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MPAA Seeks $15 Million From The Pirate Bay
praps writes "Having tasted blood with its victory over TorrentSpy, the MPAA is now stepping up its attack on The Pirate Bay. The association is claiming damages of over $15 million, based on The Pirate Bay's distribution of four films and a TV series — Harry Potter, The Pink Panther, Syriana, Walk the Line and the first season of Prison Break. The Swedish court is unlikely to be as generous as the one in California, although the four Pirate Bay founders are already facing charges of being accessories to breaking copyright law."
TorrentSpy, in the meantime, has declined to pay the settlement awarded to the MPAA on Wednesday. In addition to appealing the decision, they have filed for bankruptcy.
TorrentSpy's big problem was the destruction of evidence.
http://www.google.com/search?q=torrentspy+destruction+of+evidence
Once they did that, the Judge essentially said "we can't have a real trial, you're guilty"
No legal precedent was set in the TorrentSpy case, because no legal analysis of any copyright claims happened.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Yeah right, who would want to Pay to watch those movies and that TV show...
I'm puzzled about whether the pirate bay guys are just attention seekers, or if they are actually willing to potentially screw up the rest of their lives for this cause.
They must have seen it coming and they've had a lot of time to back down.
Either way, big balls.
...could perhaps be if we all stopped consuming their products! No buying, no selling, no copying, no nothing. I'm pretty sure if people did that for a month or two, you would see these corps either disappear or back off right away.
Does it gain a lot of money from its site ? How many millions do they get from ads and such ? Can the court force them to publish the real numbers ? Or will its fortune stay secret ?
Or does it gain nothing at all (really no profit) from their activities ?
-- Rastignac was here.
Just to point out:
:) )
We are not "the consumer". We are nerds who participate in friendly discussion on an Internet News Site. That means that we are just a tiny, microscopic fraction of all consumers everywhere (or, in this case, in the US) and, as such, have no power over the rest of the consumers. Thus, preaching like "Vote with your wallets!" HERE will not accomplish anything - we already know this (though most of us probably don't care). The only thing we CAN do is raise awareness - and somehow, I don't see any big protest signs on the streets criticising MAFIAA for their actions.
To sum it up: Why don't we actually DO something about it, not stand idle and repeat the old phrases that every one of us heard a dozen times?
(Reply: The sun. IT BURNS USSSS!
"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams [...]."
TPB is much larger than TorrentSpy was and has still operating. Shouldn't MPAA seek more than they got from TorrentSpy. Something like... One... Hundred... BILLION DOLLARS!
Sending legal threats to the Pirate Bay, MPAA? Yeah, how's that working out for you?
UTF-8: There and Back Again
The MPAA does not differ between downloads from Sweden and from abroad, which I think is not going to fly well with the court. Unlike US courts that (apparently) doesn't care about things like national jurisdiction, Swedish courts do (at least I hope so).
/ The Arrow
"How lovely you are. So lovely in my straightjacket..." - Nny
It feels like trying to fight piracy through legal threats is kinda like trying to fight air by waving a fan around.
Sure you move it about a bit, but in the end you accomplished nothing.
Really, I don't give a damn either way. Pirate Bay is cocky and arrogant and makes money from other peoples work, and the movie industry is a cynical money grabbing cartel. I tolerate the Pirate bay because I like to get free stuff, and movie industry for the few decent films they actually do produce.
Now before you all go getting your panties in a bunch waffling on about Intellectual Property, multi million $ damages, legal technicalities blah, blah, blah... please remember one thing.
PyratByran is run by Swedes. Sweden is not part of the United States. Your silly American laws do not apply in Sweden.
I look forward to the usual barrel of laughs that will ensue.
I'm pretty sure that picketing outside some local MPAA/RIAA/whathaveyou office is going to have absolutely zero effect, unless you manage to get a few hundred people - I suppose you might get on the local/regional news.
Donating to the EFF might help in defending against frivolous lawsuits against individuals (amicable briefs and such), and that's laudable, but that's not quite what we need in this case either.
So, where do I go to find a party that will take on the MPAA/RIAA/the law* and say "It ends here. These sites do not host illegal material, they do not make it available, they merely tell you where to get it - and that in itself is not illegal*." ?
(* to note - that actually -is- illegal in some nations, so the actual law would have to be changed.. which is a long and difficult road especially when faced with an extremely wealthy lobby wanting such a law in place and kept in place )
That's a really idealized vision of the system.
Capitalism is a game in which buyers and sellers are oppenents.
Saying "the market decides" means that the power is all in the hands of the buyers: that's when you can say that "the market will make better products appear": better meaning better for the buyer. This is the ideology which justifies capitalism: the people are the buyers, and the law are (supposed to be) made for the people's sake.
But this is just one extreme in the balance of power between the two players; and just finding a good example for it is difficult. The best one is probably gas stations: you know exactly what you are buying, and you can easily check an other one, so the margins are (I guess) pretty low.
But in many cases, the balance weights heavily toward the seller. We all know the reasons: using people's mistakes (lottery, complicated billing), forced buying (bundling, etc), monopoly (or any alliance of sellers against buyers), control of the information, control of the law (lobbying).
All thoses are limitted or forbidden by the law, because they all go against the people's interest. Even marketing, when you think about it, is pretty absurd since it openly tries to make a deal seem better than it really is for buyer.
The only moral justification you can think of to allow marketing is that a company will only have the money to run ads if it is successful; this takes for granted that success is mostly the result of the company's real usefulness to the people.
In short, marketing is only justified if it does not change the relative success of companies!
(Note: you can't justify marketing just by freedom of speech, which is intended for cases when the law should stay neutral in the fight between two parties, as in a trial; there is no reason not to favor the people against the sellers. Except for international competitivity; it's often an easy excuse, but it's a valid point and a wider discussion).
Of course, the other cases (monopoly, bundling) are even harder to justify; but the worse is certainly lobbying. The simple idea that sellers could affect the law is utterly absurd, and lobbying is the best indicator of the power balance. In France -and I guess most countries- it's simply called corruption (which does not mean it doesn't happen).
And by the way: the internet has the potential to take a lot of power away from the sellers. Before Ebay, some companies made profit just by providing the organisation that buyers lacked.
Things can really change; that is, if we don't let them rewrite the laws too much with the power they have left.
1, 2, 3... Fight!
Don't take my posts literally; it's just code to control my botnet.
To sum it up: Why don't we actually DO something about it, not stand idle and repeat the old phrases that every one of us heard a dozen times? That quite neatly sums up the difference between a consumer and a citizen.
If by that you mean they sell advertising space because they are a popular indexing site, then how is that 'making money from other peoples work'?
It isn't, any more than Google providing a search service then selling advertising space is.
What strikes me is that the target market in the Pirate Bay's case is (according to the **AA spin) a bunch of freeloaders and pirates who won't pay for anything, so why would advertisers pay good money to access that market?
Obviously the users of the service must have some interest in purchasing whatever is advertised there - so there's a message for the **AA there somewhere :o).
One swallow does not a fellatrix make
The MPAA is detrimental to me. It is a harmful organization hell-bent on damaging American citizens. Now citizens of other countries too.
They're using their grammar skills there.
(...)
Even marketing, when you think about it, is pretty absurd since it openly tries to make a deal seem better than it really is for buyer. Funny that you should say both in the same post. Sure in a theoretical model where they have perfect information you don't need marketing, but it's very detached from reality. True advertisements are important to give people information, which is also why we have laws against false marketing. I guess you could say people should carry the cost by doing research, but the line between an enticement to research and advertising is slim and none, particular not when the customer doesn't know the product would fulfill a need he has.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
Yeah, I "seek" a couple of hours with a compliant Eva Mendez, I've probably got better odds than them.
-Styopa
I said marketing, that is, the art of making things look better than they are. You can advertise your product without using marketing techniques, the same way that you can ask for some laws (and say why) without lobbying. (I didn't add that distinction in my post because it was long enough already.)
For example, paying millions to a specialised firm to realise a TV spot falls in the marketing category. If there was a will to reduce marketing, you could forbid claims that are not proven, intrusive ads, put a cap on marketing budget (*), etc.
I'm not saying that it would be easy to forbid marketing; only that you can't justify it in the ideology of capitalism. Actually, I don't mind marketing that much (I don't listen to it), I was just showing that even marketing, which is regarded as completly normal, goes against the interest of the buyers. An other way of saying it is that, from a global point of view, marketing is counter-productive. I think it makes it the perfect example to prove that sellers are opponents, and not your friends.
As for the fact that ads are a source of information, come on. If there were no ads, and if we still felt a need for information on some products, normal medias would fit the gap nicely. When you decide to shop for a computer, do you watch ads on TV or do you look up some specialised websites/newspapers?
(*) We have that in France for elections.
Don't take my posts literally; it's just code to control my botnet.
Speaking as one who works in sales, businesses never stop at just raising awareness. Non-profit groups, charities, and public groups might, and maybe even some for-profit small-businesses, but not the run-of-the-mill for-profit businesses. Any chance they get to embellish the worth of their products, they take.
In short, what you suggest happens too rarely to really be considered a valid exception.
A car manufacturer doesn't just note how many airbags a car has, it alludes to being unsafe with fewer.
And yet somehow the **AA have lost absolute revenue from these "freeloaders and pirates who won't pay for anything."
Linux kernel for brain would be pretty cool though. :)
The Pirate Bay is a key link in a distribution network that focuses on "pirating" material that was never meant for open distribution. They make money by facilitating copyright infringement.
The company that spends millions making a movie for profit is not the same as somebody that just wants their work to be read by lots of people.
I can't get Windows XP to stay up more than a month without something going wrong to make it unusable. I feel sorry for him. Imagine going to sleep and then once a month not being able to wake up without a power cycle? What if his face just disappeared every couple of weeks? Damn, that'd be disorienting.
IIRC, the use of police forces in raids in Sweden is limited (if not by law, then by internal police policies) to crimes where the punishment involves imprisonment. The raid on the servers of TPB didn't qualify. In fact, some high government official had to intervene in the ordinary affairs of Swedish law enforcement for it to happen.
I don't think Berners-Lee had commercial usage in mind when he invented the Web - I may be wrong, but commercial considerations probably aren't top of the list at CERN.
OK, so the Pirate Bay facilitates copyright infringement, but they make their money by selling advertising, not by infringing copyright.
There's a market demand for free digitised content, and it was a failure of imagination on the part of the content providers not to realise that by digitising their content they would themselves facilitate the free exchange of such content.
They obviously still make millions off their product - the moot point is whether they would make much more if the freeloaders could not get free content.
Personally I doubt they would - your view may differ.
One swallow does not a fellatrix make
That stuff isn't marketing. That's just plain advertising.
Marketing is when they try to entice you into buying a car because you'll get "$5000 cash back!!!!!!!!!", when in reality you're being tricked into financing an extra $5k with the car company's financing arm at a high interest rate. Without marketing, there would be no "factory-to-dealer incentives", "cash back", etc.; there would simply be the price you pay for the car and that's it. Of course, this cash back crap mainly preys on the lower-classes and uneducated (which might be why it seems to be a tool mainly used by American car brands), as anyone who knows anything about financing would see through it quickly, but that's the job of marketing: to unfairly take advantage of a buyer's ignorance using dirty tricks. There's plenty of examples of marketing that take advantage of better-educated buyers too. CompUSA rebates which are never paid are another very good example of marketing.
"How does Pirate Bay make money from other peoples work?"
A more accurate way to put it is that TPB makes money by facilitating piracy. Similarly, Slashdot makes money by facilitating reading and discovering tech news.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.