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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.
It's good to know that in Sweden cops have options beyond boxes of donuts. ;P
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.
If I were them, I'd be very careful about jaywalking
Just like the piracy laws in Sweden, there is no such crime as jaywalking. Sheesh - and they call the US "land of the free"!
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.
We have your limited edition Star Wars Princess Leia figurine still in its original packaging.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!
Nothing really changed in terms of music availability, other than that now we can now find more "illegal" tracks at higher bitrates, better quality, more quickly and conveniently than we could then. Amazing, isn't it? The Gnutella network alone is just bursting with music, and it's hardly the only one. The fact is, the RIAA's effort to shut down Napster was an absolutely classic Pyrrhic victory. Hell, a few more "successes" like that and they'll put the studios out of business entirely. Personally, I think the RIAA's poor decisionmaking in that situation would have justified the studios shutting them down instead. It really was a massive fuckup.
... and he would be right.
Put it this way: not only was that lawsuit a dismal failure in terms of discouraging copyright infringement, but also yet another clear example of the RIAA mindset simply not getting it. They failed to grasp either the technological potential of P2P (there's more than one way to skin a cat) or the human element (we've had a taste of this and we want more.) Had they asked, I would have told them that all they were doing was forcing a phase change on the technology. The appearance of Frankel's prototype Gnutella client so close on the heels of Napster's shutdown was no surprise to me. I grabbed a copy the night it was released, before AOL tried to shut it down (horse, barndoor, all that.) I could not believe how fast music began to appear on it. The thing had a serious memory leak, but I'll be damned if it didn't work! Anyway, if it hadn't been Justin Frankel, sooner or later somebody would have released the next generation of peer-to-peer, because Napster gave millions upon millions of people something they wanted. Here's the thing: some of those people were programmers.
That was something that even an RIAA lawyer should have been able to predict, and I think it should have been sufficient motivation to make them work with Napster so as to maintain a level of control over distribution. That would have required some vision, though, and a willingness to tell their bosses, "Hey, things are about to go from bad to worse and you had better do something NOW." Instead, they did the only thing they know how to do: throw lawyers at the problem. So they blew it.
So the GP can claim that the RIAA was successful in eliminating Napster as a source of illegal downloads
Not that it mattered.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
By shutting down napster, file sharing took a harsh blow that is took a while to recover from? I wouldn't really agree there, maybe in the eyes of cnn and official news sources. Personally, I never felt that blow. I switched over to kazaa in matter of days, it was still usable then, later to sheraza, then dc...and so on and so on.
It's almost impossible to deal a harsh blow to file sharing. Even shutting down oink, didn't disrupt things. Though it made a lot of people sad, myself included. In my opinion the only way to deal a harsh blow to file sharing is on the internet provider level, not by shutting down services, because new ones pop up in matter of weeks, or even days.
Once you receive a mail from your isp, saying 'I know what you've been downloading last night', you'd be more careful/paranoid. That sort of monitoring would however anger the privacy advocates.
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.