Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi, a Pirate Bay co-founder who has long been the service's spokesman, reacted to the latest lawsuit filed by the movie industry in his typically defiant way.
Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi says if Global Gaming can't find the funding, it just won't get The Pirate Bay.
(Credit: Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi)He called it "bull****."
On Tuesday, the Motion Picture Association of America filed legal papers in a Swedish court that alleged the three operators: Kolmisoppi, Fredrik Neij, and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg continue to help millions of people commit copyright infringement, even after being sentenced to jail and ordered to pay $3.6 million in damages. In their legal filing, the studios have asked authorities to stop the trio.
Also in the filing, the MPAA asserts that Reservella is just a front. Reservella is the company based in Seychelles, an island nation northeast of Madagascar, that The Pirate Bay founders say owns the site. The studios maintain Reservella is controlled by Neij, but Kolmisoppi denied this.
"Please ask (the MPAA) how they can know that since it's not true," Kolmisoppi said. "They're just saying it because they're upset that they have a faulty claim. They have essentially no idea on the ownership of the Bay."
Kolmisoppi has said in the past that the founders transferred ownership in 2006.
The question of The Pirate Bay's ownership has come up often in the past few weeks. The music industry's trade group has said that if a Pirate Bay sale is completed, it will try to seize any money that falls into the hands of the site's founders. And then there's Global Gaming Factory, a Swedish software firm, which announced plans last month to buy the service.
Hans Pandeya, Global Gaming's CEO, has said he wants to turn The Pirate Bay, a BitTorrent tracker most often used to locate unauthorized film copies, into a legal music operation.
But those plans appear to be on rocky ground. Two weeks ago, Pandeya hired Wayne Rosso, Grokster's former president, to help acquire content legally. On Tuesday, Rosso told CNET News that he had quit and that he had strong doubts about Pandeya's ability to raise enough money to acquire The Pirate Bay after talking to the CEO's investors.
Rosso said Pandeya may not have all the funding he needs. Pandeya denied there was any hold-up and said his company's investors and board will vote on whether to acquire The Pirate Bay sometime in August.
As for Global Gaming, Kolmisoppi said: "If (Pandeya) doesn't have the funding, it won't go through."
After speaking to people supposedly investing in the acquisition of The Pirate Bay, former Grokster exec Wayne Rosso says he has doubts about a deal.
(Credit: Waynerosso.com)Wayne Rosso, the former president of Grokster, has walked away from Global Gaming Factory because of "strong doubts" the Swedish company has enough funds to acquire The Pirate Bay.
Global Gaming, a Swedish software company, made big news last month by announcing plans to acquire The Pirate Bay for $7.8 million. Hans Pandeya, Global Gaming's CEO, then hired Rosso to negotiate legal music and film licensing deals on the company's behalf.
Rosso had spoken to executives from the top four major labels as well the music industry's worldwide trade group about The Pirate Bay, but now those talks have been "blown up," Rosso told CNET News on Tuesday. Rosso said he's spoken with some of the alleged investors Global Gaming had lined up.
"I and my colleagues have very strong doubts that the funding is in place," Rosso said. "And there are other issues regarding Mr. Pandeya's credibility that trouble us greatly."
Pandeya and Global Gaming have also not met payment deadlines to Rosso and his staff, according to Rosso. Pandeya said in a phone interview from Sweden that he was in the process of paying Rosso and his team.
"Everything is going to plan," Pandeya said. "We have plenty of investors that are interested in this and Wayne is just one of our many consultants...he might have been too impatient. We pay everyone we do business with."
Rosso's assertions raise even more doubts that The Pirate Bay, the famed BitTorrent tracker that enables users to find unauthorized copies of film and music, will become a legal site anytime soon.
Last week, Global Gaming's attorney stirred speculation about whether the public company would be able to complete a deal after he told a Dutch court that whether an acquisition can get done is "very much the question."
Following that, Pandeya told CNET that everything was fine, that the attorney was just stating a deal isn't done until the signatures are on the contract. He said in the interview, which Rosso also participated in, that he had the funding to acquire The Pirate Bay and just needed board and investor approval. He said they are due to vote on the deal sometime in August.
Elsewhere, the movie industry has filed suit against the founders of The Pirate Bay. The blog TorrentFreak, reported that nearly a dozen "major movie companies issued a subpoena to the Stockholm District Court demanding it put an end to the activities of The Pirate Bay."
A spokeswoman for the Motion Picture Association of America said "The Pirate Bay continues to facilitate the wholesale illegal infringement of film and television works in an organized and commercial manner despite the criminal conviction handed down by Stockholm District Court. The studios have simply applied to the Court to require the three operators and the ISP hosting the Web site and trackers to cease this infringement."
The Pirate Bay founders have maintained that they haven't owned the site since 2006, but the complaint, the studios allege that Reservella, the holding company that is the listed owner of the site, is controlled by Fredrik Neij, one of the four founders.
As The Pirate Bay apparently goes legit, the Swedish file-sharing company has hired someone with experience in both legal and illegal file-sharing sites.
New Pirate Bay hire, Wayne Rosso.
(Credit: Waynerosso.com)Global Gaming Factory, the Swedish software company vying to buy The Pirate Bay, has hired Wayne Rosso, the very vocal former president of Grokster and founder of Mashboxx, to help strike licensing deals with content owners. Global Gaming announced earlier this month that the company intends to pay $7.8 million for The Pirate Bay once investors okay the deal.
In an interview with CNET News on Wednesday, Rosso detailed some of what he's been up to on Global Gaming's behalf and provided new details about the company's proposed business model.
In addition to advising Hans Pandeya, Global Gaming's CEO, Rosso has spent several days in London meeting with music executives. Among the organizations he met with are Universal Music Group and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, the trade group representing the music industry worldwide. Rosso said he plans to meet with a wide range of digital content creators.
"We're approaching the record and movie industries, both are at the top of the list," Rosso said. "But eventually we want to talk to (anyone producing digital content)...The Pirate Bay has turned over a legitimate new leaf, so it has to be above board from the first day. That's the only way it can work."
To anybody who remembers Rosso from his days with the now defunct Grokster, the software company that created the famed peer-to-peer program by the same name, it might be hard to see the logic in sending him to make friends with content owners. He was known to compare executives at the Recording Industry Association of America to Stalin.
Rosso said he had a change of heart after founding Mashboxx, a legal P2P service that never really caught on, and working closely with leaders in the music business.
"I've gotten friendly with a lot of these guys," Rosso said of Mitch Bainwol, the RIAA's CEO and other music industry execs. "These are good guys. They've been wonderful to me. Other people in the business have been nice to me but they've had to hold their nose. Some of them took me too seriously. To me it was a f***ing circus. None of that stuff was personal."
As for the new business model, Rosso said The Pirate Bay will offer users all the music they can download for a small monthly fee. Eventually, users can whittle that fee down to nothing by tying their computers to The Pirate Bay's "cloud" network. For example, a person may dedicate a gig of hardware space to the network and the fee may go from $9 to $5. (Rosso declined to discuss pricing yet so the numbers are made up just for the example).
"The more of your computer resources you contribute to the network, the less you pay down to zero," Rosso said. "The user is in control."
The Pirate Bay then plans to harness all that computing power and sell it, becoming a competitor of Akamai and Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
"We hope to introduce a new BitTorrent technology that will optimize ISP traffic," Rosso said. "We can save ISPs up to 80 percent of their resources. Half of the Internet traffic is file sharing and half of that traffic is Pirate Bay."
Rosso first reported the news about his landing at The Pirate Bay on the British blog, the Music Void.
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