Slashdot Mirror
The Pirate Bay — "Just a Very Large Hobby"
praps writes "In a fascinating interview with two of the founders of The Pirate Bay entitled 'Are they baby-eating monsters or what?,' Swedish news site The Local discovers that far from being the radical Robin Hoods of the digital age, Peter Sunde and Fredrik Neij are actually 'polite, humorous and down-to-earth.' They may run one of the biggest sites in the world but 'it's just a hobby that's grown to be very, very large.' Financially, they are 'happy as long as it doesn't make a loss,' and both hold down regular IT day jobs. And apparently they spend a lot of time with a Bedouin in the Sinai desert."
Note that they say they are IT "consultants", they don't have a normal day 9-5 job.
Probably a bad translation. Over here, the work "konsult" can mean either "consultant" or "contractor".
Yet another in a long line of pro-piracy articles from Slashdot over the years. Nobody wants to talk about the artists getting ripped off because of that site. Everyone wants to joke about how "down to earth" its owners are. Everyone wants to scapegoat media companies to make them the bad guys in the narrative instead of the pirates ripping artists off. Everyone wants to forget that artists willingly sign their contracts.
Piracy is nothing more than freeloading. It's the total opposite of OSS in that you're not giving anything back to the community. Much worse, you're completely disregarding the human being who worked so hard to make a product to make a living off of. You genuinely don't give a shit, because it's free and it's easy to get. Software developers, musicians, filmmakers, authors, and so on--"Fuck their rights!"
"Sufferin' succotash."
I can attest that this has been the business model for a long time.
I spent many years working as a bartender in various clubs, etc.
There were many times that the record labels would send a rep into the bar with a pile of "pirated" singles (cassettes, ya I know getoffmylawn) that weren't released.
Sometimes they would even come in with a single that had two versions of the recording, because they wanted to see which mix the crowds liked better before banking on a big manufacturing run.
They were very clear about what they wanted- they wanted people to think those singles were somehow stolen, etc. before release, because it makes them more 'enticing' - if they actually put their name on the release people just say "huh, it's free so it must be crap".
The music industry has long supported the bootleg scene with one hand, while giving the finger (thumb to you Brits) with the other.