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- The Swiss can register .swiss domains from next week
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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.
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