FILESHARING SITE The Pirate Bay is lowering the Jolly Roger and setting sail under the legitimate flag of Global Gaming Factory, a Swedish software company that also runs Internet cafes.

Global Gaming Factory (GGF) is to pay 60 million kronor ($7.8 million) for the download service in a mixture of shares and cash.

Pirate Bay had become one of the largest file-sharing sites on the web. But in April the four Swedes running the site were convicted of copyright infringement, sentenced to a year in jail and ordered to pay damages of 30 million kronor ($3.9 million).

GGF intends to take Pirate Bay legit by developing a way to pay copyright holders when their content is downloaded via the BitTorrent catalogue tracking site.

If tpb dies every private tracker dies too!
LOL

That's the source where 99% of the private trackers get their torrents.

Meh... If TPB goes "legit" and asks you to pay for your [censored]... then you will be stuck with a new tracker popping up, noone will want to switch from pirateing all their stuff, to paying for the same crap that they sell in the stores. it is just stupid. TPB is the PIRATE bay. if they do make you pay, the users will leave, leaving the company with a $8 million loss... They don't want the loss, so they _hopefully_ won't charge people. mebbe just an arse load of banner ads would be nice?

Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde has informed TorrentFreak that the site will soon decentralize and stop running a BitTorrent tracker of its own. Instead they will encourage their users to use a yet to be launched third party tracker for their torrents.

To decentralize even further, the torrents that will be listed on the site wont be hosted on The Pirate Bay’s servers anymore. In the near future the site will use a new torrent hosting service that will store the torrents for them. This new hosting service will be open to other torrent sites as well and can be accessed through an API.

In the end The Pirate Bay is making these changes to ensure that the BitTorrent ecosystem stays intact no matter what happens, Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak. By decentralizing the different aspects they hope that BitTorrent users will be less reliant on the uptime of The Pirate Bay’s servers alone. The burden will now be spread among several independently operated services.

Update: According to Johan Sellström, the CTO of Global Gaming Factory, the plans have changed after Peter Sunde talked to us. “We had discussed closing it down initially so I think that’s why he said so. The plan is to use technology from Peerialism that makes bandwidth utilization more efficient and then it would not make sense to shut it down,” he said, adding. “Peerialism will modify the tracker but it will be backwards compatible. But all this is subject to change if for some reason it would not work. It is our ambition to do so.”

The Inquirer got their facts wrong.

I reallly hope it closes....forever!

Shame to see the site go, wonder when Mininova will follow.

The Inquirer got their facts wrong. There are definitely back-end changes taking place, they decided not to shut it down but the trackers are moving to a third-party and there is some new p2p technology that's going to make the site "more reliable".

The only problem is that registration is hard to get.

Actually, I'm not too sad TPB is gone. Most of their torrents were useless as in they weren't always seeded.
If Demonoid shuts down though, I'll be sad. That's where many people go for their torrents. The only problem is that registration is hard to get.

My only problem with Demonoid is that with my upload speed, torrent sites that are share ratio orientated don't really work out for me.

Shame to see the site go, wonder when Mininova will follow.

When the owners lose a giant lawsuit.