 'losses', I was never going to buy your shite anyways!

[Anonymous Coward]

21 gig of torrents

Wow! That's got to be a couple of hundred metric fuck loads of torrents. Anyone know how many unique products that is? (Product is the only sensible word I could think of. Digital entity? File is confusing. Song / film is inaccurate. Hmmm.)

[local grockel]

Incomplete article...

Further down the same linked page is (now) the sentence I roughly translate as:

"According to verbal reports to AktieTorget from an affected broker, a good 60 million Kronor has been made available by investors. The suspension of trading can be withdrawn as soon as these reports have been confirmed."

Also "Today's trading suspension has nothing to do with suspicions of insider trading."

Excitement though, TPB has been nothing if not good interest value:)

[dgp]

Re:Freetards, who us?

@Winkypop

You forgot #4; It's fine to copy music and films, bands such as U2 are always telling us to give all our money away to the starving children of XYZ, so obviously when can no longer afford to buy their shitty music and thus have the right to download it. Films are always teaching us that being tight fisted or selfish are the downfall of man,... so by Hollywood's teaching we should all be sharing films.

[Anonymous Coward]

No loot then?

So if this deal collapses does that mean the TPB lot won't get any money and in fact be in debt with fines totalling several miliions?

trying not smirk.

[deegee]

@Winkypop (Freetards)

Re: #1.

Gee this works well with CD/DVD copy protection, doesn't it -- it just gets cracked. Duh. :-/

Re: #3.

For some types of product piracy it IS a "loss". I wish the "freetards" and pirates would get an education before posting wrong information and spreading this garbage.

For example Software is licensed. When you buy a copy you may own the media, but you don't own the software. You are purchasing a license to use it. So if you did not purchase a license to use the software then you do not have any right at all to actually use it. And your use of the unlicensed copy is a definite provable loss on licensing payments.

If you are simply a software hoarder and only collect everything imagineable but never actually install it and use it, then it is not a loss. But if you do actually use the unlicensed software then it is a loss.

Use requires a license payment. Unlicensed use = a license payment loss.

Do you understand yet?

I've had a few friends over the years who do pirate various things, such as music or software, and then when they get an IP of their's ripped off whether it be music (if they are in a band) or images (if a photog), etc., they whine about it. I always tell them to STFU or GTFO because now they know what it is all about.

[Neoc]

"The Pyrite Bay"

Oh, bravo. Snorted my mid-morning Miso Soup through the nose.

[The other Ross]

@ Winkypop

Your rules #1 & #2 are irrelevant, really.

#1 - Whatever format it's in, if enough people want to copy content, it WILL be copied.

#2 - Once someone manages to copy it, it will go up on teh intarwebz, nothing to do with the copyright holder's decision to put it online or not.

Only rule #3 has any real bearing. Of course, since I wasn't going to buy their shite anyways, I don't see the point in downloading it either, except 'try-before-you-buy' for the shite that you might just buy after all.

How about the following rule - if you want people to buy your stuffs, make good, quality stuffs and make them available at a reasonable price. And how about ending such nonsense as 'regions' or 'staggered release' or most of all 'this video/service is not available from the country you are in.'

[TeeCee]

@Winkypop

Grrrrrrrr.

"#1 If you don't want stuff copied, don't make it in a format that is so easy to duplicate."

Conbloodygratulations! You've just justified DRM. Yes, it exists because the world is unfortunately full of complete knobs who take that attitude.

I hope you're fucking proud.........

[Marvin the Martian]

Site backups

Does this giant file include file number 900,001 --- being the TPB backup? I think we should be told.

As for providing hard-to-copy files as a prevention against theft, hard-to-copy logically equals hard-to-open files --- not a genius business proposition. [Oh, I remember, DRM separates these two? For example CSS was making DVD copying impossible... for a month or so. Similarly you can convert DRM'ed music via WAV to DRM-free music, en masse. hence hard-to-copy = hard-to-open, even if it takes a while for someone to find the route.]

[Anonymous Coward]

@DeeGee

"And your use of the unlicensed copy is a definite provable loss on licensing payments."

Ah, No.

Adobe Photoshop is a classic example - where the 'Pirate' user could never have afforded a licensed copy in the first place (CS4 is currently £527 on Amazon). Therefore no sale was lost by an individual downloading a copy so no negative financial impact on the publisher. Before you waste your time mentioning it, no most people DON'T qualify for the educational versions.

There IS a provable POSTITIVE impact though. A load of guys out there have learned Photoshop using copied media, and have gone on to be employed by the sort of agency who purchase dozens of licenses for this - and associated products - thus propogating the skill base and driving corporate purchases of the software.

[Anonymous Coward]

@AC 10.26

You may not be about to buy photoshop, but by pirating photoshop you have harmed the manufacturers of the less expensive/FOSS alternatives to photoshop who you are not using becuase of your decision to steal photoshop. The only way that I can possibly see this argument working is if you use photoshop or whichever other 'top end' software at work, indeed many companies producting this kind of software actually allow you to use your 'work licence' at home. I have a full copy of MS Office Pro because I only had to pay for the media, whereas I'd never be using it at home if not.

[Shakje]

@Fraser

Photoshop is a bad example, as there ARE good alternatives out there. Eg. Paint .NET which is one of the best image-editing packages I've ever used. However your argument doesn't quite work out, as the alternatives to the paid version quite often are distributed as free. They don't have the same featureset as the paid software, but they also don't make any money, they're just left as downloads all over the net. I'd guess that you can probably get most free software from download.com or similar sites, and if you get it from there the original creator isn't going to get any advertising revenue (AFAIK) or have any knowledge that it was downloaded unless the creator monitors all of these sites.

Of course, your argument also forgets that the possibly 'crapper' versions that are available for free might never be used at all anyway, simply because they don't do what the user wants them to. There's no lost download (which is of minimal impact anyway), or lost sale of the professional software, as the user may well just not have bothered if the fully featured software wasn't available for free.

Let's say you had pirated your version of Office, what would you use instead if you didn't? OpenOffice? Are you seriously suggesting that OpenOffice are damaged by you not using their software or do you think that they are quite happy with the fact that they're popular and don't really care that you don't use it (yet).

All this is bollocks anyway because the original argument was about proving that a license is lost by a company when you don't buy their software, which is clearly addressed and proven false by the AC. The other manufacturers are not addressed in bit lawsuits where the pirating is seen as a loss from the person you pirated it from. That is what the AC was addressing. Maybe if the FOSS solutions were better publicised (why not upload torrents of their own software if it's free and tag it with the name of their common competitor so that people who are trying to download illegal content see them first as a free, good, legal alternative?) maybe they'd win over some of the pirates, as it is, if you know about one big product, and not the competitors you'll get the big product every time, won't you? And if you couldn't buy it because of the cost of it in the first place, it's not a lost sale. Simples.

[Anonymous Coward]

Bad Luck

No $7 million for criminals. Do not pass go. Go straight to prison.

[Chris Matchett]

Let me get this straight...

The value of TPB plummets after tPB is used to share the intellectual property of TPB?

Now that's what I call irony

[deegee]

@AC and @Shakje re: Adobe PS et al

I AM 100% correct. Look it up, and not on a pirate wiki. Read a little before you post that what I stated is wrong because it is NOT.

Just because you can't afford the license to use the software so you pirate a download to use does not void the fact that software is LICENSED FOR USE. If you do NOT purchase a license and you use the software, that is a license loss. Since each license has a set value, that is a set monetary loss.

It cost the software developer [as much as] $millions to develop, plus market, package, distribute. Software companies make their income from the licenses sold, not the CD media. Unlicensed copies in use = income loss.

I don't care how you spin this, these are all crap bogus arguments and have nothing to do with the fact that the software in use is not licensed: "I can't afford the expensive license", "Adobe/MS/whoever are the devil", "I'm only going to use it until I get enough money to buy it", "the pirated copy allowed me to learn the software so I got a job using it", etc., these are still all piracy and are an unlicensed use of the software.

They are lame excused purported by pirates in an attempt to justify their actions.

Check out "software license" on Wikipedia. Maybe ask an adult or someone who knows about these things.