Swedish software company Global Gaming Factory X bought The Piratebay for 60 million Swedish crowns. It is rare that websites
like The Piratebay get bought off, they usually cease to exist either by legal pressure or by being closed by its administrators.
The two most important questions right now for the millions of users who use The Piratebay are these two: Who are Global Gaming Factory X and what are their intentions with the website. According to the company website “Global Gaming Factory X AB has the biggest network of internet cafés and gaming centers in the world and provides advertisers, software publishers and service providers with an unprecedented access to the large group of tourists and the large gamer community that visit these centers”.
Neither the new owners nor the Piratebay administrators revealed a lot about the changes that are about to happen to the website and business model. The only outlook can be found in the full press release:
“We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site.”
Paying the copyright owners for content that is downloaded via the site (which actually are only torrent files and not copyrighted content) can mean different things. They could share advertising revenue with copyright holders which would probably be the only revenue sharing model that would not have a huge impact on visitor numbers. It would surely be different if they would roll out a subscription based model.
