Buyer of Pirate Bay, a File-Sharing Site, Plans to Go Legal

PARIS — Free music and movies, mostly pirated, abound on the Internet. But Hans Pandeya says he thinks he has an even better offer. He wants to pay Web users to share songs or films— with the full approval of the copyright owners.

Mr. Pandeya, chief executive of a small Swedish software provider called Global Gaming Factory, said Tuesday that the company had agreed to acquire the Pirate Bay, a file-sharing service whose founders were recently sentenced to prison for assisting in illegal copying.

Global Gaming Factory, a publicly traded company based in Stockholm, said it would pay 60 million Swedish kronor, or $7.75 million, for the site and hoped to turn it into a legal source of free music, movies and other content, using a novel, untested business model.

It would be a radical change. The Pirate Bay, with its Jolly Roger logo, has been the music and movie industries’ most prominent target in the battle against illegal file-sharing. To keep content free but appease content owners, Global Gaming Factory wants to generate revenue from a new, ultra-fast file-sharing system that uses networks of computers to help move large digital files. Read more…

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A Global Approach to Financial Risk

Prabhu Guptara, a noted business professor and specialist on long-term global trends, offers a wide-reaching plan for overhauling financial regulation.

The Obama administration’s proposals preserve and even increase the multiplicity of regulation and regulatory bodies. This will continue to mean regulatory confusion, enabling American companies to continue to move to the least regulated part of the economy.

As is so clearly demonstrated by the failure of the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets to fulfill its mandate of preventing the present crisis, coordination between competing fiefdoms rarely happens because of the existence of a talk shop or club of the powerful, let alone because of the amorphous desire of the public or of the market.

Coordination can only happen if it is legally demanded and institutionally imposed, not if the number of members in the club is merely beefed up, as proposed by the administration at present. Read more…

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How Facebook Could Create a Revolution, Do Good, and Make Billions

Great bruising battles between powerful antagonists is good for media. It “sells papers,” as we used to say, or “generates clicks”, as we now say. When you mix in a love triangle and jilted lovers, well, the audience just goes wild. And Wired did a great job in its piece on Facebook, Google, and Microsoft: riveting stuff. But the thought that kept coming back to me is that Facebook’s bravado, its “grand vision” talk, is what you would expect from a concept-level startup. Surely by now, about 6 years into its venture, Facebook should show some substance? It is time to deliver some real financial results. The concept-level talk is great for attracting capital and talent. Facebook has done that brilliantly. But the point of attracting capital and talent is to be able to generate financial results.

Give It Time? Too Important to Rush?

Anybody who criticizes Facebook’s financial results gets accused of being small-minded, of missing the point, of (gasp!) “not getting it.” In digerati circles, not getting it is like having body odor. Facebook is changing the world, they say. It is a new form of communication, akin to the printing press. Once you get to scale, profits always follow. Google created a service without knowing how to monetize it. Read more…

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