GGF Buys The Pirate Bay, Plans Legal Content Downloading Service

Stockholm, Sweden-based GGF on Tuesday said it acquired The Pirate Bay, along with its domain names and related Web sites, for about $7.7 million in cash and stock.

In April, the four Swedish men who founded The Pirate Bay were sentenced to a year in prison and fined about $3.6 million in damages for providing a means of downloading content such as video and music files without compensating the copyright owners.

In addition to The Pirate Bay, GGF on Tuesday also said it acquired Peerialism, a Stockholm, Sweden-based startup developer of solutions to transport and store data on the Internet, such as video distribution for content owners and IP traffic optimization for broadband operators.

GGF, which is a software developer and owner of one of the world's largest network of Internet cafes and game centers, paid about $12.8 million in cash and stock for Peerialism.

With the acquisition of The Pirate Bay, GGF plans to combine the data distribution technology of Peerialism with the popularity of The Pirate Bay in order to develop a business that will allow the legal downloading of content and provide compensation to the content providers and copyright holders.

The Pirate Bay is among the top 100 most-visited Internet sites worldwide and a global brand with more than 20 million visitors and more than 1 billion page views per month, GGF said.

In a statement, Hans Chandra Pandeya, CEO of GGF, said, "As a result of the acquisitions of The Pirate Bay and Peerialism, GGF will have a strategic position in the international digital distribution market. File sharing traffic is estimated to account for more than half of today's global Internet traffic."

GGF further said in that statement that technology and broadband providers, service providers, search engines and rights holders would all benefit from a clearer legal downloading landscape.

"GGF wants to accept the challenge to position itself as a respectable participant in the market and contribute to the Internet's infrastructure, with the goal to establish working models for co-operation and a clear allocation of responsibilities on market terms, respecting both intellectual property rights and the rights of privacy," the company said.