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ISP Block on Pirate Bay Not Having Desired Effect
TechDirt is reporting that the recent block placed on The Pirate Bay torrent site is not only relatively ineffective, but actually driving more traffic to the site because of the attention. "The news from The Pirate Bay appears to confirm this suspicion. According to The Pirate Bay's new Court Blog, Danish traffic has not dropped since the implementation of the block. '...the number of visits from Denmark has increased by 12% thanks to IFPI,' the blog post reads. 'Our site http://thejesperbay.org is growing more because of the media attention than people actually coming to learn how to bypass the filter - our guess is that alot of the users on the site now run OpenDNS instead of the censoring DNS at Tele2.dk.' 'We also started tracking some stats before and after the block. There's no noticeable difference between the number of users from Tele2.dk before and after.'"
"The Net treats censorship as damage and routes around it."
-- John Gilmore
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
...what everyone thought, I suppose. I'm wondering: did any of the legislators consult a single tech guy? I don't agree with filtering, but this is just embarrassing.
non-english speaking cultural output is a lot smaller than english language output. not only because its large, but english language output tends to penetrate non-english speaking countries, not the other way around
therefore, when say, germans abandon the financial support for german cultural output, this should have a more devastating effect on financing german cultural output than when english language fans pirate music or movies
and since piracy is hugely prevalent in europe, i wonder what the epxerience has been for danish movie, czech music, etc.
incidentally, i think that the financial support for all culture via traditional means SHOULD collapse. it isn't viable anymore with the internet. new channels of financial support will emerge (concerts, advertising, etc.), but i think they will be permanently reduced funds. not that this is a big problem:
1. no more need for a middle man who presses lps and cds and tapes
2. the cost of production, sutdios, cameras, etc.: shrinking dramatically every day in the digital era. to make an album nowadays, all you need is a laptop
3. people are motivated to do art for the sake of art. if you were guaranteed to make $0 from making a song or a movie, people would still make songs and movies. it's called love of art, not love of money. money is an artificial injection into the creation of art
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
That is absolutely true but most folks in government (worldwide) don't seem to get that. It's as if the people who typically go after Internet issues haven't spent much time using it outside of checking the weather and ordering condoms (size extra small) from Amazon.
http://www.busyweather.com/
Seriously, does no one advise upper management that trying to block something on the internet just draws *more* attention to it? Happens over and over.
The meme is dead, long live the meme!
I certainly must have missed something. They are only doing a DNS level "block" of Pirate Bay? No shutting down of specific IP addresses that go to servers or at least some attempt at firewall (ie, Great Wall of China variant) filtering ?!?!?
./'ers can say they are doing something different - or I am going to spend alot of time chuckling over the brandy tonight....
I really hope some other
The tele2 tech guys I know are quite competent. It is just that it is not in their, not in their employers, interest to implement an effective filter. So they do the absolutely minimal amount of work they have to do, in order to comply with this "small claims" court order.
That's the difference between copyright infringement and stealing. If I steal something from you, you have to replace it somehow if you want to sell it to a paying customer. That's additional cost, and if I steal enough I can drive you into the red. If instead I copy your product, you still have the original and can sell it if you can find a buyer.
If, say, ten thousand people buy the product and that's enough to turn a profit, it doesn't matter if ten people pirate or if ten million people pirate - it's no cost to the producer. Even if the whole remainder of the earth's population pirated, it wouldn't affect the profit-loss sheet, as long as that hard core of buyers remains.
The remainder of your post I think is quite correct - that the middleman is going to become extinct in the future. But you seemed to imply that increasing the ratio of pirates to payers would produce losses. That's not true, as long as the absolute number of payers does not decrease. Reduce the payers to one tenth of their former number, that's a loss. Increase the pirates to ten times their former number, no difference at all.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
I think the advantage English has is that we, for the most part, don't care how badly you mangle it.
If you want to speak with an accent, go for it.
Messy writing? Spelling mistakes? No problem.
Confuse you're apostrophe's? Irritating, but still readable. (It took me about a minute to write that first sentence.)
26 characters and you're good to go. You can express any damn sentiment you want.
Compare that to, say, Cantonese, where you have to worry about intonation, angles, way more characters, &etc. Even french speakers get upset when you put the emphasis on the wrong syllables. But English, man, any semi-coherent motherfucker with a keyboard, pencil, pen, paper, dirt path, or whatever can be understood by any motherfucker unfortunate enough to read the gibberish.
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
-- John Gilmore "But what if censorship is in the router?"
-- Seth Finkelstein
Then we run into the situation where the average person's greed and selfishness will have eclipsed that of the large companies. So selfish they'll take and enjoy all they want without supporting the creators. You may think that by initially undermining the large RIAA affiliated corps it's a good thing but the audience pandered to by TPB is generally a sign of a growing audience: warez fiends who feel entitled to everything for free.
A few thousand dollars (even 20k) is a non-trivial investment for most people. It gets even harder because at the value you quote you're only considering equipment and initial costs. If you start selling and transferring files, that $15/mo host will probably cut you off quickly and you'll have to move to something more expensive. I imagine that you'd be pushing to have your download income outpace your bandwidth bills, never mind costs for the rest of your equipment.
And as you said, you didn't include your time. Or your residence, food, or anything else you need to live. So you'll probably have to be working a job and doing this in your free time, which carries its own set of pitfalls.
I'd wager that the cost of running a business like this (since that's what you're doing) would not be high, but your income would probably not be much higher. I would be less surprised to see them operate at a consistent loss, since you aren't really selling anything. Giving your product away and hoping for handouts is a sure fire way to lose money on something.
And that only considers costs based around the production of an album of music. Never mind other, more expensive media (animation, video games) that don't have any real-life counterparts.
The vast majority of people on the net probably have little knowledge of how to bypass the block, and would be helpless to do anything. It may be correct.
The component they seem to miss is the resolve of those people that know how to do it to not only adapt their system to access anything they want, but to then make the fix for it easily accessible to the masses. They are willing to write scripts, make interfaces, patches, websites, directions, etc so that anyone can do it.
Thats the component they miss, and it is not a technical lack of understanding, but a cultural one.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.