When the Pirate Bay was purchased last month by Global Gaming Factory, most people scratched their heads and wondered why. Now comes official word that yes, Pirate Bay will charge users a monthly subscription fee. This fee will be lower than normal if you share a lot of files. Supposedly, all of the money collected by the new Pirate Bay will go to pay off copyright holders.

This entire enterprise is doomed to failure.

From TorrentFreak:

In addition, GGF hopes to cut deals with ISPs. “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 conveniently fails to mention that a Pirate Bay where users have to pay for access will not be generating much traffic at all, so this part of GGF’s business model has to be rethought. BitTorrent does not depend on The Pirate Bay, and new trackers have already lined up to take over its job.

When Global Gaming Factory announced their acquisition of The Pirate Bay, it took everyone by surprise. More surprising was the claim that GGF would make Pirate Bay ‘legit’, which kind of defeats the purpose of The Pirate Bay. Reminds me of Napster, and we all know how that turned out.

Well, most of us may have been surprised by the turn of events, but apparently stockholders of GGF weren’t too shocked, as evidence is mounting of insider trading.

From TorrentFreak:

Around a week ago, equity marketplace Aktietorget shut down the trading of GGF stock after it spotted unusually large trading volumes leading to a rapidly increasing stock price, notably in the absence of any new information to explain the sudden interest in the company.

Indicating they suspect insider dealing and announcing an investigation, Peter Gönczi, executive vice president of Aktietorget told Dagens Industri: “There are reasons to suspect that information was leaked.”

After the price of GGF shares rocketed by more than 150% yesterday, at one point today they had lost 29% of their value, up to date details here.

The Sims 3 isn’t even out yet, but pirates have had access to the game for week, thanks to an early leak of EA’s franchise juggernaut.  According to Bloomberg, The Sims 3 has been downloaded over 180,000 times between May 18 and May 21. For some reason I don’t think this is going to impact overall sales and we can all rest assured that The Sims 3 will be hogging NPD sales data for many months, if not years, to come.

People can bitch and moan about piracy all they want, but the larger question EA should ask itself is: how did our game get leaked prior to release?How can we prevent that in the future? Why does this always happen?

From Bloomberg:

The company chose to release the game without Digital Rights Management, coding that makes software harder to copy. Electronic Arts, based in Redwood City, California, came under criticism from users last year when “Spore,” a game designed by “Sims” creator Will Wright, included protections that limited the number of copies.

The code was cracked and “Spore” became the most-pirated title of 2008 with 1.7 million downloads, according to TorrentFreak.com, a German Web site that tracks downloads. “The Sims 2,” released in September 2004, was second with 1.15 million downloads last year and Ubisoft Entertainment SA’s “Assassin’s Creed” was third with 1.07 million downloads.

Pirate Bay, the popular BitTorrent site, raised quite a few eyebrows when it introduced a small applet last week that allowed Facebook users to link torrents to their profile.  Facebook didn’t waste any time in bringing the hammer down, as the company has disabled this capability.

From Wired:

Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt told TorrentFreak on Wednesday that the social-networking site “respects copyrights and our Terms of Service prohibits placement of ‘Share on Facebook’ links on sites that contain any content that is infringing. Given the controversy surrounding The Pirate Bay and the pending lawsuit against them, we’ve reached out to The Pirate Bay and asked them to remove the ‘Share on Facebook’ links from their site. The Pirate Bay has not responded and so we have blocked their torrents from being shared on Facebook.”