GGF announced last month it was acquiring Pirate Bay’s assets and all related domain names. Furthermore, GGF issued a similar announcement earlier this week stating copyright owners and file-sharers alike would receive payments for participating in the newly launched torrent site.

“For the great majority it will be free of charge, for a minority it will actually make them money, and for a small portion it will cost them,” GGF’s chief exec Hans Pandeya stated in the acquisition announcement.

However, it looks as if there’s some choppy waters ahead before GGF can turn those plans into reality. Now a lawyer for GGF says the company won’t purchase Pirate Bay unless it can transform the company into a legitimate, copyright-friendly service.

GGF attorney Ricardo Dijkstra told a Swedish court hearing during a civil case brought against GGF and Pirate Bay’s operators by copyright holders consortium Stichting Brein that the company would go through with the acquisition only on the condition the “assets can be used in a legal manner.”

Stichting Brein originally intended to sue only Pirate Bay’s operators but amended the lawsuit to include GGF after the company announced its acquisition plans last month.

When making the original acquisition announcement, GGF said it didn’t know who actually owned Pirate Bay, saying it dealt with “foreign lawyers.” Earlier this year a Swedish court sentenced the four men known for running the site to one year in prison and fined them 30 million kronor ($3.8 million) for facilitating copyright infringing activities. The four men remain free while their conviction makes its way through the appeals system.

Pirate Bay did not actually host content. Instead, it provided little pieces of code called torrents that enable users to download content from other computers. Say you’re looking for a file – U2’s latest album, for example. Downloading the torrent and plugging it into your bittorrent peer-to-peer software client enables your computer to download bits of the album from other users on the network.

Now it looks as if GGF and Pirate Bay are in a cart-before-the-horse predicament, with the company saying it won’t purchase the site unless it can turn it into a legitimate service. Of course, it can’t turn it into legitimate service unless it purchases it, leaving observers wondering if the entire acquisition is dead in the water.

Meanwhile, Dutch magazine Revu quoted one of Pirate Bay’s former administrators, Fredrik Neij, saying he hadn’t received any formal announcement of Stichting Brein’s lawsuit against the torrent site and GGF, and had no plans to attend the court proceedings.

“Would a sane person trust information that he received just like that from the Internet?” told Revu. “Of course we’re not coming.”