AfterDawn: News

Pirate Bay acquisition is likely dead

Last month, Global Gaming Factory X (GGF) announced it planned to acquire The Pirate Bay for 60,000,000 SEK ($7.8 million USD), but it appears today that the sale is on its deathbed.

The Pirate Bay has given the software company one more week to get the funding needed for the purchase, but Wayne Rosso, former Grokster CEO and now former-exec at GGF says it will not happen.



Rosso adds that he has stepped down from his position, alleging that GGF’s CEO Pandeya was not "straightforward" with him.

“We decided that we’re not going risk our reputation further,” Rosso said in an interview with TorrentFreak. “The more time we spent with Mr. Pandeya, the less confident we were.” Rosso even added that he did not receive promised payments and other deals were falling apart as well.

“I don’t think there’s going to be any money raised with GGF’s current (lack of) plans,” concluded Rosso.

Written by: Andre Yoskowitz @ 29 Jul 2009 13:17

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• 19 comments

• Mysttic

  Uh-OH! Too bad Warner, Sony, Disney and whomever else wanted to hop on the lawsuit band wagon; for now all the people at Pirate Bay are even more broke with no help of anyone bailing them out as it is. Good luck getting your so called millions in damages.

  29.7.2009 13:34 #1

• joe777

  Someone in another thread said it all, when they said that this is all part of the masterplan for TPB. I agree that TPB are creating smoke-screens so the torrent community can become more decentralised everyone can make a copy of the torrent base and then TPB will live forever. Its their way of saying we will never be beaten and now there is no-one in particular tracking torrents.

  29.7.2009 14:14 #2

• scorpNZ

  Interesting does this mean it was nothing more than a free marketing campaign on GGF's part to get their name out there some more,well if there was no intention to buy tpb what other reason is there since the lame excuse risking reputation would've been known before the buy out.

  29.7.2009 14:16 #3

• melodeath

  Long live thepiratebay.

  29.7.2009 14:49 #4

• mystic

  maybe the boys from TPB can sue them over a breach in contract due to the non payment and other misgivings im sure a good lawyer would help them maybe they need to hire a good trial lawyer and go after GGF it might be a way to offset some of their debt to Sony and the rest of the vultures...hey maybe TPB can open a web space in the USA and then get a bail out from the new government in charge........ long live TPB

  29.7.2009 15:58 #5

• cart0181

  "We're all the Pirate Bay.... We're all the Pirate Bay.... We are all the Pirate Bay. Yea!!"

  29.7.2009 16:53 #6

• joe777

  But you are all forgetting that someone somewhere made alot of money when the share price of GGF rose 400%!!!!!!!! So someone made money and the swedish authorities shut down trading, ( as far as I know they are accused of insider trading ) then the price dropped a little below where they started before the mention of buying TPB domain name. But allthe same I think its TPB's way of saying we have to go on with more decentralised methods and now we have no choice. Its all good though, I hope in the end

  29.7.2009 18:44 #7

• zax808

  haha, yha. we'll see how long this last's. i can can throw a demonoid invite someones way if i can get one to hd-torrents or hdbits
  
  just PM me here on afterdawn =)

  29.7.2009 22:29 #8

• Mysttic

  I dunno how well going after GGF for $ will work; it's going to come down to, was there a written contract signed or no? The media has a tendency to over-fabricate stories at times, so until TPB comes out and files a lawsuit, don't expect too much reaction from them.
  
  As for GGF bailing out, I can't necessarily blame them. If you invested a crap load of your money into a company that has potential lawsuits by the shit loads from major corporations, would you risk spending your hard earn $ on what could eventually turn out not just a financial disaster of the decade; but all those eyes on TPB would then focus on you. They have a valid point regarding their reputation, and it doesn't matter how we feel about the laws surrounding what happened with TPB, it only matters that the law made their decision and personally I thought any company willing to buy TPB was either stupid or not entirely informed about how their plan could work to make it a profitable buy.

  29.7.2009 23:44 #9

• domie

  Originally posted by cart0181: "We're all the Pirate Bay.... We're all the Pirate Bay.... We are all the Pirate Bay. Yea!!"except that the three swedes who owned and ran it have millions in their private bank accounts from advertising revenue and donations and we don't ....YEA !!! - apart from that we are all the Pirate Bay - absolutely ;)

  30.7.2009 06:59 #10

• joe777

  @ Dumie (sorry that was cheap) I meant Domie, and where is your proof my good man, or are you just speculating or spouting nonsense. There are lots of peeps claiming there are millions in ad revenue floating around TPB. While there are ads @ TPB they are very minimal indeed. But the question for you domie is this : How much does it cost for servers and bandwidth to run the worlds largest tracker?
  Question 2 Do you think its impossible for the swedish authorities to track down payments which ad companies payed to TPB?
  
  Its ok to voice your own agenda...I mean opinion.... but to make it with no evidence to back up your claim is simply childish.

  30.7.2009 10:25 #11

• domie

  In answer to your question - I owned and ran the largest ed2k site in the world (2007 - drunkendonkey.net)( although nowhere near the size of the Pirate Bay - my site was only ranked about 7000 in largest traffic sites whereas TPB was ranked in the top 100.
  
  Let's make a really generous calculation and suggest that they need at least 25 times the number of servers that I did - mine was dual opteron top range and unlimited bandwidth but I only had a maximum of 3,000 users online at any one time - even with 25 times the numbers (say 75,000 online ), the cost ( an entire server farm ) it would be something in the region of $ 5,000 a month for 25 fully dedicated independent servers working in unison ( and they didn't use that many ) that makes about $ 60,000 a year.
  
  Now bear in mind they have an offer , whether it becomes reality or not is doubtful - but an offer nevertheless of $ 7.8 MILLION and bear in mind that that offer is after the site was busted and marketing analists know they will lose the vast majority of their traffic immediately and you have some idea of what the site was worth in advertising revenue before and after the bust - if it hadn't been busted you could have multiplied that offer by 100 times - remember how much google paid for youtube, how may billions was it ???
  Note that they were ranked in the top 100 of internet traffic sites by any analysis and then see what you can find on google about the advertising revenue of what the top 100 sites in the world make - there isn't a single one with less than 2 million a year in revenue and the majority of them have a hell of a lot less advertising revenue than the Pirate Bay and they don't ask for donations to build a new dream island country either or flog t-shirts either.
  
  Facts aren't hard to find out if you know where to look but it is clear to me that those of you who don't own a site or have never owned a really big site have absolutely no idea of the staggering amounts of money that they make online.

  31.7.2009 09:19 #12

• joe777

  Domie I doubt your story matey. When I used the EDonkey network there were far biggar players than you frankly. TPB is at this moment tracking 25 million torrents/peers. So that would cost how much in bandwidth? Are you a member of TPB or frequent the site? Where is all the ads then? They are minimal my freind. But where is your evidence that the boys are making millions. Its still just your own opinion with absolutely nothing to back it up.
  Heres some tech data for you:
  
  Initially, The Pirate Bay's four Linux servers ran a custom web server called Hypercube. An old version is open source. On 1 June 2005, The Pirate Bay updated its website in an effort to reduce bandwidth usage, which was reported to be at 2,000 HTTP requests per second on each of the four web servers, as well as to create a more user friendly interface for the front-end of the website. The website now runs Lighttpd and PHP on its dynamic front ends, MySQL at the database back end, Sphinx on the two search systems, Memcache for caching SQL queries and PHP-sessions, and Varnish in front of Lighttpd for caching static content. The Pirate Bay consists of 31 dedicated servers including nine dynamic web fronts, a database, two search engines, and eight BitTorrent trackers.
  
  On 7 December 2007, The Pirate Bay finished the move from Hypercube to Opentracker as its BitTorrent tracking software, also enabling the use of the UDP tracker protocol for which Hypercube lacked support. The Pirate Bay also announced that their servers would support SSL encryption, in response to Sweden's new wiretapping law. Opentracker is free software.
  
  On 19 January 2009 The Pirate Bay launched IPv6 support for their tracker system, using an IPv6 only version of Opentracker.
  
  Of course this doesn't tell of the backup servers that are dotted around the globe.
  
  But to end this conversation I will say this. The law in sweden states that TPB can continue its operations as long as its not for commercial profit. Thats why making profit was never a court issue with them, cause if it was then the swedes would have ordered them to cease their operations. The charge was assisting with the distribution of copyrighted works. So there is no money trail.

  31.7.2009 11:37 #13

• domie

  Originally posted by joe777: Domie I doubt your story matey. When I used the EDonkey network there were far biggar players than you frankly.well then matey, you need to read the facts instead of forming opinions from the top of your head that aren't backed up by statistical data. 95% of the traffic was from the Italian forums which no doubt you never visited. the english side of things was always fairly small.
  facts : http://blog.p2pvine.com/top-10-alexa-edo...-2007-01072007/

  31.7.2009 12:13 #14

• joe777

  Razorback was serving 100's of thousands back in the early 2003/4/5 era on the EDonkey netwerk that was when bit torrent was in its infancy and most folks used the EDonkey client. But you haven't answered all of my rants. Are you creating more smokescreens to avoid your original gripe about TPB?

  31.7.2009 13:23 #15

• domie

  Difficult to create a smokescreen when you are blowing smoke everywhere yourself - Razorback weas a server not a site there is a difference - as such of course it got more traffic than a site as everyone who uses different sites connects to the same servers.
  The argument you began was doubting the size of the site - it's illogical to introduce ed2k servers into the equation now as obviously a server is not a site. Can we stop this sillyness now and get back on topic ?

  31.7.2009 14:46 #16

• joe777

  I think the topic is finished only you and I left bickering.Lol. Anyway onwards and upwards eh!!Lets all get on.

  31.7.2009 17:54 #17

• PCB4

  I must say, I find this discussion of how much money TPB made is disconcerting. So what? They were in business and the business was successful. Things may not be going so well now but these guys did something extraordinary. I hope they did make lots and lots of money and I hope they were smart enough to tuck some away for that inevitable rainy day. Whether they did or didn't isn't my business, it isn't domie's business, although he does seem quite bitter about it. For the world wide service TPB provided, a profit would not be an unreasonable thing to expect. No one works for nothing, not on purpose anyway. Look at this fantastic web site, note the advertising, how much does Afterdawn make? Not my business. Domie, I don't know you and I don't want to say anything unkind about you for that reason. I don't care what you do for a living either, I just hope you are being paid handsomely and that no one is annoyed by that. Cheers.

  6.8.2009 13:18 #18

• Mez

  I think GGF just wised up. I do believe some of the masterminds made a killing. Isn't that what it is all about these days? They bought low then sold last week before the announcement. Screwing all the speculators who did not have the inside track.
  
  The Bay was not about money. They could have made a killing if they charged a small fee to join. There is a new wave of paid for downloads. They have and are still harvesting the free data. They are in it for the money. Because they have money and own the data they will be near impossible to eliminate. If one gets shut down they will open a new one. I am sure the corporations are all shells.

  10.8.2009 07:43 #19