Sadly for GGF, none of the headlines in the last year have turned out to be good ones for the company. It has been followed by almost constant controversy.

Now, for the second time in just over a year, GGF faces bankruptcy. In common with last year’s close escape when a former employee requested court action against the company for unpaid debts, history is repeating itself.

A pair of companies, Kennicott AB and Hercora Trading Technology, say they are collectively owed 1.5 million kronor ($220,000). The amounts, 906,200 kronor and 567,600 kronor respectively, were loaned to GGF in August 2008 but the companies are yet to be repaid.

In an application to the district court the companies demand that GGF “is immediately placed in bankruptcy.”

According to a report, owner Hans Pandeya already has liabilities of more than 400,000 kronor ($58,800) registered with the bailiff and today Global Gaming Factory has recorded liabilities of 450,000 kronor ($66,200). The company has filed no financial reports for 2009.

In filings, Pandeya places much of the blame for the current position on the failure to acquire The Pirate Bay last year.

In 2009, GGF was kicked off Swedish stock market Aktietorget following several serious violations which solicited comments that the company had a casual approach to disclosure requirements which misled the market.

But despite all the setbacks and serious lack of finances, Hans Pandeya continues to pursue his dream of owning a torrent site.

In August this year he approached Demonoid with a buyout offer, which was rejected.

Then in September, Winnipeg-based law firm Thompson Dorfman Sweatman LLP put in offers to acquire several of the largest BitTorrent sites on behalf of an unnamed client. All roads pointed back to Pandeya. These offers were also rejected.

TorrentFreak has learned that just two weeks ago Pandeya made an offer to one of the most prominent torrent sites. No prizes for guessing what the response was.

Source: Failed Pirate Bay Buyout Blamed for Global Gaming Factory Going Bust, Again

In recent history quite a few medium-sized torrent sites have changed owners, but these were all deals done within the torrent community, none were conducted in the open.

The first time that an outsider went public with plans to buy a torrent site was last year when Global Gaming Factory (GGF) made a $7.8 million offer for The Pirate Bay, and a $25 million offer to buy Mininova. GGF planned to legalize the sites and turn them into media portals where movies and music would be sold with approval from copyright holders.

Most readers probably recall that the deals with the two largest torrent sites at the time didn’t go through due to funding issues. However, last month GGF CEO Hans Pandeya popped up again, this time with an offer for the largest semi-private BitTorrent community Demonoid. Apparently, he had not yet abandoned his plans.

Demonoid’s owner told TorrentFreak that he was not interested in anything GGF had to offer, so Pandeya had to target other sites to carry out his plans. Interestingly enough, a few days after Demonoid rejected Pandeya’s offer, the Canadian law firm Thompson Dorfman Sweatman LLP contacted several other larger torrent sites with similar offers.

In their correspondence the solicitors claim to be working for a U.S. based corporation that is interested in acquiring the assets of the sites in question. The identity of the potential buyer is not disclosed, but considering the timing it wouldn’t be strange if it turned out to be GGF CEO Hans Pandeya.

Torrent sites don’t often get offers from external parties, except the ones from GGF we discussed above. If Pandeya is indeed behind the offer, it would make sense for him to make his approach using the cover of a law firm due to the bad reputation he has built up among torrent site owners.

The torrent sites that have been approached prefer not to be named, but they are among the most visited on the Internet, which is in line with Pandeya’s plans. The only thing that’s different this time is the money being offered. Unlike the millions of dollars that were thrown around previously, the current offers are at the lower end of the scale.

None of the torrent sites that were contacted are interested in selling, so it is likely that we might never know the truth about the mysterious buyer or if he has connections to GGF.

Hans Pandeya was contacted for a comment, but didn’t want to respond on the record.

Source: Law Firm Puts In Mysterious Offer To Buy Leading Torrent Sites

A few months after the announcement the deal eventually bounced. Although GGF’s shareholders agreed to the acquisition, the company failed to come up with the required $7.8m (SEK 60 million). What followed was mostly silence and the deadline for the acquisition eventually passed without an official response from the company.

Many thought that the company had abandoned its BitTorrent plans for good, but behind the scenes it was preparing for a second shockwave. In the last month GGF CEO Hans Pandeya has been continuing his plans to acquire one or more torrent sites to start an industry approved entertainment platform. One of the prime targets for a takeover at the moment is the popular BitTorrent site Demonoid, but other sites have been approached as well.

“I have finally managed to get some funds in place and want to acquire Demonoid and some other sites to execute my plans,” Pandeya told TorrentFreak. “I lost a year and a fortune due to Aktietorget’s [the equity marketplace] acrobatics during my attempt to acquire The Pirate Bay in 2009 but I think it is still not too late to acquire and convert torrent sites.”

Whether Demonoid is open for an acquisition by GGF remains to be seen. The site’s owner has not commented on the proposal yet but Pandeya hopes there will be a favorable response to his plans.

It has never been a secret that GGF was interested in buying more than one torrent site to build its entertainment empire. Last year, when all eyes were pointed at GGF’s takeover of The Pirate Bay, the company also put in a 20 million euro behind-the-scenes offer for fellow BitTorrent site Mininova. Even today, Pandeya is still interested in reactivating the deal with The Pirate Bay.

“The Pirate Bay and Isohunt are on my Most Wanted list of course but I have to take one step at a time. I hope it is going to work this time. There is a positive attitude towards out-of-the-box thinking in the US which seems to be essential for this project so keep your fingers crossed.”

It is questionable how realistic Pandeya’s most wanted list is in terms of takeover potential. TorrentFreak contacted representatives of The Pirate Bay and isoHunt who both assured us that they are not interested in a deal with GGF at the moment, not least because they doubt Pandeya actually has any money to splash around.

The owner of Demonoid, the prime target of GGF at the moment, was contacted for a comment but we haven’t heard back at the time of publication. Despite all the skepticism, Pandeya firmly believes in his plans to transform torrent sites into ‘legal’ music and movie stores, and there is little doubt that this won’t be the last we hear of it.

“My plan is doable,” Pandeya said.

Update: Demonoid’s owner got back to us. We were told that he has no intention to sell the site to Global Gaming Factory. This means that Pandeya has to find another candidate to carry out his plans. Demonoid will remain as it is.

Source: GGF Plans To Buy and Legalize Demonoid

This fall, however, it all turned out too good to be true. After GGF’s shareholders agreed to acquire the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker, the company had a month to come up with the proposed $7.8m (SEK 60 million). What followed was mostly silence and the deadline passed without an official response from the company.

From the moment it was announced the planned Pirate Bay acquisition had been surrounded by controversy. However, behind the scenes GGF CEO Hans Pandeya was drafting an even bigger deal with BitTorrent’s number one indexer at the time – Mininova.

“We will try to buy as many torrent sites as possible,” Pandeya told TorrentFreak back in August. In common with their plans for The Pirate Bay, GGF hoped to turn these sites into large media stores where users could download content with the full permission of copyright holders.

Little information has been made public about the “other” sites Pandeya was aiming at and how serious this interest was. Unlike all the other plans and deals that leaked out previously, no other torrent site has been publicly connected to GGF, until today where Pandeya’s connection to Mininova was exposed.

TorrentFreak has learned that GGF and Mininova already finalized a contract last summer to sell the torrent index for no less than 20 million Euros. This deal and the amount have been confirmed by several independent sources close to Mininova and GGF. One of the sources who confirmed the Mininova buyout plans was Hans Pandeya himself.

One of our sources further said that the deal had already been signed off by Mininova, and that GGF would wait for the verdict in Mininova’s appeal with the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN. This verdict was due one day before the GGF shareholders were set to give the green light on the Pirate Bay deal.

A positive outcome for Mininova in that case would have certainly made the site a valuable asset, but as we now know Mininova lost in court and was forced to proactively filter titles and remove a great number of infringing, and indeed non-infringing torrents to ensure absolute compliance.

Sources from within Mininova deny that a contract was already signed on their part. Instead, Mininova would have liked to see some proof that GGF could pay the proposed sum before signing.

Although there seems to be some disagreement on the details, there is no doubt that GGF had set course to get the two major BitTorrent sites in possession. In fact, Mininova was brought in during licensing negotiations with several senior executives at one of the major record labels.

During a meeting with the label in London, Pandeya was assisted by his short-lived business partner Wayne Rosso. In the meeting the executives were asking for some traffic metrics and out of the blue and to the surprise of Rosso, Pandeya picked up his mobile phone and rang a Dutch number, claiming that it was a “company of his” close to Amsterdam that could provide some insight into the traffic question.

The person on the other end of the line provided some information to the label execs and plans were made to head over to The Netherlands to do some due diligence. When Rosso later asked Pandeya about this mysterious Dutch company Pandeya revealed that it was in fact Mininova.

“It’s Mininova. I’m going to buy Mininova too and eliminate all the competition,” Pandeya told Rosso explaining the Dutch connection.

At the time of this meeting the contract was already drafted but not signed by both parties. If it would have gone through GGF would have had the option to buy out the two largest BitTorrent sites online. Of course we now know that the deal didn’t go though. GGF didn’t have the money and Mininova might not have been worth it after the negative verdict in their case against BREIN.

In the months that followed Mininova removed over a million torrent files making it a less lucrative asset for Pandeya. On the other hand it also shows that a torrent site with only “authorized” content will quickly lose most of its regular visitors. Despite this knowledge and all the failed attempts to pull investors in, Pandeya said a few days ago that we haven’t seen the last of him yet.

“I have a lot of secret plans I’m working on,” he warned.

Source: Pirate Bay Buyer Offered Millions to Mininova

After GGF’s shareholders agreed to acquire the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker, the company had a month to come up with the proposed $7.8m (SEK 60 million), half of which would be paid in shares.

After several anonymous investors decided to pull out of the deal the company was faced with a problem. To get the required funds in place GGF’s shareholders – including the CEO who holds more than half of the shares – decided to finance the acquisition themselves.

But today, after a month has gone by and the deadline for the sale has passed, there is no joyful press release from the company, just silence.

To get the latest information about the upcoming deadline, TorrentFreak contacted GGF’s CEO Hans Pandeya yesterday. However, thus far we haven’t received any response and his phone has been switched off.

In addition to these dark signs, sources close to Resevella – the company selling The Pirate Bay – could not confirm that the promised money had been transferred or that an arrangement had been made to deliver ‘the goods’.

Based on these observations we think it’s safe to conclude that The Pirate Bay will not be sold to GGF, something that’s not really that much of a surprise considering all the financial troubles the company and its CEO have, not to mention the fact that GGF was recently thrown off the Swedish Stock exchange.

So what’s next? We assume that Hans Pandeya will soon offer an explanation for his failure to transfer the funds. In the meantime, the people involved in the Pirate Bay will probably be looking for a new buyer, perhaps one that will actually be able to pay for the site.

Source: The Pirate Bay Will Not Be Sold ‘Yet’

The debt should have been paid off in July but GGF failed to do so. In a response Sellstrom has now submitted a request for GGF’s bankruptcy in the Stockholm District Court which states that “the debtor can not legally pay its debts, and this incapacity can not be regarded as temporary.”

“This is just standard procedure and the next step is for GGF to pay or explain why not and to show that they are indeed not bankrupt,” Sellstrom told TorrentFreak in a comment.

“The Pandeya family was served at breakfast on August 21. But like Bagdad Bob he is now denying that he knew anything about it. The debt is mentioned in the annual report and Hans [GGF's CEO] even commented to Cnet about the filing,” he added.

Sellstrom used to be a GGF board member but left the company after he doubted its future plans for The Pirate Bay. “I did not believe in the strategy,” he told TorrentFreak. On top of that Sellstrom says that Pandeya refused to share financial reports with him at the time.

Over the past weeks several (former) GGF partners including the technology provider Peerialism and business partner Wayne Rosso have complained about outstanding debts and liquidity issues. In addition, GGF was removed from the Swedish stock exchange.

This bankruptcy request is yet another nail in the coffin for the Pirate Bay deal. The deadline will expire in a few days, and thus far there has been no confirmation from Pirate Bay’s owners that they have received any of the promised money.

Source: Pirate Bay Buyer Faces Bankruptcy

Those uncertainties seemed to fade a little recently when the company’s shareholders agreed on the deal two weeks ago. However, some of the shareholders decided to pay the money needed to make the sale from their own pockets after several investors walked away, and thus far nothing has been paid.

Because the company failed to provide evidence that the funds were in place, trading in GGF stock was stopped by equity marketplace ‘Aktietorget’ in August, which caused a problem with the acquisition since half of the payment for The Pirate Bay is set to be made in shares.

GGF CEO Hans Pandeya said at the time he was confident that trading would resume soon since it was all one big misunderstanding. However, today news broke indicating it won’t resume, as Aktietorget has decided to kick GGF off the Swedish stock market.

“The alleged infringements have been serious. They give a systematic impression of a lack of accountability and of an almost casual and unsuspecting approach to the disclosure requirements,” AktieTorget commented on their decision to remove the company from the stock exchange.

“The Aktietorget board regrets that the company has misled the market through its lack of disclosure, which prompted a number of investors to do business they probably would not have done if they were properly informed,” they add.

Without shares to trade the company suddenly has to raise twice as much money, which seems to be an impossible task without any outside investors and with the company’s CEO in personal financial trouble. All this makes the sale of The Pirate Bay yet more uncertain.

GGF CEO Hans Pandeya was not available for comment and representatives of The Pirate Bay could not be reached. If we receive a response from either of them we will update the article accordingly.

Update: Pandeya responded to the news and says the deal is still on.

“GGFs managed to get enough investors to pay the entire amount in cash, i.e. 60m Swedish kroner and the seller faxed confirmation of acceptance to Aktietorget. We even had a clause that if investors dropped out, I would put the balance and if I could not, I have pledged my GGF shares as security. The transaction is guaranteed, It cannot be stopped,” Pandeya explained.

“I liked the stunt with the MC, car and boat. Gives the impression I am broke. Well, I provided security worth three times the amount to the debt agency – and they agreed. However, they were keen to take the stuff that makes spectacular pics to entertaining stories and stole my boat after our agreement,” he added.

“we will be closing the deal within the next two weeks,” Pandeya concluded.

Source: Pirate Bay Buyer Kicked Off Stock Exchange

Today, GGF shared its plans with the shareholders, who all decided in favor of the deal.

After several investors decided to pull out, GGF’s shareholders – including the CEO who holds more than half of the shares – will finance the acquisition themselves.

After the domain has been transferred to GGF, the new Pirate Bay will be transformed into a pay site charging users for access. To please the entertainment industries, GGF will install a system that will allow the copyright holders to either authorize the ‘illegal’ torrents or have them removed from the site.

How pleased the copyright holders will be with this new legalization plan is seriously up for debate – Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN has already stated that it is insufficient.

There are currently no licensing agreements in place with the entertainment industry, but despite the criticism GGF hopes to partner with most of the major movie studios and record labels within a year.

In addition to the Pirate Bay acquisition, GGF also confirmed that it will buy the file-sharing technology company Peerialism for 100 million Swedish kroner. Peerialism will provide core technology for the new Pirate Bay.

Source: GGF Shareholders Push Through Pirate Bay Acquisition

Despite all the negative media coverage, GGF CEO Hans Pandeya is confident that the deal will go through. The investors that are left are existing shareholders of GGF and their names are not published but known by the company’s management.

The equity marketplace Aktietorget meanwhile claims it has still not been provided with evidence showing the funding for the acquisition is in place, and has decided to extend the shut down in trading of GGF’s stock.

Today, GGF’s shareholders will discuss the buyout of the Pirate Bay and the plans for the site, before they give the green light or decide to vote against it. After the shareholders meeting GGF will host a press-conference to discuss the outcome and inform the public on what steps they will take next.

GGF CEO Hans Pandeya told TorrentFreak that they have been working on a new deal with at least one other major BitTorrent site. However, it will be difficult enough to successfully convert The Pirate Bay into a site where both users and the copyright holders are kept happy, before moving on to other sites.

Source: Pirate Bay Buyer Loses Several Investors

Earlier today reports surfaced in which it became clear that Johan Sellstrom, former director and board member of GGF, is owed hundreds of thousands of dollars by Pandeya. As a result, trading in GGF’s stock was stopped immediately by equity marketplace Aktietorget.

Sellstrom told TorrentFreak that Pandeya used $200,000 of his money to buy GGF shares in 2006 and 2007, but has yet so see any of the money back. “I want that cash back,” Sellstrom said, adding that Pandeya owes him another $650,000 privately.

Sellstrom has only recently left GGF, and he cites the company’s future plans for The Pirate Bay as one of the main reasons. “I did not believe in the strategy,” he told TorrentFreak. On top of that Sellstrom says that Pandeya refused to share economic reports with him.

In addition to the troubles surrounding Sellstrom’s loan, one its technology partners, Peerialism, is also waiting for money from GGF. Peerialism is supposed to provide the new Pirate Bay with a unique technology that would allow users to share more efficiently.

But Johan Ljungberg, CEO of Peerialism, told CNET News that Pandeya is not keeping his promises. Peerialism has been hired to start working on the new technology for the site, and was promised half of the money upfront.

“That was two months ago but he hasn’t paid anything,” Ljungberg said. “We have his signature on the contract, but he hasn’t paid and we haven’t done the work.”

Besides failing to pay the people that were supposed to provide the new Pirate Bay with key technology, Ljungberg said that Pandeya also failed to inform Peerialism about the company’s future plans and financial position.

“From the beginning we asked to see a business plan, the names of his investors, or to see some (technical specifications),” Ljungberg said. “We still haven’t heard a thing…the question marks are growing bigger by the day. We’re not quite comfortable with the situation. We had really high hopes and ambitions for our technology but I’m not sure if this is the right home for it.”

The doubts and uncertainties pointed out by former GGF director Sellstrom and Peerialism’s Ljungberg don’t do the image of GGF much good, and the shareholders and potential entertainment industry partners may become skeptical too.

Aside from the lack of payments described earlier, the equity marketplace Aktietorget is also uncertain that GGF actually has the funding in place to make the Pirate Bay acquisition

Aktietorget says it has no evidence of any funding apart from a press release by GGF. They wanted to know more so they summoned Pandeya, who got someone on a phone saying he is with an investment bank. The man claimed that the funding is indeed in place, however, trading will be halted until they get written confirmation as well as the identity of the investors.

These recent developments will certainly raise some eyebrows with the shareholders. A smooth acquisition of the Pirate Bay seems to be nearly impossible. Despite all the allegations, Pandeya remains confident and told TorrentFreak: “Some people’s attempts to damage the deal have escalated, but it is too late to stop the acquisition.”

Source: Pirate Bay Acquisition Hits Iceberg In Stormy Weather

GGF’s proposed notice and takedown is in fact not very different from those operated already by sites such as Mininova. What they add is the option for copyright holders to keep their content on the site and get paid for it. Plus, the users have to pay a monthly fee to use the site.

As one of our commenters put it yesterday: “Cool, a paid private tracker without dedicated servers or seed-ratio enforcement, and with arbitrary censorship.”

And the users of the site are not the only ones who are complaining. In response to GGF’s plans, Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN, that acts on behalf of the music, movie and gaming industries, issued a press release today in which they argue that the plans for the new Pirate Bay are not sufficient to please the copyright holders.

“In the proposed system the right holder must detect illegal content on the website and remove it. That is insufficient,” BREIN director Tim Kuik says. “This sort of Notice and Take Down system works in case of incidental infringement but not for the structural infringement that happens at The Pirate Bay.”

“The point is that The Pirate Bay is responsible for what happens on the site. They must keep preventive supervision and take care that no illegal torrents become available on the site. The site provides access to content which to an important and even overwhelming extent is illegal,” Kuik continued.

“So they can not assume that there is permission and leave it up to the right holders to check continuously for infringements. It is their site, their business and so their job to clean it up and keep it clean”, Kuik added, demanding a stricter removal system.

BREIN’s response makes sense from their perspective, since they have a pending court case in which they demand a proactive content removal system from the Dutch-based torrent site Mininova, who already have quite an elaborate content removal system in place.

GGF’s CEO was contacted for a comment on BREIN’s response, and we will add that to the article once it comes in. It is clear though that not all copyright holders are wildly enthusiastic about the plans for the new Pirate Bay.

Source: BREIN Not Impressed With New Pirate Bay Plans

Today, GGF shared its plans with the shareholders, who get to decide next week if the deal will go through or not. In a letter addressed to them, the company confirms that the new Pirate Bay will become a pay site while revealing some additional details on how GGF plans to legalize it.

To please the entertainment industry GGF will install a system that will allow the copyright holders to either authorize the ‘illegal’ torrent or have it removed from the site. If the copyright holder opts to choose the first option they will be compensated every time the file is downloaded. In addition, the board says that it will pay penalties if it has to.

“The holder will be able to leave the file and obtain compensation or ask for removal of the file. GGF will also pay any penalties that may arise,” the GGF board announced. There are no licensing agreements in place with the entertainment industry yet, but GGF hopes to partner with most of the major movie studios and record labels within a year.

One of the pitfalls of this new reactive system is of course that copyright holders might start to remove content en masse instead of authorizing it, so that there is nothing available for the (paying) users to download and share. Without content the users will walk away and The Pirate Bay will slowly die.

However, GGF’s board believes that this is not going to happen, and they base this on talks with entertainment industry representatives.

“The risk that rights holders will remove all content on The Pirate Bay at the date of acquisition is estimated as inexistent by GGF. GGF’s assessment after talks with the entertainment industry is that the majority of the content will remain on The Pirate Bay,” they say.

If the shareholders give the green light to the new plans, the Pirate Bay will be acquired on August 27. Whether or not any of the existing users will start to pay for the site is yet to be seen, but we estimate, based on talks with several Pirate Bay users, that the majority will wave goodbye and move on to the next torrent site.

Source: How The Pirate Bay Will Be Legalized

Today it was announced that GGF and STIM, the Swedish Performing Rights Society, have entered into negotiations for license rights for The Pirate Bay.

Earlier, GGF CEO Hans Pandeya told TorrentFreak that his company had started discussions with several of the major entertainment industry companies, and that the responses have been very positive. Thus far the only confirmed partner is STIM, but the names of the other organizations GGF are in discussions with will be announced after the site has been acquired.

STIM is a key partner, Pandeya stressed: “STIM is very important to us because they have spent several years working out special agreements for filesharers. This is not an easy task because the music world is so complicated that it is difficult to know where to start. Other publishing societies will be able to draw upon STIM’s work instead of reinventing the wheel,” he told TorrentFreak.

The rights organization on the other hand welcomes GGF’s plans to legalize the Pirate Bay, as they hope that the deal will bring in some extra cash.

“GGFs pending acquisition of The Pirate Bay creates a window of opportunity for the entertainment industry, which has suffered heavy losses due to illegal file sharing. The music industry has been forced against its own will to take tougher measures against illegal file sharing through costly litigation,” Tomas Ericsson of STIM said in a comment.

STIM has for some time been making proposals on how the file-sharing issue can be handled and welcomes GGF’s plans to legalize The Pirate Bay. “STIM is more than happy to contribute with its unique expertise in copyright issues and will be happy to help in this challenging project that will benefit our members,” Ericsson added.

More news on all the changes that will happen to the site, and further details on the business model and subscription fees are likely to be announced at the upcoming press conference.

Source: Entertainment Industry Cuddles Up to The Pirate Bay

“We will try to buy as many torrent sites as possible,” Pandeya told TorrentFreak. In common with their plans for The Pirate Bay, GGF hopes to turn these sites into large media stores where users can download content with the full permission of copyright holders.

TorrentFreak has confirmation from one of the major torrent sites that they have been approached by GGF. The owner of the site – who prefers to remain anonymous – told us that the contact was informal and that no deals have been closed thus far.

This isn’t the first time a company has targeted torrent sites in the hope of building a large network of traffic and potential customers. Three years ago Searching.com came up with a similar idea, and although they managed to get some advertising partnerships, none of the torrent sites were taken over at the time.

Things will be different this time around though. According to Hans Pandeya there are plenty of investors who are willing to partner with the company, and the entertainment industry is also following the latest developments with great interest.

The real problem for GGF is one of a different nature. They can buy dozens of sites and cut deals with all the big movie studios and record labels, but they have to find a way to keep downloading free, or at least dirt cheap. If they can’t pull this off, their newly acquired userbase will flock to the next torrent site in a snap.

Source: GGF Plans Torrent Site Assimilation

TorrentFreak spoke with GGF’s CEO Hans Pandeya in an attempt to get more details about what the future holds for the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker. Although most questions will remain unanswered until after the deal is completed, we did find out that the company plans to have The Pirate Bay listed on the American stock exchange.

“We are looking into the possibility to get the operation listed on the NASDAQ Small Cap Index,” Pandeya told TorrentFreak, adding that the first priority is to get the major music labels and movie studios on board. “The Pirate Bay is a strong brand in the US and most parties who have showed interest in the project are based there,” Pandeya said.

GGF is currently wrapping up the funding for the Pirate Bay acquisition and most of the investors are from the US, which is another argument in favor of moving operations from their current base in Sweden. Despite these ambitious plans, GGF will still have to move a few mountains to get copyright holders on board without losing the current visitors.

Without an unlimited library of music, movies and software the current users will leave the ship and move on to the next torrent site. With copyright infringing links still present, none of the copyright holders will agree to enter. The pirate’s dilemma.

Pandeya agreed that this is not an easy task to complete, but assured us that GGF is confident that they can pull it off, and that a NASDAQ listing is realistic once agreements with the major music and movie studios are in place.

Unfortunately, GGF’s CEO wouldn’t tell us what will happen to the site on the 27th of August when the transfer of ownership is scheduled take place, but he did inform us that no drastic changes will happen anytime soon. Again, this comment raises more questions than it answers.

“The majority of the Pirate Bay users wont even notice that anything has changed,” he told us. We hope for GGF’s sake that the copyright holders do see something different, or else they’ll be dragged to court before the summer ends.

Source: The Pirate Bay to be Traded on NASDAQ

One of the parties that offered a 2 million dollar investment in the acquisition is John Fanning who operated Napster, one of the first mainstream file-sharing applications. In addition, the board revealed that Fanning offered GGF 10 million dollars for The Pirate Bay itself.

John Fanning discussed his plans with Hans Pandeya in London but they did not reach an agreement. The 10 million bid on the site and its assets has been rejected and thus far there is no official deal closed on the 2 million investment offer.

In addition to Fanning’s offer, GGF has also received an informal bid of 16 million dollars for The Pirate Bay by an unnamed Russian company. This offer has also been declined, GGF’s board announced.

“The basis for a legal site has been placed and contracts are expected to be concluded shortly with a leading player in the entertainment industry. The development of the company is very positive, and goes as planned,” Hans Pandeya said in a comment.

TorrentFreak contacted Napster’s John Fanning to find out what his plans are for the site, if he would be in the position to acquire it. He might be interested in working out a deal of his own if GGF’s acquisition of the BitTorrent tracker fails after all. We haven’t heard back from him yet, but we will update the article as soon as do.

Source: Napster’s $10 Million Bid for The Pirate Bay Rejected

GGF painted a bright future for the site and two weeks ago Wayne Rosso, ex-CEO of Grokster joined GGF in their ambitious project, hoping to close some deals with record labels and get investors excited at their plans.

However, Rosso has already quit his position, claiming GGF’s CEO Mr. Pandeya was not straightforward with him.

“We decided that we’re not going risk our reputation further,” Rosso told TorrentFreak. According to Rosso he and his partners never received the payments promised to them and Mr. Pandeya made several other promises he couldn’t keep either.

“The more time we spent with Mr. Pandeya, the less confident we were,” Rosso said, adding that he feels the funding required to close the deal is not going to be raised based on the current lack of workable plans.

Not all was bad though. The support and enthusiasm of at least one record label was something he had never seen before according to Rosso. Unfortunately, it now seems that this enthusiastic response was based entirely on false promises.

“I don’t think there’s going to be any money raised with GGF’s current (lack of) plans,” Rosso told TorrentFreak. Besides Rosso and his partners, the people who were supposed to finance the acquisition were also misinformed.

When confronted with the news, a Pirate Bay insider said they would give GGF a week to get insurance from the investors, otherwise the deal is off. Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde told us that he doesn’t know what will happen to the Pirate Bay in the future, when the deal is off the table. Time will tell.

Source: Pirate Bay Sale Dead in the Water

At the Amsterdam court BREIN’s lawyer demanded that the operators of the site block access to all Dutch visitors. The lawyer claimed that The Pirate Bay is assisting in copyright infringement by allowing millions of visitors a day to download copyrighted content. Interestingly, Global Gaming Factory – the Swedish company likely to take over the site in a few weeks – was also added to the lawsuit.

The relevance of this case remains to be seen. The defendants, who were summoned to court through Twitter and FaceBook, were not present at the hearing and it’s certainly possible that they remain unaware of the proceedings. That aside, the site itself is currently scheduled to change ownership at the end of the month, and go legal, so that will render the case useless.

The Pirate Bay is no stranger to having visitors blocked access to the site. IFPI took legal action in Denmark and more recently in Norway to accomplish a similar block in those countries. However, in these cases, legal action was taken against ISPs and not the operators of the site itself.

Whether or not this Dutch strategy is going to work out is unclear. Meanwhile, BREIN’s website is still suffering from the alleged DDoS attacks that started after the outfit announced its legal proceedings against The Pirate Bay. The judges will now review BREIN’s demands – the verdict is due on July 30th.

Source: BREIN Wants Pirate Bay to Block Dutch Visitors

For years The Pirate Bay’s users have been able to share files without censorship or charges, but this is all about to change. Rosso said that under the new management, the 3.7 million Pirate Bay users (or whatever userbase remains) will have to pay a monthly fee to access the site.

The money collected from user subscriptions and advertising revenue will then be used to pay off the copyright holders. The exact monthly fee is yet to be decided, but Rosso did confirm that the more files people share, the lower it will be.

“The more of your computer resources you contribute to the network, the less you pay down to zero,” Rosso told Cnet. “The user is in control.”

In addition, GGF hopes to cut deals with ISPs. “We hope to introduce a new BitTorrent technology that will optimize ISP traffic,” Rosso said. “We can save ISPs up to 80 percent of their resources. Half of the Internet traffic is file sharing and half of that traffic is Pirate Bay.”

Rosso conveniently fails to mention that a Pirate Bay where users have to pay for access will not be generating much traffic at all, so this part of GGF’s business model has to be rethought. BitTorrent does not depend on The Pirate Bay, and new trackers have already lined up to take over its job.

Details about the actual acquisition of The Pirate Bay are still scarce. Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak that GGF will get the domain names for thepiratebay (under all the tlds they exist) and a copy of the code and the database. If all goes well the transfer of ownership will take place at the end of July.

GGF has to raise $7.8 million in funding in order to buy the site. After that, the share holders – who’ve seen a drop in the stock price after the announced buy-out – have to vote in favor of the deal.

Source: New Pirate Bay Will Become a Pay Site

So how would Mashboxx work? According to Rosso the application would work like many other P2P clients of the day. Users would be able to search for, upload and download tracks but also buy WMA-encoded and fingerprinted music tracks for around $1 each, all while employing Shawn Fanning’s SnoCap technology. Those tracks, it was claimed, could then be legally distributed to other users on the network, utilizing the buyer’s upload bandwidth.

But it wasn’t to be. Three years later the Mashboxx site is in the same condition as it was in 2006 when the last press release went up announcing that EMI had “agreed to make its entire catalog of digital recordings available to Mashboxx, a legal peer-to-peer (P2P) service currently in development.” Another casualty of P2P that never even got off the ground, Mashboxx was rumored to have died due to lack of investment.

But now in 2009, Wayne Rosso is back in what appears to be somewhat similar circumstances. Like almost everyone, when the news broke that GGF would buy The Pirate Bay and turn it into a legitimate service, Rosso says he was pessimistic. “Those poor bastards have no idea what they’re in for,” he recalls.

But then, two days after the announcement, Rosso’s phone rang. On the other end was none other than GGF CEO Hans Pandeya. At first Rosso says he couldn’t grasp what Hans is trying to accomplish but now he does and describes the plans as “pretty ingenious”. It’s fairly well-known by now that Pandeya plans to harness New Pirate Bay users’ bandwidth and computing resources in order to subsidize their media consumption costs.

“Long story short, I am now working with Hans to facilitate the model and helping to make the Pirate Bay site legit,” says Rosso. “So Jaws is back. And I’m sure a lot of people won’t be so thrilled about that!”

So now, in a replay of events in 2004/2006, Rosso is meeting with content providers and “big players” in the international music scene in order to make New TPB’s future a little more certain. And here’s the thing – according to Rosso every one of them has been supportive. He even goes as far as to say they are “excited” at the proposition.

“They see that it could really work. I left a label meeting Tuesday unlike any I have ever had. They were fantastic!” says Rosso.

An enthusiastic Rosso says he is working with people he describes as “real partners” who will not tie up him and GGF “in Gordian knots that would drive all the users away.”

It remains to be seen if the current users will subscribe to even testing the New Pirate Bay, but Rosso is characteristically enthusiastic and optimistic, to levels not seen since, well, 2004.

Praising the attitude of his music industry partners, Rosso concludes: “It was truly incredible and exciting and when the time is right I will go out of my way to give these guys the credit that they deserve, because, together, we’re going where no mortals have ever traveled.”

Time will tell if the result is sci-fi, or just sigh.

Source: Ex-Grokster CEO Teams With New Pirate Bay Owners

By paying both the copyright holders and file-sharers the company aims to satisfy both parties while cashing in on lucrative advertising deals.

Investors in the company responded positive to the news and the share price went up by 200% just hours after the plans were made public. GGF’s CEO appeared in every major news outlet, and although his plans were not very concrete, he predicted he could generate half a billion dollars in ad revenue per year.

However, after the media hype passed a lot of unanswered questions about the company’s exact business model remained unanswered. Possibly related, the shareholders lost faith as well and earlier this week the share price dropped below where it was before the Pirate Bay buy-out was announced.

At the Stockholm stock exchange GGF’s acquisition of The Pirate Bay raised some suspicions of insider trading. A week before the deal was made public the equity marketplace Aktietorget had shut down trading in GGF because the stock price was increasing rapidly without any solid explanation.

“There are reasons to suspect that information was leaked,” Peter Gönczi, executive vice president of Aktietorget said in a comment. This obviously didn’t do the image of the company or the value of its shares any good.

Whether or not GGF will be able to come up with a viable business model is still uncertain at this point. However, their first priority is to get the funding needed to make the acquisition, while convincing the shareholders that it’s a good deal.

Source: Pirate Bay Buyer’s Stock Back to Square One