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The Pirate Bay Facing "Old Fashioned" Pressure
Jety writes "Ars Technica has an article reporting that The Pirate Bay is facing legal pressure from a new front. A wealthy musician with a track record for going head-to-head with record labels and little kids is now joining the queue to take a legal swing at TPB. What I find particularly interesting about this article is the description of the 'camera-toting investigators following [The Pirate Bay admins] around in cars marked with Danish plates.' One TPB admin asks, '"What do they think they can find out by following us around? Everything we do is digital.'"
I think that they COULD find out what they do by following them around. But the years of training of these pirates has turned them into a ninja/pirate combination, taking the best from both worlds, ending the age-old argument, and allowing them to stay concealed.
That's game. Blouses win.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
It's good to know that in Sweden cops have options beyond boxes of donuts. ;P
If I were them, I'd be very careful about jaywalking, cramping my wheels to the curb, and making sure my mattress tags were intact. It's called a shitlist; an idea not entirely unfamiliar to TPB admins, I'm sure.
Dear TPB Admin,
We have your limited edition Star Wars Princess Leia figurine still in its original packaging. You do what we tell you when we tell you unless you want something....bad to happen to her. Just so you know what we're serious we have sent you the packaging from your original Jabba the Hut figurine.
MAFIAA
"Some books contain the machinery required to create and sustain universes."-Tycho
A "wealthy musician?" Seriously?
It's Prince. Or that symbol thingy. Or TAFKAP (I think I know what one of those "A"s stands for).
The summary seems unnecessarily coy about exactly who's behind this.
Peter Sunde, a Pirate bay admin, tells Ars that the Purple One's legal team has already started leaning on some advertisers to drop support for the site. "We're not even worried, since the Internet is too big for morally upset people to get it their way," Sunde said in an e-mail. "I'm just sad that Prince--whose music I really like--can't understand that he's the new Metallica versus Napster. And we all know who lost that..."
Uhhh...yeah, Napster did.
Could someone please tell me how TPB is somehow offering some new business model for the people who make the music?
The record labels are told people will still keep illegally distributing music because the labels aren't providing it online. The record labels finally give in and provide it online, and they're told that people will still keep illegally distributing music because they don't like DRM and 99 cents a song is somehow too high.
The only business model a lot of people here seemed to support was AllofMP3, but honestly 10 cent non-DRMed songs really isn't a viable business model, as much as everyone wants it to be.
Ignoring taking sides over if Pirate Bay should be allowed to exist or not, is this worth it for Prince?
Money probably isn't an issue for him, so count that almost completely out (-.01)
This can't help him sell records I would imagine, image (-1)
Any publicity is good publicity? (+.2)
More people buy his record after not being able to find it on PB (doubt it ?)
A personal victory for Prince (he must really dislike Pirate Bay or I don't see why bother). Maybe he wants to help out other artists that don't want to attempt getting in the news for this.
Duh, they're trying to catch you stealing all that music and software!
What, doesn't Sweden have laws against stalking? Because that's what this sounds like to me.
Just because Prince is some big star doesn't give him any special rights. Well, outside of America anyways. If Hollywood had any influence there, the TPB admins would already be in jail.
So go for it - sue Prince for harrassment and stalking.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
You fail it!
The subject of the sentence is "A wealthy musician" not "A wealthy musician and little kids". The singular conjugation "is" is correct.
Please report to your nearest Mother Superior for the appropriate punishment.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
We have your limited edition Star Wars Princess Leia figurine still in its original packaging.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!
I normally hate all the Ayn Rand crap about how laws are just designed to keep the masses down, but in this case, it provides some context... It doesn't matter if you do everything online. At some point, you step back into the real world, along with real world rules. And that's when you can be caught for a million different things: littering, jaywalking, illegal parking, u-turns, speeding... the list is endless. If you're serious about taking someone out, don't do a frontal attack. Instead, sneak around the back and get them by surprise. Their site is firewalled and legally unassailable? Get them for something else. Tax evasion, anyone? If nothing else, the constant harassment will cause the admins to blow up at some point, and to provide some camera fodder.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Nah, that's been Prince's trademark since at least the early 80s. A lot of his song lyrics use kw3lspeak, e.g., "I wanna do it 2 night, baby, I wanna do it 2 U" is an actual line, with original spelling, from 777-9311 (which he wrote for The Time).
He was doing it before there WAS SMS.
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
What do they think they can find out by following us around? Everything we do is digital.
Perhaps they are trying to dig up dirt about the admins for a good old fashioned blackmail mud-slinging political match ala J. Edgar Hover and the old school politicos or maybe they are just trying to intimidate the admins (i.e. black suburbans, helicopters, and guys in SWAT vests with 'RIAA' velcroed to the back). The best thing that the admins could do in response would be to keep reporting what is going on in their blogs and other public places on the Internet. This will help discourage these pseudo agents from arranging an 'accident' or some other more overt form of persuasion because everyone will know who was responsible.
Only you seem to be focusing on deriding the people who don't pay directly for their copies of music (according to our brief custom of the last 70 years).
Why is it so hard to see that its ok to let companies with no practical business model die off? I know it becomes a touchy subject when we bring art into the picture, but the spirit of copyright law is to promote the creation of art, not to give business models to musicians. It seems particularly hard for people of the last couple generations to fathom that music (or art in general) can be created without being paid for copies of their work. They can't see that the true value in art is the process by which it is created, that is what is rare. This value can still be monetized, and a business model can be developed around it (think service instead of product).
Even if you don't want to or can't believe this old school view of art, you will face the reality of digital technology. Copying is only going to get faster and more convenient. Distributed technology will only get more robust. Controlling the location of 1s and 0s will become increasingly futile. No laws will be able to reverse this, no amount of yelling thief at a generation of hungry minds will hold them back.
What do you think will happen when 1 million 3rd world kids get on the internet through OLPC? What happens when they reach 10 million in the next few years? Can you seriously expect them to even consider intellectual property with an open source key on their keyboard?
Right now there are more people with cell phone in China than there are people alive in the USA. What happens when there are more Chinese online than people in the US? What happens when the same goes for India? Do you think these huge amount of people wont be able to find a way to adapt open source software for their needs? When they are completely bypassing proprietary western solutions, what good will our DMCA do?
So I laugh at the moral indignation of the slighted intellectual property holders. Right now I am stealing. I'm robbing those who were lucky enough to get fat from an unworkable system. Luckily, the system is changing and I wont have to steal in the future. Still, every time they yell thief I feel more like Robin Hood, and I'm not the only one.
"how can they call it a MINE if everything here is THEIRS?!?!" -Straight Jacket
Invite? They revel in it! They make a habit of publishing silly rebuttals to legal threats, and apparently their country of origin supports them to a surprising degree.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
I think he probably means did Metallica stop piracy. Which they didn't. Napter is probably a bad choice, but for a the legal noise that surrounded it P2P sharing was just getting started, it didn't stop and barely slowed down.
Quack, quack.
Dear god, Prince, have mercy. Don't send Appolonia Kotero and Sheila E, and certainly not while wearing lingerie.
And if you have a soul, for the love of all that's holy don't send Sheena Easton, especially not speaking in character as Annah from Planescape:Torment. Rawr. Er, I mean Oh No!
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
I can understand why Prince would be tempted to attack the P2P culture. As far back as the early 90s, he was one of the most bootlegged artists around. Seriously- I have hundreds of live shows, along with a ton of unreleased songs, on my hard drive. At least 20% of my 60 GB iPod is made up of Prince music, both released and unreleased. If all you know Prince for is Purple Rain, you're missing out on an artist with a passion for jazz and funk- he's James Brown and Miles Davis put together with a better voice. I've been grooving to his Vegas 3121 concerts and his concert at Montreux for the last few months, and they are SWEET. But this solution is just nuts. Killing the Pirate Bay and YouTubers isn't going to stop the flow of bootleg tracks. When Prince was a Warner Brothers artist and downloading free music was only a Cory Doctorow dream, the problem was just as bad. When he went on his own, some of his solutions were laughably bad. He sold "Crystal Ball", a 4-CD set, directly to his fans; however, once he had their money, he released the same set (minus the soundtrack to his ballet, which wasn't really why anyone bought the set) to retailers at a lower price, then took up to a year to mail out the copies to the fans who bought them first. His NPG Music Club cost fans hundreds of dollars for very little benefit over the life of the club- 12 "radio shows" that hinted at the vast material in his vaults, one acoustic CD, and preferrential seating at concerts. When he then decided to sell albums directly to fans (the little-known Chocolate Invasion was one), he encoded them in low bit-rate DRM'd Windows Media. I love the music that Prince has made over the years, and I want to pay him for that music. All he'd have to do is hook up with iTunes or Amazon.com and sell high-bit DRM-free MP3s, and he'd be raking in great money. Does he need my money? Of course not; he's one of the richest men in the world. But the best reason for paying an artist isn't because the MPAA or the RIAA forces you to; it's because you want to show respect and thank an artist that has added something to your life. I want to thank Prince by paying him some money. I hope he realizes this someday. PS- if you want to hear some GREAT Prince music, try hunting down the 3121 show from 12/2/06, the Small Club show from 8/18/88, the Montreux Jazz Festival show from 6/16/07, the Paisley Park show with Miles Davis from 12/31/87, or the Fillmore show from San Francisco from 2/14/04.
Dude, you are pirates. They are looking for your ship, and therein, all your booty.
In particular, in some places such as the USA it is a crime to provide a service that abets illegal file sharing. In other places, though the filesharing might be illegal, providing metadata about shared files is legal. In those places, you have to go after the sharers because running the tracker is legal see footnote 9 . Sharers are like roaches: there's a million born every day and they're coming out of the woodwork. There's little evidence that suing a few hundred sharers alters the behavior of the unsued millions. So for Prince, going after trackers is the only sensible option, even if trackers are located where trackers are legal (one wonders when or if the RIAA will ever come to this conclusion). So Prince is desparate. Suing fans, the only legal remedy, may be counter productive. He's left with trying to intimidate the tracker operators.
The bigger picture here is we're watching the collapse of a business model, and there's no replacement in sight. If musicians can't make money, they won't record. On the other hand, the record labels have earned the ire and disrepect of many fans, and the labels are practically impotent. We're watching dinosaurs die, and we have no idea what will replace them.
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
Prince alone in the studio It's two a.m. and all the girls are gone The girls thought they were going to be able To have sex with him They wore their special underwear Once the tracks were laid down Prince's back turned around Raspberry headphones on his head On his ears Prince alone in the studio It's three a.m. Prince hasn't eaten in eighteen hours Dinner's burned on the stove But Prince, he doesn't even know Prince alone in the studio It's four a.m. And he finally gets that guitar track right And it's better than anything any girl could ever give him Because Prince is alone Prince is alone Oh Prince, you are so alone And when it's all complete He feels like a hunter on the street And when it's all complete He feels like a hunter on the street
I wonder what would happen if the pirate bay admins suddenly hired their own people to follow Prince around.
Seriously, people that would take pictures of his every move, looking for something embarrassing to publish in...
oh....never mind
Happiness does not come from having much, but from being attached to little.
This is a crock. Many, if not most of the bands out there are not making any profits off the labels so nothing will change on that front. Also, not every band out there does it for the money. Many do it for *GASP* the music or *GASP* the recognition for the real money maker, concerts. In the days before big mega media corps, many bands released their music to their local radio stations for this recognition. When was the last time you heard one on your local radio? Maybe it's time to break up the stranglehold the labels have on the media market. Maybe it is time the labels cartel was broken up starting with the RIAA itself.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
The Pirate Bay Facing "Old Fashioned" Pressure
Sounds more like good old-fashioned harrassment to me.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Did some research into this, since I was all for hearing about lawyers making fools of themselves.
However, I don't think that actually happened... See FAQ 1.5 at
http://web.archive.org/web/20010803004755/http://pan.rebelbase.com/faq.html (as of Aug 3, 2001)
"If musicians can't make money, they won't record."
This is a non-sequitur.
First of all, the collapse of the RIAA has almost nothing to do with musicians making money. I take that back... it makes it more likely that the average musician will make money.
But It makes it less likely that older acts like Prince who depend primarily on an older back-catalog for income and who currently makes a lot of money from the old business model. I can appreciate his dilemma, although I have no sympathy. His quandary is that he's already earned most of the money he's going to earn and thus would prefer he keeps making money on work he did 20 years ago. I wish I had that gig.
Anyway, musicians will record because without the RIAA it's more likely that "middle class" musicians can thrive. It's now profitable to sell 20,000 CD's. Under the RIAA regime, that kind of act will not continue, because that will net the musician nothing. In the new order, selling on iTunes, Amazon, or direct will gross perhaps $200K. That's enough to encourage some acts until they can 100,000 albums directly to consumer. All the sudden, a moderate sized act can hit $1M without the record company scooping up most of it.
Tough luck to prince though. Maybe he can go back into the studio and become creative again. Life is a bitch when you can't depend on old royalty checks. Kinda like the rest of the world.
What do they think they can find out by following us around? Everything we do is digital.
Oh, that's easily explained. You see, Prince is very wealthy and completely insane. So, if Prince throws $60,000 your way and says "follow these people", you stfu and do what he says. It doesn't matter if anything comes of it. It doesn't matter if it's worthwhile. It doesn't matter if there's no point. And there isn't. Any information they collect will likely sit in storage somewhere until all of his copyrights expire (which, thanks to Disney, will never happen).
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
If musicians can't make money, they won't record.
Dire straits, Sultans of swing.
Listen to the song and hear what it is about.
There are countless musicians who got a day time job to support their hobby, at best they recoup a bit of their costs at times but mainly it is a hobby AKA a moneysink.
When I was young a neighbour of mine operated a pirate radio station. He bought all the gear, bought records, payed for the power and for what? A few small ads? Did he become rich of it or even break even? Hell no, but it was his dream, his hobby.
If all musicians are out of a job tomorrow, the music will go on. And personally, I think the music will be a lot better or at least more varied, because people will play what they want to play, not what sells best.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The first HUNDRED FUCKING COMMENTS are of the nauseating amateur-comedy-hour variety that get modded up rather than sent to oblivion where they belong.
Even the summary is shitty. Way to ironically make a feeble gesture against Prince by not mentioning him by name.
Actually... in a rational world, actions like this would be lauded rather than mindlessly criticized. Unfortunately the dominant meme here is that information should be forced to be free and anyone opposing that philosophy using any means should be demonized.
Right on, Prince. You've made some of the best music, you're an intellectual maverick, and you aren't part of the problem regardless of how many insipid comments get positive moderation on a communist geek site.
I fail to understand why people who create "art" has the right to earn such enormous amounts of money?
I have not seen or heard of any rich research scientist. There are certainly none were i work. We earn enough to put food on the table and that is it. There is no patent or copyright protection of our work(you cannot copy three consecutive notes from a piece of music, but you can sure copy more than three symbols from our math) and yet science is created. How can this be? The framework which aim was to promote intellectual pursuits is not valid for hard science. It is too important for humanity that we can all share in scientific advance.
Then what is the point of intellectual property? If it is deemed such a hindrance for progress that it must be invalid for the "important" fields? Why must we have special protection for music, literature, art, inventions when pure science is exempt?
Furthermore the exemption has shown that the protection is not necessary. Basic research is still being done. Even if I only earn
the same as a nurse or a police officer. But that is OK. I get to earn a living at doing what I think is interesting. Why should it be different for artists?
I am saying, don't expect me to give a damn. I am a baker by training. A good one, but YOU buying YOUR bread in the supermarket and insisting on zoning laws that don't allow me to have the bakery attached to the shop have put me out of business.
Times change, I had to give up my dream, why should you be any different?
Society does NOT own you the right to make a living in your chosen career. Only a lucky few manage that.
Unless you support goverment action to protect all kinds of other jobs that are dying out, I don't see my musicians should be given any more special threatment then they already get. Check how much money already goes to the arts. You need my taxes AND my spending money? Greedy much?
I wish you luck, if you make it, congrats. BUT do NOT expect me to subsidize a dying industry unless you are willing to do the same for mine. Show me the receipts from your local butcher, baker and grocer for the last decade and I will buy your album, but if you shopped at a supermarket just once, the deal is off. You don't care about my career, I don't care about yours.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
"This is a crock. Many, if not most of the bands out there are not making any profits off the labels so nothing will change on that front. Also, not every band out there does it for the money. Many do it for *GASP* the music or *GASP* the recognition for the real money maker, concerts. In the days before big mega media corps, many bands released their music to their local radio stations for this recognition. When was the last time you heard one on your local radio? Maybe it's time to break up the stranglehold the labels have on the media market. Maybe it is time the labels cartel was broken up starting with the RIAA itself."
don't you think we should *GASP* give the musicians a choice? Also, when you don't make shit from concerts unless you are signed with a label.
My wife has a friend that does security for concerts at the major venues in town, so we got free floor tickets to Metallica. This was a "theater in the round" sort of event and I ended up about two or three people away from the stage. I was standing directly in front of James Hetfield when he said, "Here is one off of our new album, St Anger. Have you all gotten it yet". Now I had been drinking a little that evening and apparently my volume knob was turned up a little louder than usual because I replied "Yea, It's great. I downloaded it last night!" and everyone as far as I could see turned and looked at me and started laughing. I guess James heard it to, because he looked down and gave me a little smile.
Ahh, I miss Fugazi and their enlightened business ethics... (and hey, the music was pretty good too :)
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."