Pirate Bay to become legal download site

The Pirate Bay could become a legal download site after it was bought by a Swedish gaming company.

The Pirate Bay is reportedly set to become the new Napster, transforming itself into a legal download site.

It has been bought by Swedish gaming company Global Gaming Factory (GGF), which said it will start paying copyright fees for music offered on the site.

The founders of Pirate Bay were sentenced to a year each in jail by a court in Sweden earlier this year for copyright infringement.

International lawyers acting on behalf of the four men demanded a retrial, claiming that the judge had a conflict of interest because of his involvement with two pro-copyright organisations.

But the Swedish Court of Appeal has ruled that Tomas Norstrom, the original judge, was not ruling from a biased point of view and Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde were denied their request.

Their file-sharing service, which pointed users in the direction of torrent files held on the computers of other Pirate Bay members, will now be taken over by GGF.

Like Napster, which was an illegal file-sharing site when it was first launched but was forced to become a subscription-based service following legal pressures, the Pirate Bay could now operate under a lawful business model.

Hans Pandeya, head of GGF, said: "Content creators and providers need to control their content and get paid for it."

He confirmed: "We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site."