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: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

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: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.