The Pirate Bay's recent surprise decision to sell to gaming company Global Gaming Factory and become a legal operation shocked fans of the popular torrent site. Now, it looks like the arrangement may fall through, after all.

Torrentfreak is reporting that Wayne Rosso, the former CEO of Grokster who spent two weeks working with GGF to close the deal, has walked away from GGF and is not optimistic that they can raise the money to buy the Pirate Bay. The Pirate Bay crew are reportedly giving GGF a week to show them the money.

Rosso reported that GGF's plan isn't in good enough shape to attract the necessarily investors. Apparently, GGF didn't even pay Rosso what he was owed for his services. With only a week left for GGF to confirm the necessary investors, the Pirate Bay's future is in flux again. According to Peter Sunde of the Pirate Bay, though, there are no definite plans for the Pirate Bay if this acquisition doesn't work out.

Nevertheless, GGF boss Hans Pandeya remains steadfastly optimistic. Metro.se (translated) reports him as saying "a group of investors are prepared to inject 30 million SEK" to make the purchase happen. He's also pegged August 27th as the date the deal will go down.

Pandeya also mentioned ongoing negotiations with four major content providers - Universal Music, Sony Music, EMI, and Warner Music - and claimed discussions with one have reached the "final phase." Of course, that final phase could be one label telling him to shove off once and for all.

Based on Rosso's feedback, we'll just have to wait and see if Pandeya is telling the truth or talking out his...aft?

In case you hadn't noticed, there's been a bit of a revolt among eBay power sellers. Basically, eBay increased some fees, which led some buyers to hold a boycott. But the truth of the matter is eBay is a giant, and if you make a decent portion of your income buying and selling goods on eBay, there aren't a ton of good alternatives. Wigix wants to change that, and the site is willing to waive fees on all items sold for less than $25 to do it. For pricier items, WIgix has significantly lower transaction fees than you'll find on eBay.

Wigix isn't exactly an auction like eBay. Rather, it's an "exchange," which lets buyers and sellers connect with one another. Sellers don't have to fill out product descriptions manually. Instead they choose from a database of products which already have product descriptions. This database also makes the search process easy for buyers. When you start to enter a term in the search box, Wigix will provide a list of items to chose from before you even hit enter. When you find the item you're looking for, you can see how many buyers and sellers there are, and you can set a price at which you're wiling to buy an item. As soon as the item is available for that price, Wigix will hook you up with a seller.

You can conduct similar transactions with eBay's Half.com, which lets you "pre-order" an item which will automatically be purchased as soon as someone offers one for sale at your desired price. But Half.com only includes books, movies, music, and video games, while Wigix users can sell pretty much anything.

[via Mashable]

It seems like some internet savvy hookers have found out that Craigslist is the place to be in order to attract Johns interested in a little offline business.

Local authorities have been monitoring the employment and for sale ads, and have noticed a steady increase in action from the sex trade business. Nassau County, New York was where the latest sting took place. In the past year alone, over 70 arrests have been taken place just from Craigslist ads. Police have started placing decoy ads on the website and monitoring it to catch would be customers in the act. High tech hookers have taken off all across the US, with another recent arrest of 60 in Illinois that used Craigslist to advertise their services.

Craigslist says that its 24 staff members cannot possibly flag all objectionable ads, but that hasn't stopped law enforcement officials from accusing them of enabling prostitution. Others are saying that the sites digital footprints help law enforcement crach down on the sex trade. On one day over 9,000 listings alone were added to the "Erotic Services" category in the New York region. Welcome to Prostitution 2.0.

First an NFL player gets in a bunch of trouble for dog fighting, and now Amazon gets their feathery tails in little issue surrounding the sale of cockfighting magazines.

It seems that Amazon is making animal activists a little disgusted with the fact that they are involved with the selling of illegal 'sports' magazines, and the Humane Society has stepped in to file a civil lawsuit. Amazon believes that they should not act as a censor, and that the magazines are legal to sell, even though they run advertisements for blades that attach to birds legs with the sole purpose of inflicting fatal injuries.

A lawyer representing the publisher of one of the magazines says that "The bottom line is as long as its legal someplace, you're not advertising an illegal activity." A search on Amazon.com for "cockfighting" returned results not only for raising cockfighting birds, but for raising and training fighting dogs.



[via NYTimes]

Odeo, an early pioneer among podcasting sites, is up for sale. Odeo's creator, Evan Williams is aiming to be open and honest about the sale, and wants everything out on the table so he's blogging about it. The creator of Blogger and the founder of Obvious Corp who is the web development company behind Twitter, admits that Odeo has not gotten the attention it deserves.

Back in the day, Odeo did receive funding, but when things didn't work out; Evan bought it back and was trying to rehash a business model. Twitter has taken off, and they must spend their time with that application, so Odeo is on the market. As an alternative to a buyout, Obvious is currently looking at looking at different investment situations as well, from a cash offer to equity. The full Odeo pot includes selling the odeo.com domain as well as the studio.odeo.com platform, including all code, the brand, and a database of three million MP3s. So, if you're interested, drop Evan an email.

UPDATE: Evan was reported to have paid $5 Million when he bought back ODEO from investors.

[Thanks Jordan Running]

In December, I pointed out that this is a great time to pick up some software on the cheap. Well, if you thought there were a lot of good deals before the holidays, you should check out these after holiday sales:

• eSoft Interactive has extended their sale by about a week to January 7th. You can get 50% off of all the games in their store with the coupon code: ESOFTHOLIDAYS.
• Astraware is doing their annual Hogmanay (New Year's) sale. Every day through January 11th, Astraware will offer up a couple pieces of software for 50% to 75% off. You can pick up some games for as little as $2.95.
• Several web sites that have partnered with MobiHand seem to be offering discounts. For example, if you make a purchase through the Just Another Mobile Monday store with the coupon code JAMM-HOLS you'll get 20% off of any software purchased through January 6th.
• PhatWare's offering up to 50% off selected products, including PhatPad, Calligrapher, PhatNotes and PhatSpell. These discounts expire January 31st.
• And PocketGear, Conduits, and Pocket PC Techs all have sales continuing into January.

NewsGator, the cross-platform gurus of all things RSS and blogging, is feeling a bit festive this holiday season, as they have announced an end-of-year sale on all their products. This forum post has the short 'n sweet details: through the end of December, using coupon code NGHoliday at checkout will score you $10 off any of their products. As most of them are sitting around the $30 price point, this could also loosely be considered a 30% off sale - not a bad deal if you ask me.