3 Count: Pirate Sale

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1: GGF Shareholders Push Through Pirate Bay Acquisition

First off today, despite several investors pulling out at the last minute, it appears that the sale of The Pirate Bay to Swedish software firm Global Gaming Factory will take place. Shareholders of the company received and unanimously approved the financing plan and control of the site should be transfered to GGF within the next month. During that time, GGF will have to pay 60 million kroner, or roughly $7.8 million.

This puts to rest the speculation that GGF would not be able to secure the funding for the acquisition, but still raises questions about if the transfer will be successful as copyright holders, who won a civil and criminal verdict against the administrators of the site earlier this year, have vowed to try and intercept the transfer.

GGF has said that they plan to convert The Pirate Bay into a legitimate site but so far have signed no agreements with large copyright holders and there is a great deal of speculation about whether such a service could survive.

2: Pirate Bay Clone Threatened By Romanian RIAA

Next up, with the sale of the Pirate Bay confirmed (for the moment) many are looking toward other sites and services as a replacement. As part of that effort, a torrent appears on The Pirate Bay that let users download the entire site, so they could create mirrors and clones elsewhere. However, one of those clones has already found itself under legal threat.

The administrator for BTArena, a Romanian site, had downloaded the torrent and set up what he called an “outline” of The Pirate Bay on his server. Even though the tracker is not functional, the site is just a backup of The Pirate Bay’s torrent files, the Romanian equivalent to the RIAA has contact the site’s host about suspected illegal activity and that information has been passed on to the admin.

No word if the rightsholders plan on taking any additional action but it is clear that they are eager to prevent any clones of the site from appearing.

3: RightsFlow Scores $1.5 Million, Will Launch Consumer Facing Site To Obtain Music Rights

Finally today, music licensing service RightsFlow is coming out with the first consumer-facing music licensing system, designed to let everyday citizens, rather than businesses, license music for their needs. For example, it could be used to license music for a party or, if a small cover band wanted to perform songs at a show, they could use RightsFlow to obtain those permissions. This comes after they have secured an additional $1.5 million in funding for their company.

RightsFlow already provides licensing assistance to many of the Web’s most popular music companies, including Imeem but this new proposed service will be the first major attempt to work with individual consumers to let them license music for their own needs.

Obviously this particular area of licensing has been bathed in controversy, often times because it can be cryptic and difficult to do correctly, but RightsFlow hopes that it can bring both simplicity and affordability to the process.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today. We will be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

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