Intellectual Property Law

Vote: What?s Next for The Pirate Bay?

By David Kravets

Thursday’s de-listing from a Swedish stock exchange of The Pirate Bay’s corporate suitor is likely to scuttle the planned $8.5 million purchase of the world’s most notorious BitTorrent site.

The removal of GGF from the AktieTorget exchange was based, in large part, on the exchange’s findings that the Swedish company’s CEO, Hans Pandeya, never had the financing to go through with the deal, and was just trying to manipulate the company’s penny stock prices.

That leaves the proprietors of the 5-year-old Pirate Bay without an obvious exit strategy at a time of unrelenting legal pressure. The four co-founders were convicted last April on charges of facilitating copyright infringement. Their year-long prison sentences have been stayed pending appeal, but a Swedish judge has already issued an order aimed at closing the site. For now that order has been frustrated by Pirate Bay’s technical countermeasures, but can the cat-and-mouse game really last forever?

The Pirate Bay crew’s previously stated commitment to operate forever as an outlet for free content was exposed as an illusion when they made the GGF deal. So what happens now? Your guess is as good as ours. We’ve come up with some predictions below. Vote on what you think the site’s future holds, or submit your own predictions if you have a better idea for the future of Sweden’s file sharing supersite.

Let us know what you would add to the list, and vote for the worst offenders below.

Show predictions that are: hot | new | top-rated or submit your own prediction

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While you can submit as many predictions as you want, you can only submit one every 30 minutes. No HTML allowed.

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Illustration: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Full post as published by Threat Level on September 10, 2009 (boomark / email).