The would-be buyer of Web site The Pirate Bay backpedaled in a Dutch court Tuesday, saying that it is uncertain whether the purchase will ever be completed.
Lawyer Ricardo Dijkstra said Sweden’s Global Gaming Factory X would only buy The Pirate Bay if it can turn it into a “legitimate business.”
GGF, a software company, said last month it planned to buy The Pirate Bay domain name and related Web sites for 60 million kronor ($7.8 million), with the deal closing in August.
Dijkstra said Tuesday that is conditional on whether “those assets can be used in a legal manner.”
The Dutch court is hearing a civil case brought against The Pirate Bay and GGF by Stichting Brein, a Netherlands-based organization funded by various copyright holders groups.
The Pirate Bay provides an index to BitTorrent files, which can be used for trading media such as movies, music and computer games. The site has more than 20 million users globally. In April, a Swedish court found that four Swedish nationals connected with the site had helped millions of people download copyright-protected material. They were given one-year prison terms and ordered to pay a fine of 30 million kronor ($3.9 million, EU2.8 million).
Stichting Brein had originally tried to summon The Pirate Bay and the men fined in Sweden for the Dutch suit, but amended that to include GGF after the company’s announcement last month.
Dijkstra said GGF was surprised it had been named in the case, since it supports paying copyright holders, and GGF doesn’t have any say over the site at the moment.
Whether the deal will ever be completed is “very much the question” he said.
GGF has said it hopes to strike a deal with copyright holders as Apple has done with its iTunes store, though the Swedish company has not presented details of how its service…