TorrentFreak

Responses have been overwhelmingly negative to the news that The Pirate Bay will soon be sold to Global Gaming Factory. But what if there is a method to the apparent Pirate Bay madness — one that, as Peter Sunde has hinted, could actually be good for the P2P community?

Earlier this year, anti-piracy outfit BREIN demanded the closure of Usenet community FTD. After negotiations between the pair came to nothing, BREIN declared FTD a criminal operation prompting FTD to take legal action against BREIN to clear their name. Now BREIN is counter-claiming against FTD, demanding $70,000 a day in penalties.

With millions of pageviews every day TorrentReactor.net is ranked in the top 5 of all torrent sites in terms of traffic which makes it a lucrative target for malicious attacks. The site is currently suffering from a serious security breach resulting in a rootkit being installed on the computers of some of its visitors.

Last month a working group of the Dutch Parliament published a report in which they made various suggestions on how to deal with online piracy. In their analysis they made several false accusations against the Dutch based BitTorrent site Mininova, who today announce that they will take legal steps if they don’t get a public rectification.

After Global Gaming Factory X announced that it intends to buy The Pirate Bay for $7.8 million, the CEO of the company bombarded the press with his revolutionary plans for the site. By paying both the copyright holders and file-sharers the company aims to reshape the digital media landscape. We have our doubts.

Shares in GGF rose dramatically yesterday on the news that the company is set to acquire The Pirate Bay. However, about a week ago equity marketplace Aktietorget shut down trading of GGF’s stock after unusually large trading volumes led to a rapidly increasing stock price, prompting suspicions of illegal trading.

Numerous BitTorrent-enabled TV devices are jostling for position next to your TV these days, but a new entrant to the market attracts the eye not because of what it has, but for what it doesn’t. CinemaCube is a BitTorrent-enabled set-top box that goes for the less-is-more angle, at a price most people can afford.

The latest Digg Dialogg stars none other than Brüno, the über-famous Austrian model and host of the Funkyzeit fashion and celebrity show. To make sure that Brüno’s interview is well-seeded at all times, Digg has teamed up with Mininova.

On the day that The Pirate Bay announced that they will be sold to a commercial company for $7.8 million, Tomas Wennström secured an audio interview with TPB spokesman Peter Sunde. The interview is of great interest but raises even more questions as shockwaves continue through the P2P community.

Alongside the news that The Pirate Bay will sell shares on the Swedish stock market come some other significant changes. The site itself will decentralize and stop hosting and tracking torrents. Instead, The Pirate Bay will use a third party tracker and torrent hosting service to serve its users.

According to gaming company Global Gaming Factory X, it is in the the process of acquiring The Pirate Bay for $7.8m (SEK 60 million). The acquisition is scheduled to be completed by August and will see the site launch new business models to compensate content providers and copyright owners.