The Pirate Bay Tops 10 Million Users

An anonymous reader suggests we go over to Slyck for news that The Pirate Bay has cracked 10 million users. The publicity from the upcoming court case probably helped. "Today, The Pirate Bay asserts itself as the self-proclaimed 'World's Largest Tracker' by topping over 10 million peers, while managing over 1 million torrents. Peter Sunde of The Pirate Bay told Slyck, 'We're very happy to be part of all of this and we hope our users keep sharing those files!... And we're looking to break 20 million as well.'"

Comments

Re:10 million users?

[Seumas]

Pirating is something organized criminals selling copyrighted content for money on the streets in Malaysia do. I don't believe there are any pirates on the pirate bay. Aaargh.

It all comes down to $$$

[ihaveamo]

I don't believe they do it for the love, (or some damn-fool idealistic crusade, for that matter). Anyone know how much money a site like the pir8 bay makes?? (Just banner revinue, or something more insidious)

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[Starvingboy]

Say what you will, the way they thumb their nose at the media bullies gains them bonus points in my book. I tip my hat to them and wish them well.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't believe they do it for the love, (or some damn-fool idealistic crusade, for that matter). Anyone know how much money a site like the pir8 bay makes?? (Just banner revinue, or something more insidious)

And that's why they must be evil.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[CSMatt]

All the Pirate Bay administrators are doing is providing a tracker, which can very well (and does) link to legal content as well as illegal. The fact that they are generating income from ads placed on search results is irreverent. You might as well say that Google is guilty of infringement as well, since they index both legal and illegal material with a similar business model and are constantly defending their ability to do so.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[tero]

Apparently they make back just about what they lose in bandwidth/server costs. Or so they say.
I guess that will be one of the main points in the upcoming trial.

The PB guys make it sound like it's ideal hobbyist project and the prosecution wants to paint them as IP thieves bathing in money.

Here's one article (unfortunately in Swedish)
http://www.svd.se/nyheter/inrikes/artikel_334410.svd

It "claims" PB is pulling 600k SEK / month with their ads (a sum quoted for last 4 months of activity).
That works to about USD 93k/month. PB claims most/all of the money goes to upkeep of the site, bandwidth and servers.

Interesting to see if the prosecution manages to get a coherent case out of this... I have my doubts.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[TheGoodSteven]

I also doubt that Smith & Wesson produce guns simply for their love of firearms. I won't reject your argument; of course if there was no money to be had they would quickly disappear. However this line of reasoning can be made toward numerous other companies with negative outcomes that are many times worse.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[Damon Tog]

You might as well say that Google is guilty of infringement as well, since they index both legal and illegal material with a similar business model and are constantly defending their ability to do so.

A couple of other companies have used a similar argument, shortly before getting shut down. Napster and Grokster were basically search engines that could be used for both legal or illegal purposes, but the courts didn't buy it.

Google, or an ISP, can reasonably argue that they provide services that are mostly used for lawful purposes, even though some illegal activity takes place. The difficult argument that the pirate trackers are faced with is that when you are providing a service that is being used primarily to infringe copyrights, even if the service can be used to share Linux distributions, you're potentially liable.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[timmarhy]

I could believe PB would chew close to 93K a month in costs if they have 10 million users.

if 1/2 their registered users visit just once a month and they get another 5 million drive by's (which is easy to see happening) and the average bandwidth used per user is 0.5meg (also pretty mild) it would mean they need 5 terabytes of bandwidth spread out over multiple 100mbit links, not to mention how much all the rackspace would set them back.

if google can make billions providing ad based search results then i can't hold the PB guys to ransom over what ever measley profit they make. after all all the PB stuff is indexed on google anyway.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[Anonymous Coward]

It's always a rediculous argument. Oh it's just a tracker, wink wink nudge nudge. Oh we don't transport contraband across the border we provide trucks for both legal and illegal goods we simply don't pass judgment on those using the service. Another post claimed they only take in enough revenue to cover bandwidth. Do they do it full time? If so are they living in their parents basement? Where'd they get the money for all the equipment? It's all rationalization. Saying it's all digital information makes it all better. What if you spent five years working on a video game. You start selling the game and it's moderately popular so you start making 10K a month. Some one posts it on Pirate Bay then miraculously your revenue drops to 2K a month and you have to go back to working at Fries Electronics and you can't aford to make another video game. Is it still a victimless crime? You put five years of your life into a game and Pirate Bay benefits not you. Does it really make you feel better while you're working 9 to 5 that thousands of people are enjoying your game for free while you can't aford to make another? Go out and use the popularity to get a job at professional gaming company? So you have to work 9 to 5 at a gaming company so people can get your game for free? And what about the five years of your life? And what if the company ha to then lay you off because their games are being pirated as well? A the core it's about getting something for nothing and Pirate Bay are seen as folk heroes for providing the service while they get to make money for facilitating the pirating of copyrighted materials. This isn't about striking a blow for liberty it's about stealing other people's work. Want the game or movie or album? Pay for it. Don't want to pay for anything? There's lots of free stuff on the web. Don't like the free stuff but you like the commercial stuff? Well the commercial stuff costs money to make. Believe it or not you won't die if you don't get the new Brittany Spears album for free. When I was growing up we didn't have free downloads and some how we managed to survive. I've heard arguments that illegal downloads increase sales yet sales have steadily dropped ever since downloading became popular. At this stage it's a no win situation so I personally look forward to all the music and movie studios closing their doors. Then people will really have something to complain about. I just hope there's enough mirrors to go around so people can see who to blame. The people running those companies will just move on to another industry it's the average person that watches the movies and listens to the music that will suffer.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[Anonymous Coward]

You're wrong, I'm sure Smith did but I can't comment on behlaf of Wesson now that guy something altogether.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[Alsn]

Know much about Swedish law do you? Because according to every single article i've read in Swedish from a reliable source the prosecutor has no case whatsoever.

The google defense seems to be working just fine since theyve used it for years already...

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[aussie_a]

Funnily enough I'm also disgusted by firearm and tobacco producers.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[eiapoce]

Hey, let me fix that for you

A couple of other companies have used a similar argument, shortly before getting shut down. Napster and Grokster were basically search engines that could be used for both legal or illegal purposes, but United States courts didn't buy it. You people, why can't you just grasp the concept that US law applies only on US land?

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[kdemetter]

A part is also maintenance and upgrades. You can't keep a tracker running on outdated hardware. Also , it's important to note that TPB isn't the only site they are running. They have multiple projects they work on , and spend money for that too . And there's no real problem with ads . If you want , you can even block them with adblock . If you compare that to some spyware infested p2p programs , your choice is quickly made .

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[kdemetter]

So , if u would follow your argument , all trucks should be banned , just because they can be usesd to transport contraband.

It's like saying that Nokia should be sued because terrorist might use their phones ( insider TPB joke )

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[eiapoce]

This is a full load of lies and misconceptions.
Piratebay: For the most part they are young professionals working in IT. The server are hosted at the same company that gives them work. They get some money for paying the bills.

A Poor Videogame Creator: You coward should know that a private working on a videogame usually does not recoup the costs due to lack of distribution. So either the game is acquired by a famous company and becomes a hit (quite unlikely) or the game will be offered in a bundle that actually can get some revenue despite piracy. All other options like selling 5.000 copies as you said are pure bullshit since no one will print them in the first place. And if you get to work at a software company you get a salary!!! (And I don't see EA bankrupting soon...)

I am quite sure that when you were growing you had no downloads. As much as I am sure you have been making copies of LPs on tapes!!! So stop being a whiner and start being objective.

it's the average person that watches the movies and listens to the music that will suffer. They are telling this since 1970... I'd pirate just for the fun to see if that's true... BTW I think this is a faster way to get the work done: http://www.jamendo.com/

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[cart_man4524]

What about weapons
Im pretty sure about 100% of the cases where people were shot were commited with guns
but seriously...whats the point of a handgun....if not mainly to kill people....where 5% who use it as a back up in hunting and andother 5% use it for sport

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[Starvingboy]

Not that you don't make a good point, but I was once shot with an arrow. On a similar vein, Sneakernet is very much alive and thriving. I know of several people who run a library of "Time shifted" DVD's.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[nospam007]

When I was growing up we didn't have free downloads and some how we managed to survive. ...

Yep, we had polycopied lists of floppies to be copied and shared going around both in paper and on BBses, those were the times.

They need a different business model, it's over. They were water-sellers and now it rains every day, it's no use telling people it's 'forbidden' to reach down and drink from a puddle you must buy the water from us.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[Anonymous Coward]

Their servers alone are worth $60k-$70k, they have a list of the setup at http://static.thepiratebay.org/

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[Aladrin]

TPB has no 'registered users'. There's no signup process and no accounts. You just use it. They have no way to track distinct users, only the number of torrent clients connected simulatenously. That 10 million is people that were all online at the same time.

So your '10 million in a month' is virtually guaranteed.

(It's possible that peers came from other websites and just used TPB's tracker, and it's possible that some peers stayed connected to a torrent for a month without going to the site. I find it unlikely that either of these could prevent the above situation, though.)

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[slash.duncan]

I could believe PB would chew close to 93K a month in costs if they have 10 million users. if 1/2 their registered users visit You apparently don't quite appreciate the magnitude of what they just announced, as mentioned in both TFS and TFA.

From the articles:

Today, The Pirate Bay asserts itself as the self-proclaimed "World's Largest Tracker" by topping over 10 million peers, while managing over 1 million torrents.

Let's consider these staggering numbers. 10 million simultaneous users represents a number never duplicated by any file-sharing entity

"Peers" actively bittorrenting are what a tracker tracks. Thus, they had 10 million accounts all active at the same time! So your "if half their [...] users visit" was only half of what you should have been considering! 10 million users all at the same time... using your estimate, that'd be 20 million regular users, and I'd consider that a low estimate, given the activity figures of say 1 in 10 at any given time that ISPs tend to use. Even if it's one in five, that's 50 million regular users, which I'd consider more likely than your one in two.

Looked at accurately, therefore, it's even more amazing. Pirate Bay doesn't even have to consider defining "regular user", as their active at any given instant numbers are so incredibly huge, they have no need to maximize or inflate the numbers using any other metric.

NB: I wonder how many of those peers are comparable bittorrent newbies, downloading that 17 gigs of myspaceprivatepicstorrent featured earlier here on /. I'm certainly in that group, having downloaded only two sets of files via bittorrent (ktorrent, FWIW) previously, Linux stuff not thru a public torrent site like PB, but having my curiosity get the best of me upon seeing that /. storry earlier, and started it up. I'm only on a cable connection, limited to 64 KB/sec (half a megabit) upload, and only averaging 70 KB/sec download, but I just passed 50% a bit ago, and expect to be done downloading some 32-ish hours from now. So I was one of those 10 million, and a new one too! =8^)

Duncan

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[umghhh]

I would agree with moral part of your argument but I find it hard to swallow what you say about falling sales. I observed my behaviour over the years and what I see is the following. Up to say 2001 I was buying 3..4 CDs if a week was good - in average say 6..8 a month. I did it for years and then I started having two problems:
1. CD I bought had a note explaining to me that not only I am a criminal if I make a backup of this CD but that they will actively prevent me from making this backup by introducing some 'fancy' technical method.
2. At this time I also realized that CD that had this comment was not worth a dime - I did not like the music and I brought it back to the shop. I also noticed that even while I was still buying newest stuff I listened more to music from decades ago and only occasionally there was something 'relatively' new (few years old) that was worth listening again.

Consequence of both realizations is that I stopped buying. Last year I bought one CD - as a gift to my wife.
It may be that part of the CD bonanza was releasing the old stuff from Vinyl on it that caused increased sales and now people have it already. Other factors like that of price and of artistic quality play role too. I must say as soon as I had to pay copy tax on any item that can be used for copying (back up involves copying too) and when I realized I was becoming a criminal if I tried to do what I wanted with my hardware, as soon as this occurred to me I stopped having fun in buying any media in the shop.

Now you may say that copying from pirate bay or such is an immoral thing to do. The other side of the coin is at least as much immoral and unethical. I do think that we customers should pay to artists and to some extent to people that help artists produce stuff. I have no moral obligation though towards people that are trying to rip me and others off.

Now this affects you as a game writer. I am sorry. The way it works is that entertainment sucks today because there is hardly any quality there at all. I doubt this has much to do with piracy.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[WildlyEnthusiastic]

They don't make any money at all. To quote them:

You mean our non-commercial, loss-generating activities?

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[Anonymous Coward]

There are very clear "login" and "register" buttons on the front page.

The same page which also clearly states "9.836.934 peers", so yes, it's the number of peers that they're talking about here, not registered users.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[alexgieg]

Oh we don't transport contraband across the border we provide trucks for both legal and illegal goods we simply don't pass judgment on those using the service.

This is a perfectly reasonable line of action. Why should some goods from abroad be tagged "illegal" by some clueless bureaucrat? I know what I want to buy. I don't need them to block me from purchasing what they dislike.

What if you spent five years working on a video game. You start selling the game and it's moderately popular so you start making 10K a month. Some one posts it on Pirate Bay then miraculously your revenue drops to 2K a month and you have to go back to working at Fries Electronics and you can't aford to make another video game. Is it still a victimless crime?

Then you did a poor market research. You see: offline games can be pirated easily, don't expect generally underfunded teens not to pirate them. Online subscription-based games, on the other hand, not so much. On one extreme, WoW alone has 10 million paying players and counting, with just a few, almost empty pirate servers scattered here and there; on the other, Steam offers almost any game you might wish, all under a cheap monthly fee. And online free games, where your revenue comes from advertising and/or selling in-game items? Well, just look at the profits those South-Korean software-houses make. Some of those games have more than 25 million players.

But talking about children and teens again, I don't get it. Why do game and media companies focus so much on selling to people who have NO MONEY?!? For the typical teen, who only has a computer because his dad gave him one on Christmas, paying $50 on a game is most of the time impossible, period. I'm 30-years old and only now I'm starting to be in a position where spending $50 now and then on useless entertainment is becoming something I can do without a second thought.

If you're a lone developer really wanting to make money by selling offline games, I suggest you make something very casual-friendly (10 minute play time is ideal), playable by people in their 30s and 40s who aren't gamers (think the Solitaire or MineSweeper loving kind), and good enough to be picked up by something like RealArcade. It's convenient enough and, at $15 or $20, also cheap enough for its target audience. Two clicks, they have the game installed, Real has its share, and you have your money, everything with hardly any piracy at all, since those games are not what (poor) teens usually look for when they want to play something.

At this stage it's a no win situation so I personally look forward to all the music and movie studios closing their doors. Then people will really have something to complain about. I just hope there's enough mirrors to go around so people can see who to blame. The people running those companies will just move on to another industry it's the average person that watches the movies and listens to the music that will suffer.

As the fine folks of the Swedish Pirate Party have put it, the ease with which anyone can copy anything on the Internet has caused a dichotomy to develop between entertainment business, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, technological development and online privacy. For the entertainment business profits to remain as high as they were before the Internet developed the only long term solution is both for key technological developments to be blocked as well as for intrusive (and very exploitable) online surveillance laws targeting all citizens to be passed and enacted in as many countries and jurisdictions as possible. It's either this, or the entertainment business adapting to a lower revenue stream.

So, if our options are between and unencumbered technological developments, a free Internet, and no authoritarian surveillance society, with the downside of "music and movie studios closing", as you put it; or a strongly controlled technological landscape, a locked Internet with mandatory ISP content analysis, and government backed intrusive preemptive surveillance of online activities, with the upside of music and movie studios making tons of money; I know which one I prefer. What about you?

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[muuh-gnu]

> TPB has no 'registered users'. There's no signup process and no accounts.

You're wrong. They have user accounts and a registration process. It can be used, among others, to place comments on torrent files, filter out porn, upload and delete you own torrents, and have a public list of torrents you uploaded as some kind of a credibility system to filter out fake uploaders.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[russ1337]

TPB could argue "if you think this business model is so great, then why isn't Hollywood using it?"

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[hostyle]

With bittorrent if I am downloading 5 files, I am registered as a peer 5 times. If I am downloading 100 files I'm in the peer table 100 times. Having 10 million peers is not the same as having 10 million separate people making use of the site.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[Jugalator]

TPB has no 'registered users'. There's no signup process and no accounts. This is not true. You register an account there to upload and track your uploaded torrents. You also need an account to view the porn!

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[Anonymous Coward]

"they are generating income from ads placed on search results is irreverent"

Either that word doesn't mean what you think it means, or I don't get why you think it's funny.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[uffe_nordholm]

I think your comparison with a bomb is lacking too much to make any sense.

Mostly, unless you happen to work for the armed forces, possession of a bomb is illegal, no matter what the intended use is. If TPB were illegal of itself, the authorities would have shut it down years ago, long before it made a name of itself. I think a more sensible comparison would be with a hammer: the item itself is legal, but when you use it to smash somebody's skull you are breaking the law. The use of the hammer in this crime is just a minor point, and does not make the hammer itself illegal. The same ought to apply to a torrent tracker: teh tracker itself is legal, it is the uses you put it to that could be illegal.

When it comes to TPB and their possibly illegal activities, the authorities have a problem. The prosecutor can charge TPB with aiding others in copyright violation. But in order to do that, they must first get a conviction of copyright violation, and it must have been done using TPB. Unless someone has been found guilty of copyright violation, TPB cannot be held responsible for aiding copyright violation. The authorities can obviously charge TPB with other crimes also/instead, but that is a different matter altogether.

Yes, I live in Sweden and have been reading a lot about the raid on TPB and comments surrounding the raid. However, I am not a lawyer but consensus of opinion seems to be what I expressed in the paragraph above.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[shark72]

"But talking about children and teens again, I don't get it. Why do game and media companies focus so much on selling to people who have NO MONEY?!? For the typical teen, who only has a computer because his dad gave him one on Christmas, paying $50 on a game is most of the time impossible, period. I'm 30-years old and only now I'm starting to be in a position where spending $50 now and then on useless entertainment is becoming something I can do without a second thought."

Just a cursory glance at advertising media, in particular the amount of it aimed at children and teenagers, will probably give you the impression that it must be a huge market. And, you're right -- it's enormous.

I think the tail may be wagging the dog here. "I'm justified in pirating, because I can't afford this music" is very often a rationale, not an accurate statement. If you take statements like this at face value, it becomes a bit of a rabbit hole, and then you get caught up wondering why on earth there's a whole aisle of children's cereal, yet you don't see 8-year-olds queued up to buy it. But think about how that cereal manages to get sold despite this fact, and you'll understand how music and media aimed at children and teens is sold, despite the fact that -- as you correctly pointed out -- many children and teens don't have money of their own.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[Dogtanian]

They need a different business model, it's over. There's some truth in this. Personally I still think it's desirable (from a moral and pragmatic perspective) that there's *some* mechanism in place- direct or indirect, legal and/or market-driven- to ensure that people are able to reap the rewards of intellectual effort that would not have taken place without some *potential* reward, just as happens with physical labour.

Not that I'm implying anyone is owed a living any more than someone creating a building is owed a profit if no-one wants to buy it. Only if someone wants to reap the benefit of someone else's effort, physical or intellectual, should they pay. Obviously, the nature of intellectual property and effort isn't the same as its physical counterparts, so the reward mechanisms shouldn't necessarily work the same way.

Nor would I imply that such paid efforts be protected from competition; if someone else creates a "free" alternative that doesn't unreasonably rely upon unauthorised use of the first guy's effort, then that's fair. In fact, it's notable that those (ostensibly) in favour of a capitalist free market scream foul and make comparisons with communism when others make the decision- which they have the perfect right to- to release their work for free, or under certain terms.

Were they implying that people should be *forced* to charge for something or release it under conditions that suit them? Tut, tut. Not such a free market then, is it? Not that I agree with a 100% free market in every area, but I don't expect those that do to be hypocrites about it.

They were water-sellers and now it rains every day, it's no use telling people it's 'forbidden' to reach down and drink from a puddle you must buy the water from us. On the other hand, this is a crap analogy. Software relies upon people to create it; the water falling from the sky comes from nature- i.e. it exists anyway. The people collecting it aren't relying on the efforts of the water company without paying- in fact, they're totally bypassing them.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[slash.duncan]

With bittorrent if I am downloading 5 files, I am registered as a peer 5 times. Good point, thanks.

Duncan

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[Aladrin]

Wow, there is. Okay, but there's not '10 mil' registered... There's only 2.5mil.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[shark72]

"They don't make any money at all."

Incorrect. Several operators of smaller public trackers (TBP wannabes, I suppose) have stated that net income is in the four figures per year. Heck, I have a site with traffic that's far, far less than that of TBP by an order of magnitude, and I clear a profit on advertising after paying for the servers and bandwidth. And, like TPB, I do it without the obnoxious (but apparently high revenue generating) pop-up ads and the like. I do it all with Adsense.

Countless high-traffic sites have figured out how to make a profit using ads. If TPB somehow can't do it, there's something wrong and they're missing a huge opportunity. Either they have the world's worst ad partner, or they're giving away ad space for free.

It's okay to acknowledge that the TPB kids are doing decently financially -- other tracker operators have managed to; in fact, that's why many people start trackers. Composers, musicians, authors, film directors, IT workers and programmers want to make money at what they do, so it's perfectly fine to acknowledge that it's okay for tracker operators to want to make a profit. Many people justify piracy because they believe content creators are, as a general rule, too greedy; this doesn't mean that we can't exhibit a little greed of our own.

I can understand their motivation for attempting to give an impression that they don't make a profit. It certainly makes for good PR among a certain segment of the fans. But, it's naive to blindly believe them. A bit of common sense is all it takes.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[Seumas]

I have no idea how much the make from banners. For one thing, I use adblock. For another, I would be surprised if they make anywhere enough money to recover the costs of maintaining all the servers and bandwidth. Especially when you consider all the additional projects they offer to host for services like demonoid.

There may be other revenue streams, but I suspect that at best these guys are perhaps able to pay themselves a salary (just as an FOSS coder or project manager might receive funding/salary to free up more of their time to work on their own related proejcts).

I could be wrong and I haven't seen any real numbers, so this is just my gut feeling.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[stsp]

I don't believe they do it for the love

I'm fairly convinced that they do: http://stealthisfilm.com/Part2/
Very interesting film, worth watching. It's a bit like The Matrix, but in our reality. And it's not made in Hollywood :)

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[Anonymous Coward]

You also need an account to view the porn!

No you don't. I have seen some of it and I don't have an account.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[ElMiguel]

A couple of other companies have used a similar argument, shortly before getting shut down. Napster and Grokster were basically search engines that could be used for both legal or illegal purposes, but the American courts didn't buy it.

Fixed that for you.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[spiderbitendeath]

Damn, I must have imagined creating an account there then. And keep imagining every time I log in to it.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[legoman666]

While I do see your point, spending $3 on a box of food (which is a necessity) for your kid and spending $60 on a 360 game for your kid are two different categories.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[Damon Tog]

I think a more sensible comparison would be with a hammer: the item itself is legal, but when you use it to smash somebody's skull you are breaking the law. The use of the hammer in this crime is just a minor point, and does not make the hammer itself illegal. The same ought to apply to a torrent tracker: teh tracker itself is legal, it is the uses you put it to that could be illegal.

The reason why hammer manufacturers have not been shut down is that %99.99 percent of hammers are used lawfully. If %90 of hammers were being used to "smash somebody's skull," it might be a different story.

Of course, this assumes that "smashing somebody's skull" is illegal in Sweden. As others have pointed out, I cannot speak for the land of the Vikings.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[Anonymous Coward]

Guns...interesting analogy in that TPB is also just a tool. FYI, hand guns are also employed as primary for hunting.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[Anonymous Coward]

"I can understand their motivation for attempting to give an impression that they don't make a profit. It certainly makes for good PR among a certain segment of the fans. But, it's naive to blindly believe them. A bit of common sense is all it takes."

I doubt they make very much money at all, if any.

An earlier comment mentions them making about $93k per month which seems like a lot.

Buying and operating 24 (currently) servers isn't cheap.
The trackers alone use 290mbits (from another comment) of bandwidth.
I know where I am, 10mbits of bandwidth was going to cost me over $20k per month but we do get overcharged here (UK).

Naive to blindly believe them? hardly. I have seen no reason to not believe them.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[EvilIdler]

5TB per month? My host (in Sweden) gives 3.2TB per dedicated server,
and that's around $300 per month. Swedish service providers can get
you a metric fuckton of bandwidth for cheap.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[EvilIdler]

You actually need an account to set the porn filter on/off permanently.
Nothing stops you from figuring out the category from the missing numbers
in the torrent category browser.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[The Ultimate Fartkno]

Say what you will, the way they dole out terabytes of content they didn't create to people who just want free stuff under the guise of "thumbing their nose at the media bullies" gains them no points in my book. As someone who warezed *everything* as a kid and is now trying to make a living in the arts, I find it ironic that I can't afford a hat now.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[Anonymous Coward]

bullshit. I know hundreds of gun owners and not one of them has shot at anybody, let alone killed them.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[Anonymous Coward]

"As someone who warezed *everything* as a kid and is now trying to make a living in the arts, I find it ironic that I can't afford a hat now."

karma.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[poopdeville]

As someone who warezed *everything* as a kid and is now trying to make a living in the arts, I find it ironic that I can't afford a hat now.

Maybe you should, I don't know, make something worth buying? Or is that too hard for you?

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[Anonymous Coward]

"Why do game and media companies focus so much on selling to people who have NO MONEY?!?"

I guess you haven't sired any offspring or there not at that age yet?

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[Fulcrum of Evil]

What did firearm makers ever do to you? I can see the tobaco thing, but guns are just guns.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[Jugalator]

Google, or an ISP, can reasonably argue that they provide services that are mostly used for lawful purposes, even though some illegal activity takes place. OK, yes, this is exploiting the "safe harbor" clause of the DMCA.

However, Sweden has no DMCA, which led to the story about Pirate Bay mailing their lawyers about sodomizing themselves with their batons, and the lawyers not being able to push that case further than their scary letters.

What TPB is supporting themselves on is an old BBS law that set a precedent to cases like these. It says that a public "bulletin board system" (probably a quite broad concept which TPB claims they fall under) is not posting illegal content if it merely links to it. And in this case, torrent files are considered being the "links" as they are not the copyrighted files themselves. It's just descriptive metadata for the shared material. So TPB claims that since they do not share copyright infringing material (you can search a torrent tracker server all you want for that, and you won't find any), they are safe. So far, that seem to be holding up from rather extreme pressure from *AA, Microsoft, IFPI, the Swedish police, and many other large organizations.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[Jugalator]

They don't really even have to use the "Google defense", because that defense is really just the DMCA safe harbor. However, the DMCA do not even exist in Sweden. What defense they have to use is pretty much just that no pirated material pass through there servers (and it don't) and that no pirated material is stored on their servers (and it isn't). So I also think they're pretty safe here. So far, it seems like it too -- the *AA, Microsoft, DreamWorks, Electronic Arts, Apple, Waner Brothers, etc. have all had nothing really to pick on, and I think that's because a common denominator here is that they want them to remove material because it could be used to spread their copyrighted material, although they don't directly have it / share it on their servers. And that's really DMCA territory, i.e. N/A here.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[abug]

The difference is Google honors DMCA requests.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[ZombieRoboNinja]

Why do you think teens have "NO MONEY?!?"? The whole reason they get marketed to so much is that they DO have a lot of expendable cash, and usually don't have any more important things to save their money for. (I know I bought a hell of a lot more video games when I was in high school with a part time job than I do now, when I have to pay rent.)

>>Then you did a poor market research. You see: offline games can be pirated easily, don't expect generally underfunded teens not to pirate them.

If you take up this line of reasoning, you'd better never, ever complain about DRM and Steam-style activation protocols. This is the most idiotic kind of "If you didn't want your bike stolen you should have had a better lock" reasoning.

>>I know which one I prefer. What about you?

I love how you can twist a sort of free-market argument to explain why music and game-makers are hurting, but not make the obvious next step: if we're being laissez-faire about the whole thing, then you've got no place to bitch when those companies start including DRM and/or online activation to their products. If The Consumer doesn't want DRM, he can just not buy Half-Life 2.

The way I see it, the only two philosophically consistent options are different:

1. Everybody is bound by law: Pirate Bay and others can't blatantly distribute illegal material, and the various media industries are prevented from locking down their content with DRM that violates fair-use laws.

2. Free market rules: The media industries are basically toothless to prevent Pirate Bay and other from distributing their stuff, but on the other hand they're free to add all sorts of restrictive DRM to new releases, so that nobody CAN pirate.

I know which one I prefer. What about you?

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[Dare nMc]

90% of guns are used to kill people. Hasn't stopped the gun manufacturers...

really, 4.6 million guns sold per year in the US. less than 11,000 gun related homicides per year (with 800,000 to 2.5 million uses for defensive purposes per year) and 30 million hunters in the us.

so significantly less than 1% of guns are used to kill unjustifiably. 80* more often they are used for self defense. 2000* more often they are used for other legal purposes.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[Anonymous Coward]

Incorrect. There are registered users in piratebay and alot of people are registered. Without registering, you cannot: 1) upload torrents 2) comment on existing torrents 3) download pr0n.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[Anonymous Coward]

Steam offers almost any game you might wish, all under a cheap monthly fee. And online free games Steam doesn't offer a monthly subscription fee of any kind..You still purchase games. (apart from eve online via steam but that's not out yet http://www.steampowered.com/v/index.php?area=game&AppId=8500&cc=GB)

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[Snaller]

"All the Pirate Bay administrators are doing is providing a tracker, which can very well (and does) link to legal content as well as illegal."

Show us 10 things which are legal...

"The fact that they are generating income from ads placed on search results is irreverent. You might as well say that Google is guilty of infringement as well, since they index both legal and illegal material with a similar business model and are constantly defending their ability to do so."

No. They are quite deliberately promoting pirated material on their site, that mens they are aiding and abetting criminal activity. If they didn't do taht they might have chance when the hammer falls.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[Snaller]

"Know much about Swedish law do you? Because according to every single article i've read in Swedish from a reliable source the prosecutor has no case whatsoever."

Funny, I've never read one - perhaps you can link to some?

But either way should these laws exist they are sure to be found illegal themselves because of the treaties Sweden has signed regarding copyright, once other countries (especially usa thinks enough is enough - and 0 million might do it)

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[Naturalis Philosopho]

Ok, I don't think people should infringe copyright or steal games from stores, but no one owes you anything if you spend 5 years making anything on spec. Get a contract if you're the coder, and take your lumps and figure out how to sell in today's market if you're the backer. You argue that it costs to make the commercial stuff on the web but not the free stuff? Give me a break, it costs money to make any content. The people who produce the "free" stuff just figured out other ways to make money off it (ad based revenue anyone? Broadcasters figured that one out, oh, 80 years or so ago when radio started) or decided to take the hit and put the product out there anyway.

And the argument that people will "suffer" if fewer music/video games/movies are produced... let's get real here. People suffer if they don't have food. If U2 delays an album by a year or if we don't get the next Britney Spears, that's an inconvenience at worst (insert joke about no next-Britney being a good thing here). I'd be just as happy if Michael Bay never made another movie, and maybe if Hollywood shrunk a little bit all those creative minds could think about how to make U.S. manufacturing profitable again and reduce our ridiculous trade deficit.

/end rant

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[Anonymous Coward]

Filter out the porn? Doesn't that defeat the purpose?

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[Anonymous Coward]

They do have user accounts. You can create one here or login here.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[Malekin]

Yes, but it's likely that's a localised statistic. Unfortunately, peaceful uses of firearms are only a fraction of their world-wide application. Their primary use is the slaying of people in one of the planet's many current conflicts.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[aussie_a]

They made killing me so much easier then it was before.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[vuffi_raa]

As someone who warezed *everything* as a kid and is now trying to make a living in the arts, I find it ironic that I can't afford a hat now. firstly:why do you need a hat and why is that your biggest concern?
secondly: you would be amazed to find out how many people use warez to create the art- even in high level professional environments- I do electronic music and it always amuses me when peers of mine get all pissed off when their music is posted on a tracker, but they are using cracked software and unauthorized samples to create the stuff in the first place. In fact, I don't know about you but if it weren't for warez, I wouldn't have had the exposure to professional grade software to learn the skills in either my professional career (funny enough I work in litigation) or in my audio/video/3d work that I used to do professionally until so much of the work dried up (as a result of the industry change about 7 years ago I had to take a day job since I couldn't support myself contracting anymore)and even back when I was working professionally, warezed versions of things like photoshop, illustrator, dreamweaver, maya, 3d studio, etc were everywhere when I would contract with companies.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[Fulcrum of Evil]

That goes both ways. Besides, they've been around longer than you have.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[aztracker1]

Well, handguns are substantially used to break the law... (don't start the debate).. in the U.S. at least we have a recognized right to keep and bear arms. Even if you don't believe in it, as to those that think only the government is allowed because of the "well regulated militia" portion, do you really think that a group of people that rose up against their parent country would mean it that way?

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[arkhan_jg]

Sweden does not have the vicarious or contributory copyright infringment offences the US does, which were what they got napster and grokster with. In sweden, it's only if you are directly committing copyright violations you are liable. Since there is not copyrighted material in the tracker itself, they're not breaking swedish law. Until the US government on behalf of the copyright cartel do manage to get the swedish government to change the law anyway, as they've been trying to do.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[plasmacutter]

napster and grokster were small, google is a behemoth which dwarfs the entire copyright lobby combined, and we all know the US court system is not about who is actually right or wrong, legal or illegal, but who can bring the biggest suitcase of money to souter's third summer estate.

*eminent domain is for the government only, unless a large corporation wants to force you off your land.

*monopolies are illegal, unless of course you run a huge telecom or distribute the world's most utilized OS

*drug laws have federally mandated, lengthy, severe sentences, unless of course your income meets minimum 7 figure requirements.

*copyright is absolute.. unless one of the world's most powerful consumer electronics firms wants to market a device.
~~.. and 2 decades later...
*technology with non-infringing uses is to be protected from predatory copyright lawsuits.. unless of course the developers of that technology are no longer among the most powerful consumer electronics firms.

I'm glad to hear somehow sweden's system has managed to mitigate this so much more meaningfully than the US..

sadly i'm too much of a language dunce to learn swedish and move there.. a hapless victim of the culture of ignorance I hate so much.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[plasmacutter]

what "free market"?

under option 2, you are forgetting something..

The DMCA is preventing correction of draconian DRM schemes through LEGITIMATE businesses.

This doesn't mean it's not ubiquitously broken, it means it's ubiquitously broken and that activity is not generating jobs or income.

Under your "dream solution".. otherwise known as the ever-building 'status quo', content producers continue to lose money, but now that shortfall is magnified many fold:
-the distributors dump massive funds down the toilet of drm development
-at the same time drm crack development, which could be a lucrative and very viable economic field, is locked out...
-also locked out are many potentially innovative new economic sectors.. think ipod and iphone were nice? theyre merely the survivors of the WWI style killing fields copyright cartels created with the passage of the DMCA. For every ipod brought to market, easily 20 more were killed mercilessly by these corrupt fiends. The .com crash might have only been a ripple if not for that damnable law.

Creators lose twice, and the economy and public welfare loses (literally) immeasurably more as they thrash around trying to force the horse and buggy back down people's throats.

of course, the very fact you are presenting DRM as some immutable thing under which "nobody CAN pirate" reveals the extremity of your cognitive dissonance on the issue. Even as a novice at CS it's quite clear DRM is an unreachable mythical goal. You can not use cryptographic means to protect a message from its intended recipient.

You may as well demand a construction firm build you a tower to heaven so you can see god.

Of course.. if you have so much faith in DRM, why do you need laws to keep people from cracking it. If truly viable DRM is possible, it won't be crackable.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[delinear]

You're right - but of course this becomes more of an issue when the kids/teens can get their hands on the product without paying. In situations where this is extremely difficult, such as the cereal example, you have massive marketing aimed at kids who have no money, but real-world barriers to prevent the kids just taking it without paying (an 8 year old walking out of a store with a big box of cereal is likely to be thwarted pretty quickly) - so they have to rely on parents to buy it for them.

When the boundaries become blurred it's not so clear cut. Think of teenagers and alcohol - we all know alcohol advertising appeals to the young, get them hooked at an early age is a strategy that pays for these companies. The money is less of a barrier now as they have pocket money or maybe even jobs so instead there's the legal barrier, but we know teens get around this relatively easily, they ask others to buy for them or use fake ID, etc.

Now remove all barriers - we have readily available content and relative anonymity (a handful of people getting caught when there are 10 million just on one site along sharing content is hardly a deterrent, especially to a kid who doesn't really think of such consequences anyway) and yet the content producers are very aggresively marketing to these kids/teens and expect them NOT to just take what they want without paying? It was always a recipe for disaster from the outset.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[Anonymous Coward]

I find it hard to believe they're only just breaking even. The whole point of the online advertising model is that it scales upwards the more traffic you get. If people with a fraction of the number of visitors TPB have can still turn a decent profit, then the economies of scale involved with serving to 10million users should make this a vastly more profitable venture for TPB themselves. The only way they can't be making money here is if they're charging next to nothing for advertising, in which case why can't they charge the normal rate and just have less adverts?

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[alexgieg]

Your reply is in line to what I'd have replied to the OP, but I find it interesting that it goes contrary to what you say in your linked journal article. There you criticize libertarian economics (wrongly, IMHO, because the evils you attribute to capitalism are in fact produced by state interference in the market), while in this message you used libertarian arguments.

I'd suggest you visit www.mises.org, search and read some articles on the subjects you mentioned in your journal (such as on what happened in the 1920's and in the 1980's), then download and start reading some of the fundamental libertarian books, such as Ludwig von Mises' seminal Human Action. I bet you'll change your mind on a number of subjects, even if not in all of them.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[alexgieg]

Steam doesn't offer a monthly subscription fee of any kind..You still purchase games.

You're correct, of course. Sorry for the wrong information. I had GameTap in mind, but for some reason ended up writing "Steam". Most probably a Freudian slip. ;-)

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[ZombieRoboNinja]

I find it hilarious that you think the second option was my "dream solution."

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[harl]

Admins are upkeep. They can pay the profits to themselves as wage and claim the site isn't making money. Accountingly it's not. In the USoA you can even pay them as 1099s (work for hire) and they are legally expenses rather than employees. Sweden may or may not have something similar.

Additionally their home net feeds, their transportation, personal hardware, personal mobiles, etc could all be owned/payed for by the business. Another way "wage" becomes "expense." Legally. Once again Sweden may or may not be different.

There are a ton of ways for a business to profit while technically and legally not making momey or breaking even. "Non-profits" and "charities", that are really businesses intent on making money, use it all the time.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[yuna49]

Napster and Grokster were basically search engines that could be used for both legal or illegal purposes, but the courts didn't buy it.

You need to read the decisions more closely. In the Grokster case, for instance, a lot of the argument revolved around whether the Sony Betamax decision applied. In particular, since Grokster distributed its own client software, could an argument be made that that sofware enabled other non-infringing uses (an important test in the Betamax decision). The Court decided that Grokster was distributing its software solely for the purpose of infringement and, worse, gaining commercially from such infringement by selling ads on its site.

Bittorrent, per se, is clearly a content-neutral technology that enables downloads of all types of materials, both infringing and non-infringing. In practice the infringing content far outweighs the legitimate content, but that's not the fault of the technlogy itself, but rather the purpose for which it's being used.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[yuna49]

But talking about children and teens again, I don't get it. Why do game and media companies focus so much on selling to people who have NO MONEY?!?

From http://www.mindbranch.com/Teens-R567-647/

"The Teens Market in the U.S., a new Packaged Facts report, provides a comprehensive analysis of the consumer behavior of the 26 million 12- to 17-year-olds who comprise the teens market. With an aggregate income of $80 billion, teens represent an important consumer segment in their own right. Moreover, parents spend another $110 billion on teens in key consumer categories such as apparel, food, personal care items, and entertainment."

$80 billion / 26 million = $3,076 annual income plus another $4,231 spent by parents. Still think teens (in the US at least) have no money?

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[alexgieg]

Still think teens (in the US at least) have no money?

These are amazing numbers! Now I understand what it means for a country to be a third of the world's economy. Americans are really, REALLY rich... O_o

In any case, it's still enough to only purchase much less digital content than what they're able (in terms of available free time) and willing (due to marketing-driven desire) to consume. And this means they will pirate anyway, unless prices get low enough to properly balance supply and demand. There's no way around it.

Re:It all comes down to $$$

[totally bogus dude]

I know where I am, 10mbits of bandwidth was going to cost me over $20k per month but we do get overcharged here (UK).

You do indeed get thoroughly overcharged. I'm in Perth, and at work we pay about 5,000 AUD per month for an unmetered 10mbit full-duplex fibre link to our office. Data into and out of the UK surely must be a lot less expensive than data in/out of Australia.

Pirate 2 pirate.

[Anonymous Coward]

Real pirates don't like P2P pirates.

Shiver me timbers

[Anonymous Coward]

This explains global warming.

Re:10 million users?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are a pirate

Yarrr!!

Good for them

[NothingMore]

Congrats on making it to 10 million. Like them or not they have done something that no other file sharing site/service has ever been able to do. 10 million is a huge accomplishment in the uphill legal environment that they have faced.

Umm, yay?

[timeOday]

Sure the copyright corporations, but I'm not sure I can bring myself to root for the pirate bay either. Can't we all just get along :/

Suprnova?

[mcrbids]

Anybody remember what Suprnova was like at its peak? I remember that Suprnova accounted for something like 40% of the traffic online, or something ridiculously similar. How does TPB compare?

Re:Suprnova?

[Popsmear]

Supernova alone was no where near that high. ALL torrent traffic from EVERYWHERE accounts for 35% of the internet, according to this past slashdot article: http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/04/11/04/1749257.shtml?tid=99&tid=17

Re:Suprnova?

[Anonymous Coward]

That may very well be, but wouldn't you nonetheless agree that evolution is pretty much just a theory at this point? (Theory as in, not fact, I mean.)

Re:Suprnova?

[dotancohen]

ALL torrent traffic from EVERYWHERE accounts for 35% of the internet The remaining 65% breaks down to spam and porn.

Re:Suprnova?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's more like 64%, the remaining 1% is Slashdot.

Re:Suprnova?

[houghi]

According to the RIAA, TPB accounts for something between 6148.87% and 7289.42% of all trafic. That is calculated note by mere technical people but by their accountants looking at the predicted loss due to TPB.

yeah, there is lies, damn lies, statistics and the RIAA

Re:Suprnova?

[mxs]

"suprnova" never did account for "40% of traffic online". BitTorrent did. Suprnova was just a popular BitTorrent site (among many), and its traffic was measurable in hundreds of megabits/s, not hundreds of gigabits/s

Re:Suprnova?

[Headcase88]

And 95% of the 35% of torrent traffic? Also porn.

Re:Suprnova?

[Rocketship Underpant]

And Slashdot dupes...

(Which are frequently related to aforementioned topics anyway.)

Re:Suprnova?

[dotancohen]

I measure /. in waking hours, not traffic. So it's closer to 60%. I should really go tell the wife that I miss... love her.

Re:Suprnova?

[mattb112885]

You should not report that many significant figures for such an unsure number! Shame on you!

Re:Suprnova?

[imsabbel]

Wrong. VERY VERY wrong.
Supernova was >75% of torrents back then.

And i dont know the total for supernove, but even a.scarywater.net, one of a lot of anime trackers, had many Gbit of peer trafic back then.
And supernova had 1000s of peers for just about any big movie/game.
They have several 100 to 1000 new torrent per day, and a LOT of them were => an CD-ISO, and got 4 digit downloads before the first day was over.

Just do the math.

Re:Suprnova?

[mxs]

You still don't get my point. Suprnova ITSELF did not generate the traffic. The BitTorrent peers did. Suprnova was also not the "only" tracker out there, as you well noted. Suprnova was in the hundrets of mbit/s. The PEERS generated huge amounts of traffic.

Just do the logic.

Re:Suprnova?

[Anonymous Coward]

I measure /. in waking hours, not traffic. So it's closer to 60%. I should really go tell the wife that I miss... love her.

Yes, but if you missed out on frist psot because you were spending time with the missus, you'd never forgive her.

Re:10 million users?

[ILuvRamen]

that reminds me. I bet they just had a "You know, we probably should have picked a different name" moment like all the not so wisely named sites out there that took off. I mean youtube is like you and tube, I mean it's genius! But you gotta wonder if the Flickr creator ever sat down and thought "too bad flicker was already taken" lol. I know I've had one of those moments. I've now written 36 very popular stories on a certain site and now 20,000 people read each one and I'm stuck with my stupid nickname that I pulled out of my ass in 30 seconds the first time. So yeah, do you think the owner of the pirate bay ever walked into the office one day and asked someone "you think the name's why they're suing us?" They might have done better with Happyland or Distributed Data Inc.
P.S. for all you literal people out there, this post was mostly half joking and not serious

Say hello to Sweden

[eebra82]

Pirate Bay now has more users than Sweden, which is at about 9 million. I wonder what the Swedish authorities think of that.

Re:Say hello to Sweden

[Anonymous Coward]

Sweden's users stand agape.

Re:Say hello to Sweden

[superash]

Pirate Bay now has more users than Sweden, which is at about 9 million.

TPB : All you sweedish are belong to us!

Re:Say hello to Sweden

[mxs]

Well, 10 million peers. One USER can constitute many peers in the BitTorrent world -- in fact, every torrent they download is counted as one peer. So if I download 10 files from PirateBay (or seed 10 thereof), suddenly I am 10 peers.
(It's still impressive, but it's NOT 10 million users).

Re:Say hello to Sweden

[saibot834]

"Users" of countries are also called "citizen" sometimes :-)

Re:Say hello to Sweden

[EvilIdler]

Don't they count unique IPs when they list those numbers?

Re:Say hello to Sweden

[glitch23]

Pirate Bay now has more users than Sweden, which is at about 9 million. I wonder what the Swedish authorities think of that.

How many users of Sweden are there?

Re:Say hello to Sweden

[mxs]

Traditionally, no. Of course I can't speak to what tpb does in their stats, but traditionally a BitTorrent peer is defined as a tuple of peer_id+info_hash, i.e. even /if/ a client were to use the same peer_id on many torrents on the same tracker, it would still be counted as several peers attached to several info_hashes.

Hmm

[moogied]

Wow has 10 million users, so does Piratesbay. I don't know what joke to make now.. but someone jump in and finish it.

Re:Hmm

[Eighty7]

AAARRRRR

Re:Hmm

[liquiddark]

In Soviet Russia, Pirate Bay Gold Farms YOU.

Re:Hmm

[superash]

nah.. In Soviet Russia, 10 million people are pirates!

Re:Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

10 million? WoWzArrr!

Re:Hmm

[daddyrief]

More of them are pirates than ninjas, guarunteed.

Biggest tracker and it shows

[drcagn]

As much as I love TPB for its antics, it really is a crappy tracker. It's hard to search and it's filled with shit.

Re:Biggest tracker and it shows

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you're confusing "tracker" with "website". The tracker is completely different software run on separate servers. When you download from mininova or other bittorrent sites, you're often connecting to TPB's trackers. The actual ".torrent" just contains tracker URLs, filenames, file checksums, etc. Mininova or other sites may host these .torrent sites and index them on a pretty website, but they aren't responsible for ensuring your bittorrent client can find peers to download from (and upload to).

Re:Biggest tracker and it shows

[Ravadill]

At least PB users tend to comment on the quality of the files contained in each torrent, which makes picking out bogus or just plain bad torrents pretty easy. A lot of other trackers either have no comments (public tracker) or dissalow negative (private tracker) comments.

Re:Biggest tracker and it shows

[mxs]

The "tracker" is not searchable at all. It's also not crappy at all -- it supports 10 million peers almost effortlessly, is build on OpenTracker (http://erdgeist.org/arts/software/opentracker/ -- there are also some tpb tracker graphs over yonder if you look around a bit : http://opentracker.blog.h3q.com/mrtg/).

The SEARCHING part would be part of the PirateBay website, the one you get the .torrent files from. That's not a tracker (although some crappy PHP projects proclaim this to be so). It's searchable just fine, and most of it is not "shit". Of course, some elitist folks prefer "private" trackers (haha) with "enforced" ratios (bwahaha, especially if you know how BitTorrent works) and consider any file posted on such pure gold. Have fun with that.

Re:Biggest tracker and it shows

[dmsuperman]

The best one I ever used was Demonoid, but since they've recently gone down due to the CRIA...
You could find anything on there, and it always had seeders, and it was always well described and had a lot of comments, and there were never fakes, and it was always good quality. Demonoid just plain owned.

Re:Biggest tracker and it shows

[JohnSearle]

To play the devil's advocate here, a private tracker does help reduce virus laden, mistagged, and otherwise useless crap from the site. It's like having a legit bar that sells drugs (Amsterdam), versus a sleazy guy in a back alley. The loss in anonymity provides a little bit of assurance of the product.

That's not even to mention the fact that trackers such as TPB have a lot of people who never give back for what they take. With a leeching majority you can end up with a lacking, or almost non-existent, seeding base; this makes for terrible transfer rates. Again, with the loss of anonymity, and a closed user base, you can slowly weed out those who don't contribute, and you're left with quicker transfers.

- John

Re:Biggest tracker and it shows

[Inda]

Google searches TBP just fine. I see no problem.

Re:Biggest tracker and it shows

[TheThiefMaster]

Actually, the biggest problem isn't people who don't seed, the bittorrent protocol already favours those who upload.

The problem with transfer rates is caused by the fact that a large majority of bittorrent users are on ADSL. ADSL can have as bad as 1/100th the upload speed to its download speed. Bittorrent depends very heavily on users' upload bandwidth to work: You can't download faster than the seeds you're connected to can upload.

Re:Biggest tracker and it shows

[ricotest]

I'd hardly call this elitist. I use private trackers for security reasons - they're not visible to the outside world, small (2-10 thousand users) and there's very little chance of getting sued for downloading the latest film from them. Many of these trackers have a very low minimum ratio (0.3 or 0.2) or simply just don't care. I'll agree that some require ratios of 0.9 or 1.0, which is patently ridiculous.

Re:Biggest tracker and it shows

[mxs]

This is a prime example of how FUD exists absent Microsoft in the picture :-)

A "private" tracker (a misnomer, most of those people would refer to as private trackers are not, in fact, private. It's easy to join -- especially if you have an account on another such "private" tracker with a decent "share ratio" you can point to.
Virus-laden files can easily crop up there, anybody simply trusting downloads because it is on a "private" tracker is asking for trouble. While it may take a bit more work, poisoning such torrents would be incredibly more rewarding to a would-be attacker.
Mistagging ? Well, I suppose tpb could increase its tagging capabilities, certainly. Then again, its torrents are not just indexed on their own site, but also on other, independent sites such as mininova and others -- all with their own tagging, popularity, and filtering systems.

Anonymity is not lost. It's usually an easy thing to cycle through multiple usernames, or even to build a network of sock puppet accounts -- contrary to what some administrators on such sites say, it is easy to evade detection with some care. I wouldn't liken TPB or the h3q tracker to a back alley, but rather the more mainstream all-purpose (including sinister) trackers by virtue of them being open. Combined with proper indexing and filtering systems, you can not only get high-quality long-lived torrents, but also a considerable number of peers (and more peers is virtually always better; given the choice between a torrent of a given file with 5 seeding peers and 5 "leechers" on a private tracker and a torrent of that same file with 500 seeding peers and 1500 leechers, I'd choose the latter and will usually get a better torrent-experience out of it (due to locality of peers, longevity of seeding, and total available bandwidth).

There is this inexplicable focus on "giving back what you take", which completely sidesteps the built-in mechanisms of BitTorrent to achieve a somewhat fair distribution of resources based on that exact metric -- sharing. Generally and given a higher-than-2 number of peers, those peers with more upstream bandwidth dedicated to a particular torrent swarm will also get a faster ingress speed (on the protocol level due to tit-for-tat and its associated choking/unchoking, on a higher level when initially seeding due to "superseeding" (i.e. tracking the proliferation of uploaded pieces to one peer through to other connected peers and giving that one peer a higher priority if successful, etc.). This looks only at single-torrent viability, of course, and does not track progress over multiple torrents, but given less-than-infinite upstream bandwidth of your peers, if you upload fast, you will get a fast download. True leechers never reinjecting any pieces into the swarm will still get the file, sure, but at a much slower speed due to constant choking. A certain number of sharing clients is required, of course, but generally the majority DOES have uploading enabled, the question is just whether they go up to a share ratio of > 1.0 after having downloaded the entire file. The seeding base usually increases over time until the death of the swarm approaches (which it does on private trackers, just the same).

You generally don't have a closed userbase. Even those invite-only trackers have a lot of churn. Sure, there are TRULY private trackers, but those do not have invitations either. A "private" tracker without churn will loose members due to attrition and eventually die due to not enough bandwidth or diskspace left to sustain itself.
As for weeding out those who don't contribute ... How ? Were I to want to join a private tracker and enjoy privileges beyond the "common" user, I could just download a torrent announce simulator (yes, they do exist). Set it to "seed" on a popular torrent on that tracker for a day or two and your ratio will be through the roof -- just from sending announces with faked up= and down= fields (trackers have no other way of tracking ratio, and this is EASILY fak

Re:Biggest tracker and it shows

[mxs]

Wait, you are seriously proposing that 2000-10000 users pose a "very little chance of getting sued for downloading the latest film from them" ? Are you somehow under the impression that your opponents have no savvy at all, have never heard about "private" trackers, and can't join them just the same as any other of those 2000-10000 people ? Do you know all those 2000-10000 people and their agendas personally ? Couldn't it be that those specific communities will be targeted SPECIFICALLY because they "consistently" get the newest releases first ?

If you consider "small" "private" trackers secure, I have a bridge to sell you.

Re:Biggest tracker and it shows

[owlnation]

I'm not understanding why you have been modded "informative" that's incorrect. I assume you are a sock puppet for TPB.

Yes, private trackers are: 1. overrated for the reasons you state, and 2.elitist and annoying.

However, let this not detract from the parent's original complaints, ones which you failed to deal with. Namely, that TPB has a terrible search engine that almost never pulls up the same results twice. Finding something is a lucky dip - or best undertaken by an external search engine (most of which prove how bad TPB's engine really is).

TPB is full of viruses, trojans, fake files etc etc etc. So are other sites - true. However, some other sites make an effort to remove these files - TPB doesn't. TPB also doesn't (seem) to have a strong community that posts comments on dodgy files - others do.

Demonoid was the best site out there. Not only because of the range of stuff on it, but because they actually cared about taking the crap off the site. TPB doesn't - which is a shame because it could be a great site if it made these changes. At the moment, it's just a famous site.

Though, it does admittedly serve a useful role as a scapegoat and focus of *IAA attention in the way that it baits them.

Re:Biggest tracker and it shows

[mxs]

A sock puppet for TPB just because you disagree with me ? Riiiight. No, I have nothing to do with their site nor their operation. My opinions are my own.

I have to admit, I do not use TPB search often, but when I used it, it usually found what I was looking for. That's enough for me. Sure, there are better ones, but then again, one doesn't have to use the TPB one as you already stated. You don't even have to get your torrents from there.

If you regard tpb as simply a tracker and use sites such as mininova for your indexing purposes (and they do index tpb torrents), your point is moot.

There is a reason for 10 million peers on TPB, and it's not that it contains ONLY shitty stuff, ONLY viruses, and ONLY "fakes". They are fairly liberal in what they accept, and hell, it's their site to do with as they please. If you want to track a torrent, fast, it works. Plain and simple. That same ease of operation works for blackhats just the same. The h3q tracker is even "worse" in that it doesn't even have .torrent files ... But that's ok, a tracker doesn't need em :-)
Nothing is stopping you from making your own indexing site indexing TPBs content in a way you like with filtering the way you like and attracting the community you like. It's a nontrivial problem, though :)

Re:Biggest tracker and it shows

[Anonymous Coward]

I completely agree.

The worst part is now that the Demonoid tracker is down, the torrents which used it are starting to go belly up even if they've been indexed by sites like btjunkie or TPB. There are thousands of quality torrents in the wild right now that are becoming orphaned.

Even if the data itself is distributed, it's still quite a pain in the ass and causes major headaches when the tracker goes down. Anybody know if there is some technical way around this problem? I realize that trackerless torrents have been in the works, but what can one do if suddenly a tracker upon which thousands of non-trackerless torrents depend is taken out? If TPB ever vanishes, it would be a devastating blow to many torrents which rely on it.

Re:Biggest tracker and it shows

[Anonymous Coward]

Care to list a few more nowadays to use? I used to be up to date with the P2P, having gone through: supernova, etc. what are the latest nowadays? there is mininova, but is there anything better? (such as as good as demonoid)

Re:Biggest tracker and it shows

[winphreak]

I've heard rumors that Demonoid is going to somehow make a comeback, but it may not happen. Sad days though, when they went down.

Re:Biggest tracker and it shows

[Anonymous Coward]

You are full of bullshit. Can you give me a username and password to luelinks.net?

Re:Biggest tracker and it shows

[vuffi_raa]

I agree, we need demonoid back online

Re:Biggest tracker and it shows

[Dupont]

Actually, you may be right. Seems like The Pirate Bay has offered them a tracker. Check this:
http://torrentfreak.com/demonoid-welcome-in-sweden-080116/

Guess that would mean TPB has some abundant cash and bandwidth, huh.

Re:Biggest tracker and it shows

[thepotoo]

Mininova is a pretty good substitute for Demonoid. They are easily searchable, have a good selection, and a "thanks" feature which discourages spam and fakes.

The only problem is that their comments are on a separate page from the details of the torrent. Also, they are not private.

All in all, I consider them good enough. http://www.mininova.org/

Re:Biggest tracker and it shows

[ricotest]

The tracker is completely closed (no invites) and not related to the scene, so we don't get anything first. I'm sure 2,000 users is too minor for any legal entities to bother chasing after, either.

Re:Biggest tracker and it shows

[mxs]

So the operator might be more easily convinced to give up all membership data ?
(compared to a site with enough money for a decent defense attorney ...) :P

10e6 is a relatively small number

[Anonymous Coward]

What strikes me most is that 10e6 is a much smaller number than I expected. Sure, it's more than the population of Sweden, but when you compare it to say the population of Europe, or the total amount of internetters, it is really dwarfed. Of course, there are a lot of other trackers out there, but they tend to have even less users.

Re:10e6 is a relatively small number

[Headcase88]

All I know is that in the right (wrong) circumstances, 10e5 is a hopelessly large number.

I'm looking at you and your roses, "We Love Katamari"!

1:10?!?

[dotancohen]

For every torrent on PB there are ten users? I find that unbelievable. That means that only one out of ten (maximum) are sharing new content, which seems very low for Bittorrent. Of course, one should hope that the majority are seeding the rest of files, but I still find it to be a lopsided economy when over 90% of users are not contributing content.

Re:1:10?!?

[darkhitman]

Of course, one should hope that the majority are seeding the rest of files

You must be new to Bittorrent.

Re:1:10?!?

[Alsn]

As long as a torrent is 'active' it doesn't matter if people are continously seeding as long as enough people have set their clients to stop uploading first when their upload has matched their download(which most clients do per default today).

Re:1:10?!?

[dmsuperman]

That's believable, a majority of the users just get on to download. That also means only 1m tracked, not 1m total uploaded. Torrents get deleted all the time.

Re:1:10?!?

[Eddi3]

You must be used to private trackers. On public trackers, anything goes.

The upside with public trackers is that you generally get a lot more visitors, which translates into a lot more content, and cash to the creators of the website via ads.

Re:1:10?!?

[dotancohen]

I've only ever downloaded the latest Fedora or Kubuntu with BT. So, yeah, I'm kind of green. Would you believe my entire computer (OS, apps, files) are all legal? I'm the only one I know...

Re:1:10?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, some specialized private trackers have way more content than all the public ones united in the same specialty (there are private trackers for series, movies, music, or even special music genres, etc.). Also, private trackers tend to have the latest things before public ones.

Re:TPB is for poser faggots.

[Anonymous Coward]

Protip: btjunkie != private tracker.

Also, quality not quantity.

It all comes down to bandwith.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry but wasn't the whole justification for P2P was the "bandwith savings"?

Re:It all comes down to bandwith.

[kdemetter]

Trust , it saves a lot of bandwith .

The files themselves are not downloaded from the tracker . The tracker is like a map , telling peers from who they can download . It controls the traffic .

But with 10M peers , even that becomes a huge amount of traffic .

Re:It all comes down to bandwith.

[Anonymous Coward]

The tracker BW usage is around 290mbit at the 95th, and thats just for the tracking, not the website or torrent downloads.

Re:But remember kids - piracy actually *helps* peo

[Mike89]

because they only download movies they wouldn't watch otherwise.

I download movies I wouldn't pay to see at the cinema. If I like it, I buy the DVD.

And shows they watch anyways. For "backup" purposes.

Half of the shows I like aren't broadcast in my country, and if they are, in no particular order.

And computer programs and games they are thinking about getting. For evaluation purposes.

I can't argue with you on this one, but a lot of the community here uses all freeware/open source and has no need to pirate shitty overpriced software.

Maybe if the Pirate Bay is able to make so much money off this, the RIAA/MPAA should get smart and do the same. I'd happily buy the TV shows and movies I download now if there was a legitimate way to pay for them and get them in a format that I actually wanted (Xvid, please). If DVDs didn't have 10 minutes of forced watching at the start, they'd get more sales out of them too. Do you really think the multi-million (billion?) dollar corporations need you here to stand up for them?

HOW MANY ARE JIGABOOS?

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be nice to know more about the demographics. Especially, where in the world are the pirates located.

Must be mostly Europeans though. Cowards. We win the war in Iraq, they lose the war in Afghanistan...

eMule, Gnutella, Gnucleus & Tom Slyck

[Antiocheian]

I just had a look at the news section and I think slyck.com seems to be aware of two p2p networks only: Bittorrent and Limewire (not generally Gnutella, just Limewire).

The only time Slyck mentioned eMule was when he questioned the reasoning of Sourceforge in awarding eMule as the "Best New Project" of 2007. He didn't mention eMule at the title of the article of course.

Not that a juggernaut like eMule needs Slyck, but smaller open source projects like Gnucleus did and Tom almost never said a word about them. He was too busy advertising Limewire for his buddies.

Re:eMule, Gnutella, Gnucleus & Tom Slyck

[MojoStan]

Subject
eMule, Gnutella, Gnucleus & Tom Slyck
Comment
I just had a look at the news section and I think slyck.com seems to be aware of two p2p networks only: Bittorrent and Limewire (not generally Gnutella, just Limewire).

The only time Slyck mentioned eMule was when he questioned the reasoning of Sourceforge in awarding eMule as the "Best New Project" of 2007. He didn't mention eMule at the title of the article of course.

Not that a juggernaut like eMule needs Slyck,

eMule is the name of the client that uses the eDonkey2000 network. eDonkey2000 has its own category in Slyck's news section and eMule has a subcategory. Sure, it doesn't get mentioned as much as BitTorrent, but neither does U***et. Given BitTorrent's overwhelming popularity and all the drama between BT sites and the studios, I don't find this surprising at all.

Also, Slyck has a Guide to eDonkey2000 and the eMule is the first client on its list of clients.

Not that anybody's going to read this comment, but I just had to reply because I don't think Slyck has an anti-eMule bias like you seem to imply. eMule just doesn't make the news because it's overshadowed.

Re:eMule, Gnutella, Gnucleus & Tom Slyck

[Antiocheian]

I didn't write that Slyck is anti-eMule. I wrote that he is pro-Limewire.

How sad is it...

[Smordnys s'regrepsA]

...that I use it for downloads all the time, and never took the time to notice I could sign up for an account? That being said, what do they keep track of on your account? I don't want something tied to my name that could be used against me in court.

Re:How sad is it...

[EVil Lawyer]

Actually, the Slashdot summary should've said "10 million peers", because that's what the article said. So you're already accounted for in that 10-million figure!

Re:How sad is it...

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't be surprised to know most users sign up, because you need an account to be able to search for porn...

Re:Sweden is Communist

[noTimeAtAll]

You apparently don't know what's communism. If you see communism as an ideology where people steal and eat each other, you should consider visiting Wikipedia on this matter.

Pay them to work

[Mr2001]

And we could just switch to FOSS movies, TV and computer programs anyways. It has to be true - I read it on Slashdot! No need. Here's a novel idea: how about paying people to create movies, TV, and computer programs?

You know, paying them directly for working, for doing what they enjoy and are good at. Not for making copies, which is something any trained monkey with a DVD burner can do.

Recording a song, filming a movie, or writing a program takes just as much effort, and deserves just as much compensation, no matter how many copies are eventually made. At least that's what common sense tells us. Copyright, however, links the author's compensation to the number of copies he can sell -- which makes little sense on its face, and no sense at all in a world where copying is a trivial matter that anyone can perform for himself, with no skill or investment needed. Authors and consumers alike would benefit from a more sensible business model.

Re:Pay them to work

[Standard User 79]

Well I would say copyright works pretty well. Paying someone directly for working is useful in certain cases but you can't pay everyone who wants to create something. Copyright rewards the creator who takes the risk and investment into a work.

Re:Pay them to work

[IamTheRealMike]

Recording a song, filming a movie, or writing a program takes just as much effort, and deserves just as much compensation, no matter how many copies are eventually made. At least that's what common sense tells us.

Common sense tells us the exact opposite actually. If two people produce a movie costing $100 million, and one movie sucks and the other movie rules, why would we not want to reward the producer of the movie that ruled more? How else are you going to encourage the creation of stuff that people actually want, instead of artistic navel-gazing?

In the economic system you suggest:

• Anything very expensive wouldn't get made. Lord of the Rings movies, Mass Effect, etc. Copyright lets you amortize the cost of an expensive production over huge numbers of people, who only have to pay a little bit. If the alternative was to pay up front, far fewer people would do so, because they would have no idea what their money would actually buy them. Thus the amount each individual would have to pay is much higher, further restricting those who would it.
• Anything risky wouldn't get made. Now you've collected some money from people who want you to make something, you'd better make sure they're happy with the end result. Forget about edgy third albums. Forget about experimental forms of directing. With copyright, if you spend money making something that sucks, you shoulder the financial loss but that's about it. In your scheme, if you spend other peoples money you might be facing a lawsuit. Or at least the end of your career.

Re:Pay them to work

[Mr2001]

Paying someone directly for working is useful in certain cases but you can't pay everyone who wants to create something. You don't have to "pay everyone who wants to create something", just like you don't have to pay every barber who wants to cut your hair. What you do instead is find a barber who you think will do a good job, and then you pay him to cut your hair. It's up to him to convince you that he's the right one.

Re:Pay them to work

[Mr2001]

Common sense tells us the exact opposite actually. If two people produce a movie costing $100 million, and one movie sucks and the other movie rules, why would we not want to reward the producer of the movie that ruled more? You're looking at it backwards. How did those movies get made? Someone must have put up the money to fund them, right? That means, in the minds of whoever funded the production, that both movies are worth $100 million. If they weren't, then they wouldn't have gotten made in the first place.

Anything very expensive wouldn't get made. Lord of the Rings movies, Mass Effect, etc. Copyright lets you amortize the cost of an expensive production over huge numbers of people, who only have to pay a little bit. But in the copyright business model, the cost of the production is unrelated to the number of people who end up paying. So you really have no idea whether the "little bit" they pay is going to cover production - maybe you'll break even, maybe you'll get rich, or maybe you'll lose a few million. You just have to pick a per-copy price and pray that you picked the right one. If you set a low price to give your consumers the feeling that they "only have to pay a little bit", you run the risk of setting it too low and losing money.

In a get-paid-for-working business model, however, you know ahead of time whether your production will turn a profit. If the per-person price looks higher, that's only because it's the true price.

Anything risky wouldn't get made. Now you've collected some money from people who want you to make something, you'd better make sure they're happy with the end result. Forget about edgy third albums. Forget about experimental forms of directing. Whoa now. There's no need to forget about that stuff, as long as it's what your fans want.

Re:Pay them to work

[Chris Carollo]

Copyright, however, links the author's compensation to the number of copies he can sell -- which makes little sense on its face

It makes total sense -- you'd obviously like to compensate authors for the popularity of their works, right? Copyright is intended to do that.

What exactly are you proposing here? A flat fee for creation of a work? Paid for by who? You can say "new business model" until you're blue in the face, but what would this business model be?

Re:Pay them to work

[Mr2001]

It makes total sense -- you'd obviously like to compensate authors for the popularity of their works, right? Copyright is intended to do that. I'd like to compensate authors for the time and effort they put into their work - just like anyone else.

Popularity has very little to do with it. By analogy, a road worker gets paid for the time he spends repairing the highway. Assuming the same amount of work is involved, he doesn't have any inherent right to get paid twice as much for working on a road that carries 20,000 cars a day as one that only carries 10,000. The value of his labor today does not depend on the number of people who might benefit from it in the future.

Popularity does matter, but only in the sense that it's easier to fund the production of a work which appeals to more people. That is, in order to sell your labor, you have to find someone who wants to pay you for it.

What exactly are you proposing here? A flat fee for creation of a work? Paid for by who? Anyone who thinks it's worth paying for the creation of that work. For a movie, that might include consumers (who benefit from getting another movie to watch), theater operators (who can make money by providing a comfortable, social environment in which to watch movies), video player manufacturers (who can sell hardware at a profit, but only if there's content to watch with it), and perhaps others. Everyone who benefits from the existence of more works has an incentive to pay for their production.

Re:Pay them to work

[Chris Carollo]

Popularity has very little to do with it. By analogy, a road worker gets paid for the time he spends repairing the highway. Assuming the same amount of work is involved, he doesn't have any inherent right to get paid twice as much for working on a road that carries 20,000 cars a day as one that only carries 10,000.

But building a road is not a creative endeavor, so it's not the same thing. The quality of creative works are gauged by how many people enjoyed them. The quality of roads are gauged by smoothness and durability (and companies that are known for making good-quality roads can charge more).

So, if popularity doesn't matter, should media creators be compensated at a flat rate? If so, I'm going to start a solo career with my casio keyboard and I'd like the same as what Justin Timberlake is getting, please.

Anyone who thinks it's worth paying for the creation of that work. For a movie, that might include consumers (who benefit from getting another movie to watch), theater operators (who can make money by providing a comfortable, social environment in which to watch movies), video player manufacturers (who can sell hardware at a profit, but only if there's content to watch with it), and perhaps others. Everyone who benefits from the existence of more works has an incentive to pay for their production.

They have a fairly indirect incentive to pay for their production. The have an immediate way to consume that media for free. How successful is shareware? How many free albums are financially successful? How many movies, released on a donation-basis, would cover their costs? I'd wager not very many.

Re:Pay them to work

[Mr2001]

But building a road is not a creative endeavor, so it's not the same thing. The quality of creative works are gauged by how many people enjoyed them. The quality of roads are gauged by smoothness and durability (and companies that are known for making good-quality roads can charge more). Sure, but prices aren't directly linked to "quality", whether you're talking about products or labor. That's not how a market economy works.

So, if popularity doesn't matter, should media creators be compensated at a flat rate? If so, I'm going to start a solo career with my casio keyboard and I'd like the same as what Justin Timberlake is getting, please. Media creators, like anyone else, should be compensated at whatever rate they can negotiate with the people who are paying them. If you can convince someone to pay you as much as Justin Timberlake is paid, then by all means, do it!

Your statement implies the existence of some entity who controls the market for musical labor and can simply declare that your labor has the same value as someone else's, but that's not how it works (outside of Soviet Russia, where value declares YOU!!). The value of your labor is whatever you can manage to sell it for.

They have a fairly indirect incentive to pay for their production. The have an immediate way to consume that media for free. With what, their time machines? How else are they going to consume media that hasn't been produced yet?

If you want to consume media, it has to be produced first. In order for that to happen, you have to find someone who has the skills to produce it and convince him to do that work (most likely by offering him money). If no one pays him, there won't be any media to consume. That looks like a pretty direct incentive to me.

How successful is shareware? How many free albums are financially successful? How many movies, released on a donation-basis, would cover their costs? I'd wager not very many. I agree, but what do any of those have to do with the business model I've proposed? I don't recall saying that anyone should ever work for free with the expectation that they'll get paid for it later. Just like any other service, if you expect to get paid for your work, you'd better know where the money's coming from before you start working.

Re:Pay them to work

[Chris Carollo]

If you want to consume media, it has to be produced first. In order for that to happen, you have to find someone who has the skills to produce it and convince him to do that work (most likely by offering him money). If no one pays him, there won't be any media to consume. That looks like a pretty direct incentive to me.

But it's not, because you need the development funded. If I wanted to go make a movie, I won't be asking people to pay for the privilege of watching a movie, I'll be asking them to pay to watch a movie a year down the line. Or asking them to pay to watch a current movie in the hopes that I'll make another one. But again, that's paying for future hopes, not the actual thing in front of them.

Of course I could go to a bank and get a loan based on expected future revenue from my movie, but I imagine most lending institutions would laugh in your face if you told them you'd pay them back with the proceeds from something that consumers optionally pay for.

I agree, but what do any of those have to do with the business model I've proposed?

What IS the business model you've proposed? I still don't see how it works. Is it just direct contributions/donations to the developers/artists? Is that it? If so, you're going to find virtually all of today's media massively underfunded.

Re:Pay them to work

[Mr2001]

But it's not, because you need the development funded. If I wanted to go make a movie, I won't be asking people to pay for the privilege of watching a movie, I'll be asking them to pay to watch a movie a year down the line. Or asking them to pay to watch a current movie in the hopes that I'll make another one. But again, that's paying for future hopes, not the actual thing in front of them. Yes, but so what? People do that all the time, whether it's individuals hiring someone to build a house or a swimming pool, or businesses hiring engineers to work on new product lines that won't be released for months. When you buy a service, quite often you're paying for "future hopes" instead of an actual thing in front of you.

Of course I could go to a bank and get a loan based on expected future revenue from my movie, but I imagine most lending institutions would laugh in your face if you told them you'd pay them back with the proceeds from something that consumers optionally pay for. Well, of course. There is no "expected future revenue"; without copyright, you have no legal cudgel to make anyone pay you for copies, but that's OK because you're not in the business of making copies, you're in the business of making movies, and you've already been paid for that by the time the movie is done.

What IS the business model you've proposed? I still don't see how it works. Is it just direct contributions/donations to the developers/artists? More or less. It's not really a "donation", because you're paying for a service -- a donation is money that you spend without expecting anything in return.

The model is simply that the artist sets a price for his labor (the act of creating a new work), performs that labor once he's found enough people who are willing to pay for it (consumers or anyone else who benefits from a new work's creation), and then moves on to the next project (without milking any more money from the one he just finished).

Is that it? If so, you're going to find virtually all of today's media massively underfunded. Well, I don't think that's true. Demand for that labor is obviously already there; it isn't going to vanish overnight.

But in any case, I contend that whatever loss of new works might occur would be balanced out by the freedom with which everyone would be able to use the new works that are created (not to mention the ones that already exist). In other words, a movie I can watch freely, share with my friends, re-edit and sample for other projects, etc. is worth more than a movie that costs $15 which I'm not allowed to do anything with except watch it.

Well, it sure helps *ME*

[Smordnys s'regrepsA]

...because they only download movies they wouldn't watch otherwise. Wouldn't watch at the current prices, yes. If I wasn't downloading, I would be waiting for the DVD. Even then, I wouldn't be buying - I'd rent or borrow. I'll start paying for things when they start setting a price I like, in a respectable time frame. If they released the DVD the same day/week/month as the theatrical release, then they would see more of my money. I'd pay a little extra DVDs that come out early, but still have special features/deleted scenes/etc.

Same with the programs and games - need something decent but more my price range, or they'll continue to lose out on any of my money - though I usually just stick with freeware, so I can share my love with uptight "I just want to stay legal" friends.

Did I just feed the trolls? Sorry.

It is a lousy tracker

[Anonymous Coward]

Even in English, the Pirate Bay is pretty bad. I'll take Mininova any day. Failing that, Google is like a supertracker. :D

Re:It is a lousy tracker

[Wildclaw]

Except that Mininova isn't a tracker. It is an indexing/directory site. And if you are using Mininova, you have most likely used the pirate bay tracker lots of times.

Now just imagine...

[Anonymous Coward]

If TPB launched a donation campaign, say $10 per user, to finance the biggest lawsuit in history with the purpose of finally bringing to death the evil *AAs, BSA and similar organizations.
I certainly hate that in court battles whoever wins lawyers always will get richer, nonetheless the chance of seeing those bastards disappear would be appealing.

Well, it sure helps *ME*- download.

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting you left open all those "outs" in your argument. Not the right price? Not on time? You'd be a far more impressive specimen if you simply said "I will not touch copyrighted content in any kind of fashion", but that's apparently asking too much of the "instant-on" generation. Here let me take your snapshot with my "borrowed" camera so I can show artists everywere, choose another profession. This one's tainted.

Re:But remember kids - piracy actually *helps* peo

[Kjella]

Maybe if the Pirate Bay is able to make so much money off this, the RIAA/MPAA should get smart and do the same. If you're the grand central clearing house for everything digital, you make up for it on volume. There's no way TBP makes anywhere as much as legitimate sales. But if TPB gets a cut of every song, every movie, every tv show, every application, every game, every porn clip ever produced then it all adds up. If I could collect one dollar in taxes from everyone I'd make 8 billion dollars a year and I think people would say I was making lots of money. I guess you could imagine what would happen if you asked the government to "get smart" and only collect one dollar in taxes?

Re:But remember kids - piracy actually *helps* peo

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I download movies I wouldn't pay to see at the cinema. If I like it, I buy the DVD.

Actually, I went to cinema several times only because I saw a movie at home this way. I mean, after seeing certain things, I sometimes want to see them really *big* (no, not what you think! :-D). I think the movie studios won more than they lost with me this way. :-)

Re:But remember kids - piracy actually *helps* peo

[kamapuaa]

I download movies I wouldn't pay to see at the cinema. If I like it, I buy the DVD.

So you don't rent them? If such movies really don't have any value to you, why do you bother seeking them out, and then spend your time watching them? Why don't you download the freely available movies on (say) archive.org? Obviously you think they're better in some way.

I can't argue with you on this one, but a lot of the community here uses all freeware/open source and has no need to pirate shitty overpriced software.

I very much doubt the amount of people browsing Slashdot from a Linux computer is more than a couple percent. Anyway if the software is shitty & overpriced, does that make it OK to steal it? Wouldn't that just drive people into using freeware/open source? Most Slashdot discussion of high-profile open source projects is given to how shit they are - Gimp comes to mind.

Your after-the-fact rationalizations are absurd. Just admit that you can steal easily and there's likely no direct personal consequences, so you go ahead and do it.

Re:But remember kids - piracy actually *helps* peo

[Standard User 79]

Do you really think the multi-million (billion?) dollar corporations need you here to stand up for them?

No, but people who create content do. It might feel good sticking it the man but if consumers refuse to respect copyright, creators loose the ability to assign any rights their work.

World of Pirate bay

[Mathness]

Over 10 million users of Pirate bay and World of Warcraft?

*sniffs the air*

I smell an **AA/conspiracy theory brewing with a hint of inane ramblings from J. Thompson.

Re:But remember kids - piracy actually *helps* peo

[Mike89]

So you don't rent them?

No. They come out at least six months later on DVD.

If such movies really don't have any value to you, why do you bother seeking them out, and then spend your time watching them?

Unless it's something I'm really dieing to see, I'll download it then buy it when it eventually comes out on DVD. The cost of going to the cinema is ever-rising where I live, but the quality is also ever-decreasing. It's not stealing if I pay for it..

Why don't you download the freely available movies on (say) archive.org?

Didn't know about it, anything good there you'd recommend? I'm typically into comedies and actions.

Anyway if the software is shitty & overpriced, does that make it OK to steal it? Wouldn't that just drive people into using freeware/open source? Most Slashdot discussion of high-profile open source projects is given to how shit they are - Gimp comes to mind.

I suppose not, but there are many grey areas in the computer world (Didn't you get the memo about not calling it 'stealing'?). If there was a way for me to reliably open/edit .doc files without MS Office, I'd do so. It's not OO.org's fault they have to reverse engineer the formatting (isn't this against the law too now?), and I'm certainly not financially supporting Microsoft to keep their format monopoly. Each to their own, I suppose.

Just admit that you can steal easily and there's likely no direct personal consequences, so you go ahead and do it.

If that's the way you see it, fine. I pay for DVDs which is a lot more than anybody else here would do (not that I'd condemn them for doing so). If you have a problem with it, feel free to go buy more overpriced DVDs to make up for it.

Oh, and you're right with 'stealing is easy'. If I could get (and pay for) TV shows I like in a legal way, I'd do that.. but I can't.. how is it my fault for picking the ONLY option available to me (other than not watching it?).

Re:TPB is for poser faggots.

[kdemetter]

Who are you to judge the quality of TPB ? Or any other torrent site for that matter . It's not like you are paying for it .

Re:But remember kids - piracy actually *helps* peo

[Anonymous Coward]

So you don't rent them? If such movies really don't have any value to you, why do you bother seeking them out, and then spend your time watching them? Why don't you download the freely available movies on (say) archive.org? Obviously you think they're better in some way. because i live in the sticks/on the countryside. i've got 13mbit which means a dvd takes roughly 1h to download (or 10 min for a xvid). to drive and rent a movie i'd have to drive 55km, meaning i have to waste an hour AND i have to pay for both the movie and the drive. if i had the option to rent online, i would

and i'm sure then the options to rent do come out here (sweden), i'm sure they won't be available to mac owners

Wow!!

[cheesecake23]

The Pirate Bay asserts itself as the self-proclaimed 'World's Largest Tracker' by topping over 10 million peers, ...

OMG!!! It's the elusive triple redundant double reflexive superfluous tautology!! (I tried to make that triply redundant and doubly reflexive but failed dismally.)

This kind of construct is quite subtle. According to TFA, The Pirate Bay is not claiming to be the world's largest tracker, but the "self-proclaimed world's largest tracker". Positively Colbertian.

Why someone needs to stand up for the RIAA

[Dobeln]

"I download movies I wouldn't pay to see at the cinema. If I like it, I buy the DVD." I download movies, then... well, I sure as hell don't go out and buy a DVD. I'm fairly certain there is a substantial number of people like me among TPB users.

"Half of the shows I like aren't broadcast in my country, and if they are, in no particular order." I know, being able to watch The Wire Season five the day after it was on in the US is great. For me. But will I watch it again when it shows up on basic/medium cable in a year or two? The question sort of answers itself, no?

"I can't argue with you on this one, but a lot of the community here uses all freeware/open source and has no need to pirate shitty overpriced software." I am curious - if the "overpriced" (I.e. price>0) software is indeed "shitty", why do so many people pirate it on sites like TPB instead of downloading the superior FOSS alternatives?

Maybe if the Pirate Bay is able to make so much money off this, the RIAA/MPAA should get smart and do the same. Hmm... perhaps running a torrent site where you offer what others have produced for free is a different business proposition compared to actually *producing* the movies/TV shows/software on offer? Nah.

If DVDs didn't have 10 minutes of forced watching at the start, they'd get more sales out of them too. Probably, yes. But that's a marginal issue, and you know it.

Do you really think the multi-million (billion?) dollar corporations need you here to stand up for them? So it seems, considering I got modded "Troll" for merely offering up a contrary viewpoint to the self-serving Slashdot groupthink.

The Return of the "Troll"

[Dobeln]

"Wouldn't watch at the current prices, yes. If I wasn't downloading, I would be waiting for the DVD. Even then, I wouldn't be buying - I'd rent...(snip) Thank you for confirming my thesis.

Re:But remember kids - piracy actually *helps* peo

[IamTheRealMike]

So? I don't see how this is anything except rationalization. There are films you simply must see, and you must see them right now, but you don't want to see them enough to actually go to the cinema. That sounds pretty lame to me.

The thing is that you don't have any inherent right to watch movies or TV shows. It's actually not a grey area at all. You didn't make that stuff, it's not yours, you watch it at the pleasure of those who put in the effort to make it. If they decide that DVDs come out at a different time to the cinema release, tough on you! Yeah I don't like it either, but it's not my decision, it's theirs, because they made the film! If it was really such a huge deal, some movie makers would start releasing movies with different schedule, that's how the market works.

Pretty much every problem you have can be solved by just waiting for these movies or TV shows to come out on DVD and then renting them.

The New Hollywood focus: Manure shoveling

[Dobeln]

"Recording a song, filming a movie, or writing a program takes just as much effort, and deserves just as much compensation, no matter how many copies are eventually made. " Indeed - consumer demand should never enter the equation. And given that "effort" is the metric to be used in determining compensation, I would speculate that your scheme would give us lots of glorious 12-hour movies featuring starvation victims shoveling manure into a furnace, with the camera crew doing bare-knuckle pushups on broken glass, and other similar "high-effort" setups.

Because, you know, that would be like totally high-effort and stuff.

Re:The New Hollywood focus: Manure shoveling

[Mr2001]

Indeed - consumer demand should never enter the equation. And given that "effort" is the metric to be used in determining compensation, I would speculate that your scheme would give us lots of glorious 12-hour movies featuring starvation victims shoveling manure into a furnace [etc.] Only if people were willing to pay for it. And if people are willing to pay filmmakers to produce this stuff, then by definition, there's demand for it, right?

It's a mistake to say demand doesn't enter into the business model I've proposed. This model simply looks at demand for what the artist actually does -- the act of creating a new work -- rather than the demand for round pieces of plastic that may or may not be produced later.

Re:The New Hollywood focus: Manure shoveling

[Dobeln]

So, as you have already indicated that measuring demand by people buying / renting / doing legal downloads is out of the question, would it be too much to ask how is demand is to be measured?

Re:The New Hollywood focus: Manure shoveling

[Mr2001]

I thought I made that clear in my last response. Demand for a service is measured by the number of people willing to pay for the service, and the amount they're willing to pay. You can measure demand for an artist or author's services exactly the same way you'd measure demand for an accountant or architect's services.

Re:Sweden is Communist

[EVil Lawyer]

I did. I learned that the number of communist cannibal thieves has tripled over the last year!

Re:But remember kids - piracy actually *helps* peo

[91degrees]

Screw that. I pirate stuff so I don't have to pay for it. No idea if I'd have paid for it if I didn't but I reckon I spend plenty on legitimate movies and TV shows. I've bought a good couple of hundred DVDs so I really don't think they can claim I cost the industry money. If they do I'd like to see the alleged loss on a balance sheet

WoW has 10 million ACCOUNTS!

[SmallFurryCreature]

Not users, read up on multi-boxing. I have no idea how many users have multiple accounts, but there is a difference between a USER and a ACCOUNT.

For that matter a single WoW account could have multiple users.

Don't play loose and fast with statistics, the marketing people might bump you off for trespassing on their turf.

Re:WoW has 10 million ACCOUNTS!

[Anonymous Coward]

because statistics are always so trustworthy anyway

really, how long has it been since statistics didn't go hand in hand with marketing? I'm pretty sure nine out of ten dentists still recommend my toothpaste, probably yours too.

Didn't your high school math teacher teach you that statistics are "liars math"?

Re:10 million users?

[Seumas]

I've now written 36 very popular stories on a certain site and now 20,000 people read each one and I'm stuck Oh, so YOU'RE the guy who does all that Snork fetish fan-fic!

Pirate Bay

[ptisouthwest]

the majority of people wont click on ads so I see how they can only be making just over what it costs them. Having seen where the guys who run pirate bay live they don't seem to be racking it in. Good on them. The deserve the success and good on the swedish government for their great laws. better than the poncy UK where I have a puppet government. ------------- www.xencasino.com

Re:Pirate Bay

[Anonymous Coward]

jesus how fucking gullible are you? Go to adbrite or a simialr ad agency and see how much a one day advert is on TPB, then try and say they arent making tnes of millions per year with a atrsight face.
You are ignorant as fuck if you think TPB is anything but a hihg profile front for some very big time criminals taking in serious money and handing out serious bribes to keep out of jail this long.
How the fuck do people fall for this shit?

Spartacus Moment..

[PopeRatzo]

I'll start this off...

"I am a pirate."

Demonoid closure

[Cinnaman]

I bet the closure of Demonoid swelled The Pirate Bay's ranks a fair bit. I used to go to Demonoid by default whenever looking for a torrent, now I go to The Pirate Bay. I preferred Demonoid's layout though.

Re:10 million users?

[v1]

I wonder if anyone has tried to bring up the notion that the legality of an action should be decided by the majority of the people. Once a P2P site gets to a certain point, doesn't the sheer size of its membership say something about whether or not it should be legal?

Stealing is not "productivity"

[Grampaw Willie]

Stealing is not productive. To argue that it is is an equivocation.

Re:Stealing is not "productivity"

[Wildclaw]

Copying however is extremly productive. That is the real differencce between copying and stealing. Copying creates wealth, while stealing doesn't.

Re:Stealing is not "productivity"

[kz45]

"Copying however is extremly productive. That is the real differencce between copying and stealing. Copying creates wealth, while stealing doesn't."

copying does NOT create wealth. It is actually closer to counterfeiting than stealing. The more something is copied, the less value it has over time (because it starts to have a perceived value that approaches $0). This is why software companies try so hard to prevent piracy.

Re:Stealing is not "productivity"

[Wildclaw]

That is some bad economics.

You are basically saying that movies like "Lord of the Rings" or "The Godfather" are worthless since they have been copied so many times.

And for a more physical example. If we dig up more gold from the ground, we get less wealthy since the price of gold decreases due to supply&demand. Even worse, if we come up with a more efficent way to extract gold from the ground, we will become even less wealthy.

When you are talking about value, what you are actually referring to is price (an easy mistake to make). Price is a mix of cost of production, supply & demand and various other things such as monopoly rights and goverment regulations.

Value (which is the basis of wealth) is about the perception of those who consume the service/goods.

People won't value a movie less just because it has been copied many times. They may however not be willing to pay as much if it is easy accessible. The best example to demonstrate this is air. Air is very valuable as you would die without it. It does however have a price of zero, since it is easily accessible anywhere. (clean air is another matter though)

While copying doesn't decrease the value of the work itself, it can decrease the value of other works. If you have the ability to get copies of a 1000 masterpiece songs, the value of each song will go down slightly, simply because you won't have time to enjoy them all. Fortunally, this decrease in value is far less than the increase in value of having all that music availible to you. Also, the decrease in value is mostly limited to the songs you like the least. The favorite songs keep their value even if you get access to other songs.

As for counterfeiting. That is a matter of fraud. The value of a dollar is the trust that every person puts into it. By counterfeiting you dilute that trust. Note also, that price and value are very close to each other when it comes to money since money doesn't have any usefulness beyond paying for things.

The reason software companies try to prevent piracy is simple. It is profitable to have a monopoly on distribution. I never claimed otherwise.

Re:Stealing is not "productivity"

[kz45]

"That is some bad economics."

"You are basically saying that movies like "Lord of the Rings" or "The Godfather" are worthless since they have been copied so many times."

No. I'm saying that if everyone could easily get a copy of the lord of the rings DVD for free, the perceived value of that particular DVD would be almost nothing. This applies to any digital goods/something that can easily be copied over the Internet.

"When you are talking about value, what you are actually referring to is price (an easy mistake to make). Price is a mix of cost of production, supply & demand and various other things such as monopoly rights and goverment regulations."

No, im talking about value. You even mentioned it below, which is exactly what I am referring to: "Value (which is the basis of wealth) is about the perception of those who consume the service/goods.".

"People won't value a movie less just because it has been copied many times. They may however not be willing to pay as much if it is easy accessible. The best example to demonstrate this is air. Air is very valuable as you would die without it. It does however have a price of zero, since it is easily accessible anywhere. (clean air is another matter though)"

See above. It applies more to software than music or movies, but the idea is the same.

"While copying doesn't decrease the value of the work itself, it can decrease the value of other works. If you have the ability to get copies of a 1000 masterpiece songs, the value of each song will go down slightly, simply because you won't have time to enjoy them all. Fortunally, this decrease in value is far less than the increase in value of having all that music availible to you. Also, the decrease in value is mostly limited to the songs you like the least. The favorite songs keep their value even if you get access to other songs."

Many new and independent artists these days only release their songs as an mp3 (or in some other digital format). As an example, if an artist sold their mp3s for 99 cents each, but it got shared and copied enough times on a p2p network, most people would not be willing to pay for it (because they can get it for free). This would devalue the mp3 to almost 0.

"The reason software companies try to prevent piracy is simple. It is profitable to have a monopoly on distribution. I never claimed otherwise."

This is true. But what many people don't realize is the fact that the value of the software includes the time and effort that went into that software (not just the cost of distribution..which might be very little). Eventually, everyone will have a faster internet connection and software companies will only release their products as services (no sourcecode = no pirating). The other alternative is to charge $30,000 per copy (or however much it costs for R&D+a profit)...and the person that buys it will not be willing to give out free copies because of all the money they spent on it.

Re:Stealing is not "productivity"

[Wildclaw]

"No. I'm saying that if everyone could easily get a copy of the lord of the rings DVD for free, the perceived value of that particular DVD would be almost nothing. This applies to any digital goods/something that can easily be copied over the Internet."

You conveniently ignored my physical world examples. Using your definition of "percieved value" as value, air would have a value of zero. Which is completly incorrect.

And digging up gold would make it less valuable, which isn't true. Actually, it is slightly true. As one of the selling points of gold is its rarity, digging it up will actually decrease its value. A better example would be iron that has a price because of its usefulness, and not because of its rarity.

The value of an item simply doesn't change just because you get more of an item, unless the rarity of the item is the selling point. (money, collector items). Your "perceived value" does however as it isn't the real value. It sound more like the demand price curve than anything else.

Re:10 million users?

[Jarik_Tentsu]

Yeah, I was thinking about that too. They probably never thought it'd be this big.

Hell, imagine if by some fluke everyone votes Pirate Party at next election. "In todays news, the new American President met with the Prime Minister of Sweden, the head of the Pirate Party, to try to establish an alliance for the war on terror. The Pirates politely declined the offer, stating that as long as the RIAA and MPAA existed within American borders, they would always be enemies. The Pirate Captain further stated that "Money wasted on wars and security could be better spent on file servers and bandwidth.""

Still, it'd be worth it...just for the hilarity. A country run by pirates...=P

~Jarik

what is the primary use of P2P?

[Grampaw Willie]

it appears the primary use of P2P is file sharing and that most of that is stealing copyright material

what response do you expect?

P2P will probably be made illegal and the net modified so that it doesn't work. and people using p2p to circumvent copyright law are going to find themselves with a big fine to pay.

Re:what is the primary use of P2P?

[Helix666]

the net modified so that it doesn't work.

And how, may I ask, would they do this? (And, more to the point, who would this 'they' be?)

Re:what is the primary use of P2P?

[Anonymous Coward]

no wonder you post at 0

WTO

[tepples]

why can't you just grasp the concept that US law applies only on US land? Because the Berne Convention applies throughout World Trade Organization member states.

Re:WTO

[Anonymous Coward]

True but the US courts are so far the only ones that think linking to something makes you guilty of copyright infringement.

Also, if the United States ignores WTO rules when it suits them so why should other countries not do the same?

Re:WTO

[Anonymous Coward]

PirateBay operations are perfectly legal. And if that's the point we should start changing such a Berne Convetion. By the way... why didn't any of you smartasses ever questioned WTO operations?

Re:WTO

[tepples]

By the way... why didn't any of you smartasses ever questioned WTO operations? Because getting out of the WTO would have deleterious effects on the rest of the economy, even the parts unrelated to the entertainment and computer software sectors.

Re:WTO

[CSMatt]

If the court rulings in member states had an effect on all Berne Convention countries, then CSS would be legal to circumvent everywhere because a Finnish court ruled it "Ineffective."

Re:10 million users?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if anyone has tried to bring up the notion that the legality of an action should be decided by the majority of the people.

Civil disobedience? Pot smokers of the world unite?

What software is not overpriced?

[tepples]

"overpriced" (I.e. price>0) software Which party games for PC, designed for four players holding gamepads looking at one large monitor connected to one computer, are not "overpriced" in your estimation? Which legal software for encoding videos for use on handheld devices is not "overpriced" in your estimation?

Re:10 million users?

[nomadic]

I wonder if anyone has tried to bring up the notion that the legality of an action should be decided by the majority of the people. Once a P2P site gets to a certain point, doesn't the sheer size of its membership say something about whether or not it should be legal?

No.

Thanks to all who made that possible

[Doug52392]

Including the Sweetish government, for their poorly motivated raids that ended up giving The Pirate Boy so much media attention that their web traffic nearly tripled!

Amercia != World

[Anonymous Coward]

Duh.

Re:10 million users?

[v1]

I suppose the laws are written for the wealthy and the powerful, not for the majority. Nothing new here eh.

Re:But remember kids - piracy actually *helps* peo

[Shados]

Not everyone (or even the -close- to the majority!) of people who live directly or indirectly from intellectual property are part of a "multi billion dollar corporation". With all the manufacturing processes outsourced, if intellectual property also go the way of the dodo, there will be literally 3 things left to make a living.

Anything relative to a local market: (ie: manufacturing stuff for your own mom&pop store).
Flipping burgers and washing dishes.
The Service industry.

Thats not gonna make hundred of million people live, sorry.

The supreme court disagrees with you

[tomhudson]

I wonder if anyone has tried to bring up the notion that the legality of an action should be decided by the majority of the people. Once a P2P site gets to a certain point, doesn't the sheer size of its membership say something about whether or not it should be legal?

No.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_test

The Miller test is the United States Supreme Court's test for determining whether speech or expression can be labeled obscene, in which case it is not protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and can be prohibited.

The Miller test was developed in the 1973 case Miller v. California[1]. It has three parts:

1. Whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest,
2. Whether the work depicts/describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions specifically defined by applicable state law,
3. Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, and scientific value. (This is also known as the (S)LAPS test- Serious Literary, Artistic, Political, Scientific).

The work is considered obscene only if all three conditions are satisfied.

For legal scholars, several issues are important. One is that the test allows for community standards rather than a national standard. What offends the average person in Jackson, Mississippi, may differ from what offends the average person in New York City. The relevant community, however, is not defined.

The "community standard" for porn is "I can't define it, but I know it when I see it." If the average person in a community wasn't terribly offended, it wasn't porn.

The next question is, if its reasonable to apply the community standards test to pornography, why not to other areas? Is it okay to discriminate against rights of people who aren't fans of pr0n (all 3 of them)? Is it okay to say "community standards" for pr0n but not other conduct that communities now find acceptable?

Re:The supreme court disagrees with you

[Anonymous Coward]

Comparing obscenity laws to other cases of law doesn't make too much sense. Free speech is a protected right under the constitution so the whole notion of obscenity is drawing a line between acceptable and unacceptable forms of speech based off community and legal standards.

In the case of discrimination, that you bring up, how would it make sense to let the community decide what forms of discrimination are OK and which ones aren't? If the community believes it's alright to lynch and beat black men, does that mean it should be permitted? Hell no. That's murder and assault, neither of which are protected under the constitution and consequently there's barely a line that needs to be defined (excepting the case of self defense, but a general practice of beating/killing people probably couldn't be justified in such a manner). Discrimination, similarly, is not a protected right, and again beyond certain extremes no lines need to be drawn.

To bring this whole thread back on topic, just because pirating of copyrighted media is widely accepted by the community as a valid practice doesn't mean that the courts should accept it as such. You have no constitutional right to distribute that CD you bought last week to all 6 billion of your friends (most of whom you probably wouldn't recognize anyways). This isn't sharing, this isn't giving a mix tape to your buddies at work, or that girl you have a crush on. This is a form of theft. It's widely accepted that the guys selling bootleg dvds on the street corners in New York or DC are criminals, why is it so hard to realize that just because there is no cost associated with this (other than your internet service) this is the same sort of offense?

Re:The supreme court disagrees with you

[tomhudson]

"Comparing obscenity laws to other cases of law doesn't make too much sense. Free speech is a protected right under the constitution so the whole notion of obscenity is drawing a line between acceptable and unacceptable forms of speech based off community and legal standards."

No - pornography based on acceptable community standards specifically disregarded the whole "legal standards" approach in favour of community stadards. That's why what actually constitutes the "community standard" is not codified as part of the law.

Copyright isn't a "natural right" - its something that we have enacted through our governments, and we're free to change it.

The original poster claimed that using "community standards" hasn't been tried - I pointed out that this was demonstrably false, as it already has been, in the case of porn. We can do the same with copyright. If 90% of the population sees nothing wrong with casual file-sharing, its probably time to realize that the law is outdated. Copyright holders can either work to some sort of accomodation, or take their chance of being ignored as irrelevant.

In the case of music, that's pretty much already happened. The MPAA should learn from the mistakes of the RIAA, not duplicate them. They have a different product - one that can probably survive even if copyright were made much more relaxed - at least until everyone has a desktop box thats powerful enough to allow people to produce their own shows entirely in VR.

Re:10 million users?

[tomhudson]

Still, it'd be worth it...just for the hilarity. A country run by pirates...=P

I thought you already had that ... or did I just dream the last 2 US elections and when I wake up its still 1998?

Re:10 million users?

[TurinPT]

wait what?

So what you're saying is... since pretty much the whole world wants bars of gold, the federal reserve should hand them out for free.
Makes perfect sense.

Problem with Pirate Bay's success

[russotto]

One potentially large problem -- for the eyepatch and jolly roger set, anyway -- with The Pirate Bay's ubiquity is that it's now a single point of attack for the xxAAs. It doesn't really matter what Swedish law says, eventually the industry will get it shut down, whether that means buying new laws, planting child porn on the operators, or just plain having them kidnapped and flown to the US for "trial".

Once that happens, an enormous source of torrents dries up. There used to be several others, but most of them have fallen by the wayside. No doubt several more will spring up in the event of TPBs demise, but it'll be a long, dry, several days while the xxAAs crow about their victory.

Re:Problem with Pirate Bay's success

[Anonymous Coward]

Fortunately Swedish politicians are not as corrupted as their American counterparts. Wake up and smell the reality. Not every country is called USA.

Re:Problem with Pirate Bay's success

[Patersmith]

Suprnova was mentioned above but I think it bears mentioning that the aftermath of that crackdown produced a number of high quality torrent sites. Before that, it was Suprnova and...well...not much.

Today there are enough high-ish traffic high-ish quality trackers that I can say I wouldn't miss TPB too much if it were to get shut down. I really hope it doesn't and, if it did, I would have a drink in its honour, but life would go on, you know?

Killing Suprnova produced the hydra that is virtually unkillable now. It used to have one head, now it has hundreds and there is no hope in shutting down all the trackers. It really looks like a stupendous waste of time, effort, and resources to even try. I honestly don't know how they can justify the expense.

Now, what really worries me is how they've been chiseling away at the ISPs. They've really done a great job at bringing net neutrality to its knees. Look at the situation with Comcast and AT&T. I have two broadband ISPs where I am (one cable, one DSL like almost everyone here). The cable ISP has made torrenting useless through throttling bandwidth available for seeding (good luck maintaining a ratio on an invite-only member site) down to a trickle. The DSL provider, on the other hand, chokes download bandwidth for P2P applications down to about 30KB during primetime.

My prediction for 2008: ISPs will soon offer "legit" DRM-encumbered downloads from VSPs (video service providers...I just made that up so that's copyright by me, biyatches) for a small premium while continuing to ratchet down the bandwidth available to bittorrent traffic. The "legit" traffic will travel over a separate, dedicated, high capacity, PRIVATE network built through a partnership between ISPs and VSPs (MPAA member subsidiaries), paid for in part by the premiums and the VSPs.

Is it too late to patent that and sue them if they try it?

Research vs common sense

[bergwitz]

I can understand their motivation for attempting to give an impression that they don't make a profit. It certainly makes for good PR among a certain segment of the fans. But, it's naive to blindly believe them. A bit of common sense is all it takes. You're wrong, simple and easy. TBP is run as a pro-piracy project, nothing else. They are not in it for the money. They are students or IT workers and run TPB in their spare time. Noone in the project has a salary (from TBP). Research beats common sense any time, so you're welcome to go on and do your own. But you're right about having a bad ad partner. Check the ads on the page on you get a sense of what kind of ad partner they have. The reasoning from TBP is that most companies shy away from doing business with them, so they have to stick with the lousy partner they got.

Re:10 million users?

[cdrguru]

Ask the people in inner-city Detroit or Washington DC. By this rule, murder should be legal, at least in those places.

Certainly prostitution, extortion and drugs should be legal. Just like the Internet.

Re:10 million users?

[Anonymous Coward]

Victimless crime, etc.

but you left out an important part

[Anonymous Coward]

"or borrow"
sure this doesn't work for all the downloaded still in theater movies. I've digitally "borrowed" a few torrents of out on dvd or from TV movies before. When I didn't like it, I deleted it. When I did like it, I went out and bought it.
If I had had someone reasonably close, geographically that would have lent it to me, then I would have borrowed it from them. I didn't, so I wanted to ensure my money would be worth what I spent. Often times, no, a movie isn't even worth the rental fee in my opinion, the preview of a movie is frequently not a reasonable indicator of the whole.
People frequently lend out their movies, CDs, and software, should we prosecute these people as well? Yes you can argue that digital copies are just that, copies, but that also makes them more easily disposable.
You could also argue that a physical copy can only be lent to one person at a time, but that physical copy could be played before many people at once, again, provided that they share geographic proximity. Isn't part of the digital age getting past the limitations of physical proximity?

Here's another point to ponder. Let's say some guy, we'll call him Bob, pays for cable. Bob has HBO, Showtime, he's got em all, but Bob doesn't have a DVR. Bob does have a good old fashioned VCR though, and a library of blank tapes. Before torrents came around, when Bob was gonna miss a show, he'd pop a blank tape in the old VCR, set the timer, and record. Now, we've entered a new era, and a show can be downloaded off the internet. So instead of reusing all those VHS tapes over and over, which he used to do, he simply downloads a show that he could have watched, had he been home. Bob's got no agenda, he's not out to bring down Tivo, he pays for his cable, and watches his shows. Is Bob really a criminal?

Yes, downloading movies is illegal, as duplicating any commercial product. However, so is price gouging. When was the last time you heard about some agency going out and suing the local movie theater for raising their prices because they could? Is it usually the local guy's fault? Sometimes, but not always. Most movie theaters have outlandish fees to pay the company that produced or distributed the movie, and many make money, almost solely on concessions. So it boils down to the over sized movie company felt they could make more money off the little guy, cause he was complacent enough to take it. The only options, boycott, or crime. Sure boycotting may work sometimes, but it may also lead to those companies thinking that this is not a worthwhile venture, and they'll take a different direction next time. If it works to lower prices, it will work, eventually. We could write letters I suppose, but unless they get inundated with these letters, and let's be fair, they're just gonna toss the U sux0rz letters out, they won't really care. So that brings us to crime. If a major motion picture sells (and lets pull some numbers out of the air) ten million tickets, and gets downloaded five million times, what are you left to think?

I'll wrap up, but lemme set this in a little more personal light. I am currently working on a novel. I expect it to take quite some time, and luckily for me I happen to know a recent graduate with an English major willing to proofread it for free for me before I start pitching it. I hope, not expect, I'm realistic, but I hope that it could possibly do well enough to some day make it to the big screen. Will piracy be stopped then, no, I doubt it ever will be. While most authors make little if anything from movies related to their novels, some do. Some have major roles in the adaption from one medium to another, lets say for a moment, that after devoting all that time to the book, and then all that further time to the movie, a third or even a half of the viewings are from illegally downloaded copies. Would I be upset, maybe, but as a creator, I'd be happy that what I made was viewed, and hopefully enjoyed. Yes I'd want to make money from it, but I don't need to make it into the top two percent just becaus

Re:10 million users?

[Post-Globalism]

Your rhetoric is correct. What interest does a society serve, that of commerce or that of the people?

Obviously the answer should be the interest of the people, but if anyone hasn't already figured it out, it just isn't the case, since our societies are driven by the interest of wealthy lobbies.

Question of high relevance: How can we change this?

Re:TPB is for poser faggots.

[Anonymous Coward]

So I'm not allowed to have an opinion on free stuff?

Re:But remember kids - piracy actually *helps* peo

[Anonymous Coward]

I use bittorrent and other protocols to download media that I haven't paid for and will never pay for.

I steal the same as the politicians and their schemes steal.
I steal the same as the land developers and businessmen steal.
I steal the same as the doctors, lawyers, and teachers steal.
I steal the same as you.

I'm the same as anybody else - no better or worse. I'm the same as you.

Well duh

[ortzinator]

Of course they cracked 10 million, Demonoid is still down.

Re:10 million users?

[MMC Monster]

Pirates. Not morons.

Re:10 million users?

[russ1337]

yeah, do you think the owner of the pirate bay ever walked into the office one day and asked someone "you think the name's why they're suing us?" They might have done better with Happyland or Distributed Data Inc.

or better yet, put a US style patriotic spin on it:

Freedom for all information.org
Democratic Freedom Media .org
Patriotic Freedom data .org
FREE (as in beer) trade .org
We fight terrorism with movies and music if you shut us down the terrorists will win.org
Why cant I please my wife with my .org (that's just for giggles when the **IA spokespeople are giving press conferences.)

Re:10 million users?

[kyriosdelis]

Here's a funny thing to do then: If the Pirate Bay ever gets close to being shut down, it could publicly ask it's users to vote for the 2nd biggest political party in their respective countries, when the time comes. Even though no sane voter would actually do such a thing, the idea and only could probably scare a few influential people....

Re:But remember kids - piracy actually *helps* peo

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're using VLC, it skips the forced movies. The downside is that sometims the menu doesn't work as it should and you have to open it as dvd instead of dvd(menu) for the movie to play. You still have all the options: subtitles, voice language... available in the gui though.

I always wonder who the ACs are...

[Smordnys s'regrepsA]

Everything is copyrighted, so I would have to die and go to heaven before I could follow your suggestion. If everything wasn't copyrighted, I would think I had died and gone to heaven. Some things just happen to have a very open license.

Of course my actions might be illegal, that is my point. I'm being illegal because there is not a sane legal option. I did not leave outs, I left suggestions on how they can see more than a penny's worth of my money. If my current actions were stopped, they still wouldn't be getting a dime of my money.

It isn't just about torrenting, either. If I wasn't torrenting, and it wasn't an option, I would be sneaking into the theaters with friends. for the $10.50 of a ticket, I would expect more than one person to be able to enjoy the one time experience. I pay less for a legal DVD that I can legally show as many of my friends as I want, as many times as I want. Supposedly I can even legally copy that DVD so my friends can have their own - I can do it with a CD, just try telling me DVDs are suddenly different because they use a different laser and have a higher capacity. They're both just little magical plastic disks of entertainment to me.

If the MPAA starts going after downloaders as hard as the RIAA has, I probably will switch to theater hopping. After all, what is the worst that could happen? Small fine, after being kicked out of the establishment? They're more likely to skip the small fine part, if I remember my childhood correctly.


Btw, it isn't like "borrowing" someone's camera. Maybe like "borrowing" a private webcam that's being used for security purposes - I can view all I want, but that doesn't stop those that want to legally use it from doing so as well. (It's actually a fun past time, there are tons of unsecured security cams on the public internet that you can access after a quick google search)

So...

[Anonymous Coward]

...I'm still waiting to hear the downside of the argument... ;-)

Still going

[www.tech4um.com]

I'm surprised they haven't been shut down yet. Weren't they raided a while back? Either they're here to stay or a lot of people are going to get sued all at once

Re:Still going

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody is going to get sued. Sweden is not America.

Re:10 million users?

[theo735]

If such sharing system can have 10 million users I don't see any long-term concern for current or future copyright holders or artists. It's just a new type of distribution system for their works. Over time, media companies which sign in artists or distributors of software will adapt and a new way of collecting revenue will surface - for example - ad banners, premium services for pay etc. which will be offered to them from pirate bay for exchange of their copyrighted works.

Re:10 million users?

[gad_zuki!]

>Once a P2P site gets to a certain point, doesn't the sheer size of its membership say something about whether or not it should be legal?

So in Catholic dominated countries abortion is wrong and illegal but where its not its the opposite?

The only thing I see here is a lot of people unwilling to pay market prices for media. If anything this suggests prices are too high or that ideas like compulsory licensing might make sense. Or in most likelihood mean that people are selfish and will do anything for a free lunch.

Re:But remember kids - piracy actually *helps* peo

[Anonymous Coward]

Or you can check them out for free at your local library, which is still free (as it should be). You can convince me that under current law non commercial sharing is illegal (just as you can show me copyright legally extend ad naseum instead of reflecting their original purpose with reasonable terms). Legal and moral are 2 different things. You will never convince me it is immoral. To me, immoral is bullying Canada out of a sane law allowing non commercial sharing but taxing blank dvds and cds to pay the industry. Also, immoral is politicians promoting a select private interests over the public good by making each revision of IP law even worse for the average person and to the goal of encouraging creativity and innovations than the last just so large corporate interest can continue to make money off old work instead of producing new work and putting old work where it belongs into the public domain.

In the US, you are correct that such non-commercial sharing is often illegal. It was not illegal in other countries (such as Sweden) and ideally should not really be illegal anywhere (though maybe there should be a tax on blank medium). File sharing by itself is not immoral. Select private industry interests taking over public law is immoral. OK, morality is a subjective, but if you want to project your values on the whole world, why can't I?

Re:10 million users?

[Metaphorically]

Wtf? Not saying the parent is right or wrong but how the hell do you get the idea that most people in Detroit or Washington or even a large number of those people think that murder is okay? I assume you're using those two places because of the higher crime and murder rates but by no means is it comparable to the situation with file sharing.

Besides that the laws around copyright and copyright infringement are a lot more complicated than the idea that killing someone is wrong.

I guess I shouldn't even have justified this comment with a response but I'm just blown away that it somehow got modded insightful...

Re:But remember kids - piracy actually *helps* peo

[Mr2001]

The thing is that you don't have any inherent right to watch movies or TV shows. It's actually not a grey area at all. I agree that it isn't a grey area, but I contend I have exactly the same inherent right to watch movies or TV shows as I do to calculate the circumference of a circle or the amount of time it takes for light to reach the earth from the sun.

That is, it took a lot of human effort to calculate pi and the speed of light, but that doesn't mean the people who discovered those numbers somehow "own" them. I'm not taking anything away from them when I use them myself; I couldn't deny anyone else the use of those numbers even if I wanted to. They have no inherent right to prevent me from using any number, whether that number is a physical constant or an MPEG-encoded representation of a movie.

You didn't make that stuff, it's not yours, you watch it at the pleasure of those who put in the effort to make it. That's partially right, in the sense that those movies and TV shows wouldn't be around for anyone to watch if the effort hadn't been put in to make them. But now that they have, the information that makes up those shows doesn't belong to anyone. It's not mine, yours, theirs, or anyone else's. The very concept of owning a number is absurd.

If they decide that DVDs come out at a different time to the cinema release, tough on you! Tough on them is more like it. They can choose to release the DVD late, but I can choose to get a number representing the movie from someone else instead. If they want me to buy that number on a piece of plastic from them, instead of getting it for free online, they're going to have to cater to me - not vice versa. They're not the only ones who can tell me what that number is.

False dilemma

[Mr2001]

[I download movies I wouldn't pay to see at the cinema. If I like it, I buy the DVD.]

So you don't rent them? If such movies really don't have any value to you, why do you bother seeking them out, and then spend your time watching them? The post you're responding to didn't say they "don't have any value"; those are your words, not his. He only said he wouldn't pay to see them at the cinema, which means their value in his view is less than the price of a movie ticket (and the associated costs of driving there, parking, dealing with crowds, etc.).

Why don't you download the freely available movies on (say) archive.org? Obviously you think they're better in some way. Indeed, but there's nothing contradictory about that. Perhaps he values those freely available movies at $0.00, and values the ones he downloads at, say, $1.00, which is still lower than the cost of buying a ticket or renting a DVD.

Re:But remember kids - piracy actually *helps* peo

[d34thm0nk3y]

The thing is that you don't have any inherent right to watch movies or TV shows.

Actually, our inherent right to free speech does allow us to say or watch anything we want. It is this inherent right that is artificially restricted, for a limited time, in order to encourage the progress of arts and sciences.

Silence you fool!

[__aailob1448]

What idiocy is this? Do you know nothing of numbers and percentages? What madness in you makes you spout such ridiculous nonsense?

I was going to explain why you're naught but a drooling imbecile but I'm not even going to bother.

Stupidest post ever.

Re:But remember kids - piracy actually *helps* peo

[Chris Carollo]

The very concept of owning a number is absurd.

The concept of absolutely no IP rights is absurd. If you think that all non-physical creations have no inherent value and should not be salesworthy, how do you expect that anyone will create anything that has any amount of monetary risk?

Re:But remember kids - piracy actually *helps* peo

[haxor.dk]

"I very much doubt the amount of people browsing Slashdot from a Linux computer is more than a couple percent. Anyway if the software is shitty & overpriced, does that make it OK to steal it? "

Corrected for 10.000th time - casual copying is NOT stealing.

Stealing involves that the owner of a thing is permanently deprived of it. Nobody is actually deprived of anything when a piece of commercial software gets duplicated. The fact that they do not (in some cases, immediately) get a potential profit is irrelevant.

Re:But remember kids - piracy actually *helps* peo

[alext]

All true.

It is also true that many people feel that the extremely poor quality of recent movies makes paying for a ticket (and devoting an evening to watching it) a very risky proposition. Wanting to taste before buying is an understandable reaction - we don't want to miss out on something good but we don't want to get suckered by another "War of the Worlds" or "Elizabeth - the Golden Age" either. Finding a reviewer you can trust is another option of course.

Re:But remember kids - piracy actually *helps* peo

[Mr2001]

If you think that all non-physical creations have no inherent value and should not be salesworthy, how do you expect that anyone will create anything that has any amount of monetary risk? Labor still has value. You don't need to create a salable object in order to get paid: every time I go to the barber, I leave with less in my physical possession than when I came in, but the barber still provides a valuable service and gets paid for it.

Re:But remember kids - piracy actually *helps* peo

[Chris Carollo]

Labor still has value. You don't need to create a salable object in order to get paid: every time I go to the barber, I leave with less in my physical possession than when I came in, but the barber still provides a valuable service and gets paid for it.

Okay, fine, if you want to be pedantic: replace "non-physical" with "non-physical non-service" creations. My question still stands.

Re:But remember kids - piracy actually *helps* peo

[Mr2001]

Okay, fine, if you want to be pedantic: replace "non-physical" with "non-physical non-service" creations. My question still stands. Maybe you should rephrase it, because I'm not sure what you're asking. Where does this "monetary risk" come from, and why would you not include it in the price you're charging for your labor?

A barber has costs too, but they're included in the price he charges. If he charges me $15 for a haircut, some of that goes into his pocket to compensate him for his time, and some of it goes to keeping the lights and heat on in his shop, buying equipment, etc. He doesn't need any special legal treatment to make his business model work. Why would it be any different if his service were writing books instead of cutting hair?

The Origin of the Torrent =]

[Hydro98]

Was watching a Documentary on the origin of the english Bible.... William Tyndale to thwart the Pope, Smuggled in Pages of the bible he printed in Antwerp by hiding them inside other books coming into England, where the pages where assembled into packets or books.

Re:10 million users?

[v1]

Well we've already seen this principle applied to prohibition. Eventually majority rule won over the moral minority.

I expect at some point in the future we'll see this applied to prostitution as it has in Las Vegas, and eventually maybe even to drug use.

The problem with drug use isn't so much what it is, but what people will DO to feed their habit, it's easy to show it increases crime. Although this is also true of alcohol, it's to a much lesser extent. Smoking is at the other side of alcohol, something that has always been legal and is addictive, but mitigated by age.

Extortion however, isn't something the majority of people would participate in so I don't think that applies.

I think this all gets into a case of whether what you are doing, others simply don't WANT you to do, vs things that you do that can have a direct negative impact on them. If too many people started killing and robbing because they couldn't get their nicotine fix, we'd see tobacco in the same league as crack because now you're infringing on someone else's rights in an attempt to exercise your rights.

I'm all for any law that helps remove a reasonably large risk on my rights. But I'm all against any law that is being passed to help prevent someone from doing something simply because someone else doesn't like them doing it.

I view copyright law not as a method of preventing infringement on someone else's rights, but rather as a way to provide incentive to creativity. It has nothing to do with rights, its just a government-sponsored incentive. And it should be treated differently. In a completely free market there is no such thing as copyright, and there is no reward for creativity. If you think of something and I think of a better way to market it than you, I win. This stifles creativity, and so copyright tries to help insure me some incentive for my creativity. The entire idea of making it illegal is taking the wrong approach. Instead of providing me with incentive, you're going after others. Sort of the difference between negative reinforcement ("punishment") and positive reinforcement. ("reward") Ask any expert and they will tell you rewards are more effective and cheaper than punishments.

Re:But remember kids - piracy actually *helps* peo

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, you really do a lot of credit to the the right of free speech, applying it to stealing movies. I'll remember that argument next time I'm at the bookstore, and just steal whatever I want. If they catch me, I'll tell the judge "who are you to get in the way of my inherent right of free speech!"

Re:But remember kids - piracy actually *helps* peo

[Anonymous Coward]

So people like movies enough to watch them, even over the movies that they already own on DVD, that are showing freely on TV, or that can be freely downloaded over the Internet. They just don't like them enough to pay for them. How is this anything but a ridiculous rationalization?

If you think modern movies suck, don't watch them. Saying "modern movies suck so I just steal them" doesn't make any sense.

Re:But remember kids - piracy actually *helps* peo

[Dan541]

Oh, and you're right with 'stealing is easy'. If I could get (and pay for) TV shows I like in a legal way, I'd do that.. but I can't.. how is it my fault for picking the ONLY option available to me (other than not watching it?). There is nothing morally wrong with that,
The studio isnt losing a tangable object nor is their credit being stolen (unless you show it to someone and try to pass it as your own) and they arnt giving you the option to buy content they release for public viewing so I fail to see how it could be considered stealing.

Taking a tangable object is stealing because someone loses something.
Plagerism is stealing because someone missed out on credit and recognition for their work.
Hacking someones computer and taking files is stealing because the content wasnt intended for public release.

But downloading content thats eleased to the public? How could that ever be considered stealing? Only if your selling it because you could damage the studio's name by selling inferior product or if they are selling it themselfs your taking potential profit from them.

I personally am not prepared to spend $20-$30 on a TV season that has been released for free on tv I will download it and watch it from my computer since I wasnt going to pay for it and Im not using the Studios bandwith to download they have lost NOTHING in me obtaining my copy.

~Dan

how about this

[sixsixtysix]

first, this assumes that i can, for personal use, timeshift/capture/backup what comes through my cable service.

i subscribe to cable, so why can't i d/l the shows offered on a service that i am paying for, instead of recording them? what if i have lots of computers and capture cards that are setup to record everything and cut out the commercials automatically? what if i only have one that does it? while the former is not feasible, i doubt it is impossible. the content providers wouldn't get any extra money if i bought all that equipment would they? so, i don't see why a paying cable customer can't use tpb or anything else as as their own personal tivo. movies, however, are another thing altogether, until, of course, they are available via a premium channel or on-demand or anything else which does not increase my current cable subscription(i.e. ppv).

how about this: if something d/led before it came to my cable subscription is illegal, does it retroactively become legal once it does become available for me to capture? i would think so. either way i would not be paying for it(other than my subscription), the only difference is the time waited. so, if i had a time machine, i'd be all good? this will now be called the "Subscriber-Capture Paradox©".

Class dismissed.

Re:But remember kids - piracy actually *helps* peo

[svunt]

I very much doubt the amount of people browsing Slashdot from a Linux computer is more than a couple percent

O RLY? I've got $50 says you were drunk when you typed that one out.

Re:But remember kids - piracy actually *helps* peo

[Mr2001]

Wow, you really do a lot of credit to the the right of free speech, applying it to stealing movies. Actually, he's right... it's your interpretation of his words that's wrong. Free speech applies not to the act of downloading, but to the act of sharing.

Copyright is a restriction on speech: it says that if I buy a book, there are certain facts about it that I'm not allowed to share with you or anyone else. There's a sequence of words written in the book, which anyone can look at and verify for himself, but I'm not allowed to tell you what they are. If you called me up and said "Hey Mr2001, what's the first word in that book?", I might be able to tell you, but if you kept calling back and asking about each following word, at some point it would be illegal for me to answer a simple, factual question about an item that I own. If that isn't a free speech issue, then nothing is.

Hollywood isn't using it...

[patio11]

... because Hollywood doesn't have a massive content source to parasite off of. Pirate Bay parasites off both the content production and the 8 to 9 figure advertising budget that that content brings with it. (People forget that the most popular movies/songs on P2P networks are invariably the ones at the top of the regular charts, which got there because they are mega-promoted to get there!)

Re:Hollywood isn't using it...

[Anonymous Coward]

The point is, if they can't stop this happening maybe they should take a slice of the pie. Sure, in an ideal world (from their point of view) the content producers would have everything locked down so distribution was only via their controlled channels. However, why don't they make the initial money for movies from the cinema experience and the initial money for songs from concerts, and after that distribute them via P2P and make more money from advertising.

If people had a choice of downloading from a site like TPB or going to the official source, a few who wanted to take a stand would stick with TPB, the majority who just want free stuff would go to the official source. I'm sure they could make a lot more money with this model than with the physical/expensive downloadable media distribution while FIGHTING TEH PIRATEZ model they currently employ.

It's also a model which would scale well into the future - at the moment they're scared people will backup their media (under fair use) and never have to buy another copy of it - which gets more valid as more people become technically aware. With the model I describe, people wouldn't even bother backing up their media as it would be far less hassle to go back to the source when they need to replace it (and thus generate repeat visit advertising).

I'm not saying this is the most profitable model for these companies to use, what I am saying is I believe it would be reasonably profitable with little effort required on their part and far better than standing on the beach telling the tide not to come in.

Assumption of rights

[mulhall]

"...you don't have any inherent right to watch movies"

Quite true but there is similarly no inherent right to remuneration for the artists/industry either.

Because society has recently created a movie industry does not mean that the industry has any right to exist, or that the products should be paid for - it's entirely substantiated on the weak premise that "hey we can sell copies of this stuff!".

Simply put when you decide to base an industry on a product that is *childsplay* to duplicate for *free*, you either accept that a certain number of people *will* duplicate for free or you fuck off and do something less stupid.

Will the world end if you can't run a multi-billion dollar industry on selling DVDs?

I hate you guys, really I do.

Re:But remember kids - piracy actually *helps* peo

[alext]

You merely repeat the point of the parent without adding anything except confusion (how can I not like to pay for something that I own on DVD?!)

Re:10 million users?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, what he's saying is that since "we the people" grant the rights to these content producers to be able to protect their content in the first place, if sufficient of "we the people" no longer believe those content producers are using their rights responsibly in a way we agree with (embedded DRM to prevent format switching, lobbying to extend copyright periods indefinitely, demonising fair use, etc), perhaps it's time we had a dialogue about the existence of those rights and how they should apply in the future.

Al Gore can relax

[mahju]

10 million pirates should be enough to even start to reverse warming of the oceans

the more you tighten your grip..

[plasmacutter]

the more star systems will fall through your fingers.

once, there was napster, and it was good.

"big bad men come smash napster", and its many shards grew anew.

kazaa, morpheus, gnutella, audiogalaxy..

they came with their battering rams and laid siege to these.. and they splintered and adapted again.

bit torrent arose.. and suprnova became the p2p clearinghouse of the gods, until it was attacked and rent asunder..

so a dozen equally viable clones arose.. linked by further disconnected search engine sites, and at the same time they engineered decentralized tracking.

now it only takes a game of perpetual "pass the buck" of these tiny tens of KB sized torrent files among these non-tracking engine sites.

they may as well try to keep my 2 dog household free of loose hair....

  as for me.. I live with a little more lint around and love my dogs, because its the sane way to live : P

And you need to admit

[plasmacutter]

The entire business model you refer to people "stealing" from has no right to exist.

Damn those automobile drivers.. stealing the service of getting from point a to point b from railroad providers.

Damn those light bulb users, stealing the service of home lighting from the gas light providers.. and for that matter damn gas light users for stealing the service of home lighting from whale oil providers!

Every industry now has a god given right to exist, and failure to buy a buggy whip for your car as federally mandated will put you at risk of litigation and even prison time if caught.

Indirect crackdown from other governments

[pne]

One potentially large problem -- for the eyepatch and jolly roger set, anyway -- with The Pirate Bay's ubiquity is that it's now a single point of attack for the xxAAs. It doesn't really matter what Swedish law says, eventually the industry will get it shut down, whether that means buying new laws, planting child porn on the operators, or just plain having them kidnapped and flown to the US for "trial".

That reminds me of what I read about this Russian company that distributed DRM-free MP3 music (allofmp3.com? Not sure what the name was).

Apparently, the US government leaned on the Russian government and asked them to crack down on the company before Russia'd get much further in trade negotiations.

Now imagine the xxAA leaning on the US government which leans on Sweden's government, and see how long it takes till TPB goes down, legal situation or no.

Re:Indirect crackdown from other governments

[gnick]

That reminds me of what I read about this Russian company that distributed DRM-free MP3 music (allofmp3.com? Not sure what the name was).

Apparently, the US government leaned on the Russian government and asked them to crack down on the company before Russia'd get much further in trade negotiations. While that's true, it took very little time for allofmp3.com to change its name to mp3fiesta.com, which is up and running today under the same business model within the bounds Russian law (just like allofmp3.com was.) [Please forgive if I botched the link, but there's no way I'm verifying that from work.]

For better or worse, you can't stop the signal.

Re:10 million users?

[Anonymous Coward]

How can you be mostly half joking? Is that like 3/8 joking or some unimaginable fraction that I would have to go back to school to learn?

Re:But remember kids - piracy actually *helps* peo

[Chris Carollo]

A barber has costs too, but they're included in the price he charges. If he charges me $15 for a haircut, some of that goes into his pocket to compensate him for his time, and some of it goes to keeping the lights and heat on in his shop, buying equipment, etc. He doesn't need any special legal treatment to make his business model work. Why would it be any different if his service were writing books instead of cutting hair?

I half-think you're just trolling because it's blindingly obvious that this analogy doesn't apply to IP, but whatever, I'll humor you.

It would be different if his service were writing books/software/music because that would mean that after he's sold a haircut to the first person, everyone else in the world could just "click on" that instance of a haircut and poof their hair would be shorter too. IP development isn't a one-on-one service industry like being a barber is -- it's one-to-many, and in the era of digital replication without copyright, you're unable to aggregate payments from the many to you, so any endeavor that requires serious funding stands virtually no chance of being made.

Look, I think there are broken business models out there, and copyright is dumb in some circumstances, sure. It's stupid that I can't download a TV show that I forgot to record, when it was beamed, for free, through my house last night. Or was piped through a service that I pay for last night. The advertising model is largely broken, and was dependent on people's inability to skip advertisements, which is obviously no longer the case. These things need to be fixed.

But throwing out the concept of copyright as a whole is just ridiculous.

Re:But remember kids - piracy actually *helps* peo

[Mr2001]

I half-think you're just trolling because it's blindingly obvious that this analogy doesn't apply to IP, but whatever, I'll humor you. I think you're missing its application because you're stuck on the idea that "IP" is a product that's mass produced and sold in discrete units.

If you want to understand the model I'm proposing, you'll have to wrap your head around the idea that there is no product -- this model is concerned with the labor that the artist or author performs, which obviously is only performed once for each new work. That labor is the "hard part": any trained monkey can make copies, but only an actual artist can make the original. Therefore it makes sense for copies to be as cheap as possible, and to associate the real financial rewards with the scarce, skilled labor that produces the original.

It would be different if his service were writing books/software/music because that would mean that after he's sold a haircut to the first person, everyone else in the world could just "click on" that instance of a haircut and poof their hair would be shorter too. IP development isn't a one-on-one service industry like being a barber is -- it's one-to-many, and in the era of digital replication without copyright, you're unable to aggregate payments from the many to you, so any endeavor that requires serious funding stands virtually no chance of being made. Incorrect, sir! You are able to aggregate payments from the many to you. For an example of how that works, look at any political candidate's web site: thousands of people make small contributions that add up to millions of dollars (and they're not even getting anything in return!). Or look at sellaband.com, which does something similar to what I've proposed: many individuals contribute small amounts to help bands reach a financial goal.

Look, I think there are broken business models out there, and copyright is dumb in some circumstances, sure. It's stupid that I can't download a TV show that I forgot to record, when it was beamed, for free, through my house last night. Or was piped through a service that I pay for last night. The advertising model is largely broken, and was dependent on people's inability to skip advertisements, which is obviously no longer the case. These things need to be fixed.

But throwing out the concept of copyright as a whole is just ridiculous. Copyright is dumb in many more circumstances: look at old TV shows like WKRP in Cincinnati that have to be re-released with entirely new soundtracks, because the license for the old music has run out. Look at the works and adaptations that aren't being made because someone is sitting on the rights and refuses to license them. Look at works like the MST3K movie that are impossible to find because they've gone out of print and the rights holders refuse to authorize additional printings. Look at the legal battles that parody artists, samplers, and fanfic writers have to face, even when they come out victorious. Look at the constant stream of technical and legal restrictions that are being placed on hardware and software just to protect some company's ability to make a buck by selling us numbers. Look at the retroactive extensions that are passed like clockwork, ensuring that nothing will ever enter the public domain again.

At some point, throwing out copyright becomes the most sensible way to deal with the problems it causes, and I contend we've already passed that point.

By Neruos

[Anonymous Coward]

I can goto yahoo or google right now, and with 1 search, download illegal movies, illegal music, illegal software, any type of porn you can think of, including the illegal kind, AND torrents. google (they host the cached data) finds it, but doesn't host it.

I can do the exact same thing at piratebay. I suggest PB and other tracker sites, include non-data download results in there search, this will make them exactly like PB.

Lawyers have a nice way of wording things, but the actions are the same.