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 we do.

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

While some, such as the BPI’s Geoff Taylor, have shown at least some sign of regret (although not necessarily backed up by actions), others are adamant that crushing the file-sharing pioneer was the right thing to do.

Despite making some uncharacteristically pragmatic comments about P2P last year when his album ‘Death Magnetic’ appeared on the Internet, and despite trying file-sharing himself fairly recently when he downloaded the album using BitTorrent, Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich has no regrets over his part in the neutering of Napster.

Ulrich and Metallica generated years of hate with their aggressive anti-Napster stance in the early part of the century, after discovering their entire back catalogue was available through the service.

But now, speaking with Kerrang!, Ulrich says he did the right thing in bringing Napster down, standing firmly behind his decision, expressing pride where others today are expressing cautious regret.

“Being right about Napster doesn’t mean that much to me. I don’t find any particular glory in being proved right about it,” he said.

Turning to Napster’s management, Ulrich said he admired them for managing to paint the band as greedy rock stars who were behind the times, although it hardly seems fair to give Fanning and friends all the credit for that – the band did more than enough to nurture that impression too.

“You have to give props to the other side because they did run a brilliant campaign, and they did portray me and Metallica as being greedy rock pigs and luddites who were completely behind what was happening technologically,” said Ulrich.

“But I am proud of what we did, and what we stood up for,” he added.

Indeed, today’s file-sharing community owes a debt of gratitude to Ulrich and Metallica, because without their efforts to destroy Napster there wouldn’t have been the massive effort by others to create the many improved replacements available today.

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

Of course, Napster was dead and buried a long time ago but thanks in part to Ulrich, the destruction of the service led to the creation of many others, most of which carry the entire back catalogue of Metallica to this day – along with that of every other band in the world with a respectable following.

So, when Metallica’s latest album ‘Death Magnetic’ hit the file-sharing networks last year, it seemed like business as usual when the band’s label, Universal, canceled an interview with a Swedish newspaper after their reviewer admitted he got his copy from The Pirate Bay.

However, the once vehemently anti-p2p Ulrich came out with a softened stance. “If this thing leaks all over the world today or tomorrow, happy days,” he said. “It’s 2008 and it’s part of how it is these days.”

Now, just a few months later, Ulrich has admitted that following years of aggression against file-sharing, he has actually just tried it out for himself. In an intervew with Eddie Trunk of VH1′s “That Metal Show”, Ulrich admits that last year he ‘pirated’ his own album after it leaked onto the Internet.

“I sat there myself and downloaded ‘Death Magnetic’ from the Internet just to try it,” he said. “I was like, ‘Wow, this is how it works.’ I figured if there is anybody that has a right to download ‘Death Magnetic’ for free, it’s me.”

Ulrich went on to say that he and half a dozen friends were enjoying a bottle of wine at his house and used a file-sharing client (the name of which eluded him) to download the album.

“We found it – this was like two or three days after it leaked. I was like, ‘You know what? I’ve gotta try this.’ So we sat there and thirty minutes later I had ‘Death Magnetic’ in my computer. It was kind of bizarre.”

Welcome to the 21st century, Lars – although the same ‘bizarre’ stuff went on in the last century too.

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

When EMI, Universal Music and Warner music reached settlement agreements with the likes of Napster, KaZaA and Bolt, they collected hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation – money that was supposed to go to artists whose rights had been allegedly infringed upon when the networks were operating with unlicensed music.

Now, according to an article, the managers of some major artists are getting very impatient, as it appears the very people who were supposed to be compensated – the artists – haven’t received anything from the massive settlements. They say the cash – estimated to be as much as $400m – hasn’t filtered through to their clients and understandably they’re getting very impatient.

Lawyer John Branca, who has represented the likes of The Rolling Stones and Korn, said: “Artist managers and lawyers have been wondering for months when their artists will see money from the copyright settlements and how it will be accounted for.”

Indicating the levels of impatience with the big labels holding the money he added: “Some of them are even talking about filing lawsuits if they don’t get paid soon.”

Of course, EMI, Universal and Warner have a different take on the delay, with sources suggesting that it’s down to the difficulties in deciding who gets what money, based on the levels of copyright infringement for each individual group or artist.

A recording industry on the back foot having spent most of its time fighting the digital revolution rather than becoming part of it, is clearly trying to hang on to every penny, even when it comes to compensating the artists who they claim they were defending by taking legal action in the first place.

Irving Azoff, who manages Christina Aguilera, The Eagles, Van Halen, REO Speedwagon and Seal (amongst others) says it’s hard for artists to get what they deserve from the labels: “They will play hide and seek, but eventually will be forced to pay something,” he said. “The record companies have even tried to credit unrecouped accounts. It’s never easy for an artist to get paid their fair share.”

Typically, the labels see it a different way. An EMI spokeperson said that it was “sharing proceeds from the Napster and Kazaa settlements with artists and writers whose work was infringed upon” while Warner’s said the label is “sharing the Napster settlement with its recording artists and songwriters, and at this stage nearly all settlement monies have been disbursed.”

The Universal spokesman spoke only of the label’s ‘policy’ of sharing “its portion of various settlements with its artists, regardless of whether their contracts require it” with no mention of whether it had actually done this or not.

But typically, when money is involved, things start to get murky. The same sources who suggested the reasons for the delay in making payments are also suggesting that there might not be much money to even give to the artists.

It’s being claimed that after legal bills were subtracted from the hundreds of millions in settlements, there wasn’t much left over to hand out.

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

Plans for the BitTorrent Store were made public in March, after which Warner Bros announced that it would sell movies and TV shows on it, once it went live.

Despite Warner Bros backing, the company seems to be having problems getting other content companies on board. Restricting downloads to people who have paid for a file could prove to be a difficult task. Private trackers like Demonoid.com are already doing something along the lines of this by only allowing their members to download torrents, but implementing a commercial BitTorrent system without using DRM is no easy task. Who’s stopping anyone from re-uploading the torrent onto another, public tracker?

On the other hand, BitTorrent is a medium scores of people are already used to and love. Isn’t that how Napster made its money? First there was a P2P program that was being used to swap copyrighted songs, then the company was forced to go legit and a significant part of the user base went along to become paid subscribers.

“The MPAA tells us that 650,000 movies are being downloaded every year, and nobody’s getting paid. We see P2P being utilized so that the publisher, the artist and the ISPs all get paid for the content,” said Lily Lin, a spokeswoman for BitTorrent Inc. In September, Lin told TorrentFreak that the company was still negotiating with other studios and independent artists, trying to get them to sell their content on the BitTorrent Store.

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