Intellectual Property Law

Insider Trading Suspected Ahead of Pirate Bay Sale

By David Kravets

Securities regulators are investigating potential insider trading of Global Gaming Factory before it announced its planned purchase of The Pirate Bay for $7.7 million, exchange AktieTorget told Swedish media.

AktieTorget, a Swedish exchange listing some 116 public companies, suspended trading in Global Gaming a week before the announcement as trading volume and share prices jumped without public news to account for it.

“There are reasons to suspect that information was leaked,” said Peter Gönczi, executive vice president at AktieTorget.

Gönczi also said that the exchange, if the purchase is finalized as planned in August, might open an even wider probe, given that the four Pirate Bay’s co-founders were convicted of facilitating copyright infringement by running the world’s most notorious BitTorrent tracker, and face a year each in prison and millions of dollars in fines. Gönczi said AktieTorget does not permit criminal enterprises to trade on the exchange.

“AktieTorget wants to make sure that the companies that are traded on the list are managing legitimate businesses,” Gönczi said.

The new owners said they planned to make the site legitimate and pay content providers for their wares.

Before the sale, average daily volume in Global Gaming was about 162,000 shares. From June 5 to June 18, there was little trading in the stock with an average price of about 9 cents. On June 22, shares nearly doubled to 18 cents with 1.2 million shares sold before trading was halted. (.pdf)

Trading resumed Tuesday, the day of the announced purchase, and shares closed at a high of 38 cents, with a heavy volume of 5.8 million shares traded. Trading closed at 25 cents Wednesday, down 13 cents, and the volume was nearly 7 million shares traded.

The 5-year-old Pirate Bay boasted some 20 million-plus users and was the world’s most go-to website to find pirated movies, music, games and software. Heads began spinning on Tuesday when the planned purchase was announced by software concern Global Gaming.

That sparked The Pirate Bay to become inundated by its fans asking whether their account information could be leaked.

“We are going to build a user deletion interface later today,” The Pirate Bay said on its blog. “Many people have asked about having their account removed and we will not force anyone to stay on of course. However, we also want to point out that we have no logs of anything, no personal data will be transferred in the eventual sale (since no personal data is kept). So, no need to be worried for safety.”

Hat Tip: TorrentFreak

Illustration: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

See Also:

• Pirate Bay Retrial Denied
• Pirate Bay Launches VPN Service
• Iran Activists Get Assist from ?Anonymous,? Pirate Bay
• The Pirate Bay Guilty; Jail for File-Sharing Foursome
• Facebook Divorces Pirate Bay
• Judge Reviewing Pirate Bay Trial Bias Is Removed for Bias

Full post as published by Threat Level on July 01, 2009 (boomark / email).