Well, this was bound to happen someday: Popular BitTorrent site the Pirate Bay has been sold to a Swedish software company for the measly sum of 60 million Swedish kronar ($7.7 million). This follows Friday's decision by a judge to deny the site's operators a new trial in their file-sharing case (the one in which they were recently sentenced to a year in prison and ordered to pay $3.8 million to copyright owners). "We're not [worried] and you shouldn't be either!" writes someone on TPB's official blog. "If the new owners will screw around with the site, nobody will keep using it." But you maybe should worry, because apparently the new owners do plan on screwing around with the site: "We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid," says Global Gaming Factory's CEO in an ominous press release. So this probably means you'll have to start stealing your intellectual property via one of the Internet's billions of other infringement-facilitating websites.

Pirate Bay snapped up by Swedish software firm [Reuters]