The Pirate Bay Acquired, To Go Legit?

The Pirate Bay, the world's most notorious BitTorrent tracking site, has faced the brunt of legal battles of late. Specifically, this includes the founders of The Pirate Bay, Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Peter Sunde, as well as Carl Lundstrom, who provided financing, all of who were found guilty of facilitating copyright infringement. Now, however, it looks to go legit, as Swedish tech company Global Gaming Factory X said Tuesday that it has reached an agreement to it for about $7.7 million.

While an appeal has already been filed, The Pirate Bay hasn't been sitting still either, with a recent closed beta for a logless VPN, iPREDator being launched.  Additionally, there was this deal, behind the scenes.

According to the press release:

GGF intends to launch new business models that allow compensation to the content providers and copyright owners. The responsibility for, and operation of the site will be taken over by GGF in connection with closing of the transaction, which is scheduled for August 2009.

"We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site, " said Hans Pandeya, CEO GGF.

That sounds totally legit.  One has to wonder how The Pirate Party, unaffiliated but reportedly inspired by The Pirate Bay, will feel about this.  The Pirate Party recently managed to gain a seatin the European Parliament in the latest election (two if the Lisbon Treaty is ratified).

Also on Tuesday, GGF added that it agreed to acquire Peerialism, which is a Swedish company that specializes in the development of P2P file sharing technology. The move is obviously related to GGF's acquisition of The Pirate Bay.

In the same press release as above, Johan Ljungberg, CEO of Peerialism said:

"Peerialism has developed a new data distribution technology which now can be introduced on the best known file sharing site — The Pirate Bay."

While GGF said that The Pirate Bay produces huge traffic (and yes, it's obvious), it's hard to believe that said traffic will remain unabated if things change at the site. We'll see what happens, and watch with interest.