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 $$$

[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 $$$

[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 $$$

[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 $$$

[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 $$$

[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?

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?

[dotancohen]

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

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: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

[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).

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

[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

[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:1:10?!?

[darkhitman]

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

You must be new to Bittorrent.

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?

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.

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: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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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: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.

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: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: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.

Well duh

[ortzinator]

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

Re:10 million users?

[MMC Monster]

Pirates. Not morons.

So...

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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...