Swedish software company Global Gaming Factory (GGF) is to host a press conference on Aug. 27, regarding their proposed takeover of the controversial file-sharing site the Pirate Bay.
Widely expected to confirm GGF's acquisition of the BitTorrent tracker, the conference will take place 15.30 local time on Aug.27 in Stockholm, less than two hours after a scheduled GGF shareholders meeting.
Speaking to Billboard.biz, Hans Pandeya, CEO and founder of GGF, says that he is "very confident" of the proposed $7.6 million takeover going ahead as planned and that Aug. 27 was "going to be quite an interesting day."
"There's been so much speculation, so it's good that we take over and then people will see that it is actually happening instead of all these speculations that it might go through, it might not go through," he adds.
Confirming that the original Pirate Bay founder operators - Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, financier Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde, who stepped down as the site's spokesman earlier this week (Billboard.biz, Aug.4) - would no longer be involved in the site following GGF's takeover, Pandeya was also revealed that he hoped to have "at least one agreement" with a major record label in place before Aug. 27.
Pressed as to how close any deal with the unnamed major was to completions, he comments: "90% close to signing a deal with major. It's just a matter of weeks."
Looking beyond Aug.27, he went on to say that signing agreements with the "whole global industry" will take "probably up to two years, but slowly you are going to see a lot of changes and a lot of interesting stuff on the Pirate Bay."
GGF wants to turn Pirate Bay's 20 million users legit by introducing a monthly fee for file-sharing and signing content deals with record labels and film studios. Despite the failure of many peer-to-peer networks that have previously gone legitimate, Pandeya remained optimistic that a legal Pirate Bay would continue to thrive.
"We believe in this," he says. "There is a big problem with file sharing and the industry hasn't been able to solve it for the last five years. It's the opportunity now to solve this problem and we think this is the way to do it - to legalize the Pirate Bay. We think it's going to work."
Pandeya was not willing to discuss exactly what form the new 'legitimate' Pirate Bay would take, but he did indicate that that it's unlikely to follow an ad-funded model.
The focus appears to be more on the networked storage/transmission business model, whereby users donate a portion of their hard-drive disk space to a virtual "cloud" locker, which the new Pirate Bay would then offer to clients at prices lower than the going online storage rate.
"The new thing really that we have is the next generation file sharing technology," Pandeya tells Billboard.biz. "So we'll be able to create new revenues that haven't been available [before]... It's not ad-supported, it's resource supported. You share you resources. It'll become clearer when we've taken over what this all means and how this new technology works."
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