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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.
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!
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.
-- John Gilmore "But what if censorship is in the router?"
-- Seth Finkelstein
Indeed, creative works should be a drain on society. Manual labor during the day and creative works during the night. Assuming you're not too tired to do anyhting.
Don't know about you but I don't see films being done as concerts (as plays and films are entirely different mediums.) And of course, having reduced ability to do something is always good. Cutting back opportunity is always a benefit.
Ok. So cost of duplication is gone.
You love this example because it lets you convince yourself that all you need to do anything is a laptop, and you let yourself ignore ALL of the other costs that go into the production of an album. Never mind that human creativity reaches beyond music albums (and you need more than a laptop if you want to make something that sounds good. I hear microphones are pretty expensive still.)
Of course they are, but they need to eat too.
They would, but you'd see a lot fewer people making it. Go ahead and tell yourself that ALL the bad things would go away and all that would remain would be good things.
In a world driven by money and commerce, the injection of money into artistic works is NOT artifical. It's the natural product of the way the world works.
I'd rather have enforced copyright of reasonable length than be reduced to crap packed to the gills with advertising, or more American Idol type trash. Which is largely what you'd get if what you want were to happen.
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.