ThePirateBay.org to sell for $10 million

A failed corporate calendar company, Business Marketing Services, says it has made a deal to buy controversial Bittorrent domain thepiratebay.org for $10 million.
This is a strange one. On the face of it, the deal looks like a reverse acquisition with a shell company, designed to get The Pirate Bay a US stockmarket listing.
BMS is listed on the OTC market. According to its last 10-K filing, Hans Pandeya bought a controlling 78% interest in the company this January, for $325,000.
Pandeya is the majority shareholder of Global Gaming Factory X, the Swedish company which last June said it was going to buy The Pirate Bay for $8 million.
That deal, which was widely questioned at the time, does not appear to have ever closed.
Today, BMS said it will buy the thepiratebay.org domain name, and has issued a promissory note in the value of $10 million, deliverable on June 30, 2010.
That’s the same date that GGF thinks it will close the acquisition
Are you following this? Basically, GGF is buying thepiratebay.org, and BMS is buying it off GGF on the same day, assuming the cash exists. Both firms are owned by Pandeya.
As for BMS, it’s a phenomenally unsuccessful company that tried, and failed, to build a business making corporate-branded calendars.
The company is so small it’s barely there. Check out its last 10-K.

We planned to initially print 3,000 wall planners for each industry group that we targeted and distribute them to members of the targeted industry or profession free of charge. Our plan was to generate revenue solely through the sale of advertising space on the wall planners. These wall planners would have been produced upon our sale of all the available advertising space. To date, we have not produced any wall planners… As of December 31, 2009 we had $946 in cash.

This outfit couldn’t even print 3,000 calendars, and now it is the shell into which The Pirate Bay will be reversed.
BMS said it is planning “to use the acquired assets to launch a paid for service with licensed content based on next generation filesharing technology”.
The Pirate Bay was the internet’s most popular source of bootleg torrents. Its back-story is all very complicated.
Wikipedia’s probably your best bet.

Band loses domain, gets $300k anyway

A British pub band forgot to renew its domain name, but wound up £200,000 richer anyway, courtesy of an original work from the popular graffiti artist Banksy.
According to the Bristol Evening Post, Exit Through The Gift Shop was gifted a painting valued by Sotheby’s at £200,000 ($307,000) after it agreed to change its name to avoid a clash with the title of Banksy’s new film.
But was there also another benefactor, the person who caught exitthroughthegiftshop.com when it dropped and sold it to Banksy?
The band’s drummer said:

“We had lost the domain name as we had forgotten to renew it, and when we phoned up to ask to buy it back, the man said no, that we wouldn’t be able to afford it, and that he was the agent for the person who had the domain name.”

Whois records show that exitthroughthegiftshop.com dropped in March 2008, when it was promptly re-registered by somebody who hid behind an eNom privacy service.
The domain was transferred to its present owner (no, it’s not Banksy, I checked) two days before it was due to expire in March last year. Presumably, it was sold.
Did a domainer make a killing in artwork?

A timely domain drop – iquitfacebook.com

The domain name iquitfacebook.com is dropping this weekend, and it couldn’t have come at a more appropriate time.
Facebook has walked into a bit of a privacy nightmare by announcing it will start to give third-party sites access to user data, leading some people to quit the service.
The site has already been called “Privacy Enemy Number One”, and there are dozens of other pieces of commentary and news picking holes in the new Facebook features.
Widely followed Googler Matt Cutts also raised eyebrows when he said he had deactivated his Facebook account today, and others are following suit.
“I just deactivated my Facebook account using the guide at http://goo.gl/rhpE Not hard to do & you can still revive it later,” Cutts tweeted earlier today.
Is there an opportunity for an enterprising domainer to capitalize on a trend here?
The name iquitfacebook.com is pending delete this weekend. It’s listed on SnapNames with an April 24 deadline, and has already attracted six bidders on Namejet, with a high bid of $79.

Flying.com sells for $1.1 million

Flying.com has been sold to UsedAirplanes.com for $1.1 million.
UsedAirplanes said in a press release that it will spend the rest of the year turning the domain into a social media site for flying enthusiasts, through which it can market its used plane listings.
According to the press release, the domain last changed hands in September last year, for $845,000, which gives the seller a very nice return on a quick flip.
“The amount of traffic Flying.com will generate will obviously enhance the amount of leads our brokers will receive for their used airplanes and aircraft,” said CEO Mark Horne.
While it’s undoubtedly a category killer for aviators, the domain doesn’t currently seem to rank highly in search engines for the term “flying”.
The related domain Fly.com sold for $1.8 million in January 2009. Last week, Pilot.com was sold through Sedo for $300,000.

Three reasons why iPadDownloads.com is not worth $1 million

The mainstream media has been carrying a few stories today about the guy who is trying to eBay iPadDownloads.com, iPadDownload.com and iPadDownloads.net for $1 million apiece.
“This is probably the first very smart thing I have ever done in my life,” the registrant, record producer Nik Tyler, told Fortune magazine.
I don’t know the guy. It’s quite possible that his entire life to date has been a constant stream of dumb moves. Here are three reasons why iPadDownloads.com is another: (continue reading)

Sex.com auction postponed for online bidders

The auction of Sex.com, which was due to happen in New York on Thursday, has been postponed and the auctioneer is now accepting online bidders.
Maltz Auctions, which is handling the sale, posted a link to a ProxiBid.com page and the slogan “Online Bidding Available – Call for Details!”, neither of which were there last time I looked.
ProxiBid describes itself as “the World’s #1 provider of live webcast auctions”. The service webcasts and allows remote users to bid on live, in-person auctions.
The company press released its Sex.com coup on Friday.
You’ll still need to put $1m into escrow in order to bid.
It appears that legal action may be the reason for the postponement.
The ProxiBid page still reflects the March 18 date.

Three-digit .coms fetch high prices

A few short, meaningful, numerical domains have shifted on Sedo today.
Among them is 313.com, which sold for $25,000. Its end-user value mostly likely lies in 313 being the area code for Detroit, a city of almost a million people.
Similarly, 949.com has sold for $13,560. It’s the dialing code for Orange County in Southern California, as well as being used in various radio stations’ frequencies.
Meanwhile, 421.com has sold for 8,955 euros ($12,229).

F**k.in beats SwearBox.com

This just in from Sedo… fuck.in has fetched 1,050 euros ($1,400) at auction.
Surprisingly low for something with such lovely pun value, I thought, but it still managed to beat the much more useful SwearBox.com, which sold last week for (continue reading)