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."
Peter Sunde and Fredrik Neij are actually 'polite, humorous and down-to-earth.'
And does this surprise anyone? I think most will find that most people that work in IT are this way. Sure there's the occasional elitist that likes to think their shit doesn't smell, but on the whole I'd say most people in IT are reasonable, easygoing people.
Hollywood's lawyers are just as committed to fantasy as their screenwriters...
Seriously, though, what would you expect the operators of something like the pirate bay to be like? IT guys with a strong(and probably slightly odd) sense of humor seem exactly like what one would expect. I suspect that they have a sheeple index far, far lower than average; but, contrary to depressingly popular belief, the desire to not be fucked around with doesn't inevitably lead to all sorts of outrageous depravity.
I've heard conflicting stories about those (real) pirates. Some say they are protecting their waters that were being over fished by foreigners, CNN of course just says that they are after it for the money.
Well, they attack transport ships, and when they get a microphone their demands are for money, not less fishing. So...
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
When people say it's not about the money, it's generally about the money. Sorry, TPB guys, but I don't believe you're not making a *phenomenal* amount of money from this thing. Note that they say they are IT "consultants", they don't have a normal day 9-5 job.
Which is great -- more power to them for making money -- but I don't buy this whole "we're just normal guys havin' a bit of fun" crap. They know that if they're seen as making tremendous profit from the work of others, they'll be seen a lot differently, socially and legally.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
While I hate the **AA almost as much as the average Slashdotter, I'm feeling a bit uneasy by reading this kind of news. That's one thing to criticize the whole IP scam that companies are trying to bring down to our throats, but it's another thing to sanctify torrent sites and treat their owners as if they were part of some sort of Jet-Set. What's next ? A new about how mininova's top uploader got laid ? How can we be taken seriously when fighting against the copyright nazis with news like this ? On the other hand, most of the torrent sites I use where discovered by realing Slashdot :)
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/avast
vs.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/vast
your pun is weak
Which illustrates my point. As soon as the barrier between lawful and unlawful behavior is no longer accepted as just, a determination of "fair game" for one act spreads to circumstantially related acts.
It goes from "I'll get you," to "and your little dog, too."
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I hope you're a troll!
"Once defying the law becomes seen as just and right, fine distinctions like between a corrupt church official and an innocent child witness go out the window."
Can you site any cases outside mythology to support your determination that, say, Ghandi's independence movement in India, or the US civil rights movement or the UK nuclear disarmament movement of the 80's or the Aussie Franklin river protesters, or greenpeace, or even PETA, or the East Timorese movment of the 90's or the Tuianemen square victims or indeed ANY OTHER group who believed that the law was wrong .... ... have ever failed to make the distinction in question?
I can't!
Govt agencies don't count; they acknowledge the justness of the law, but either have immunity or just break it anyway.
M. East suicide bombers probably don't have the logistical and technical resources to target the officials they'd like to. Nor, it seems, do predator drones.
No, highly principled disobedience is certainly possible at any time, and is not too much to expect from anyone who claims to have free will. I think the men you describe are typical bad guys, and decided that any witness is one too many, and you're trying to extrapolate something more absolute from the tale, like trying to pull a length of piano wire from spaghetti.
The lesson you claim is false and dangerous, and you are actively undermining people's understanding of humanity, compassion and morality.
Only on slashdot would a post like this be modded insightful.
Seeing as how the moderation system is unique to slashdot, you're probably right.
OK. Timothy McVeigh. He thought the government had overstepped its bounds. He did not scruple, when attacking it, from blowing up a day care center.
The history of copyrights furnish plenty of examples where people who find the copyright regime to be excessive have taken liberties that encroach upon what they otherwise would accept as reasonable rights of copyright holders. In fact this argument was first made by Lord Macaulay in his second address to Parliament on copyright extension.
A modern example would be this: if a copyright holder makes it difficult for you to space shift an electronic copyright of a work, then plenty of people find a way around this, and don't scruple to distribute the fruits of their labor. Apple, on the other hand, has had great success by making their DRM less onerous to users, making space shifting relatively convenient and making it easy to recover your purchases when you no longer have access to the authorized machine. They also charge what most people regard as fair prices.
As a result, Apple has a huge number of users who don't look on the restrictions Apple has put on their purchases as punitive. It really is not that difficult to get around Apple's DRM, but there has not been an explosion in trading of DRM stripped tracks you'd expect given the ubiquity of iPods.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I don't see why not. The Internet is still growing, but America's hegemony is in decline. Is the day going to come when the USA at the behest of its media cartels successfully enforces its law on every nation? If not, all that has to happen is that someone in a free country sets up a tracker index.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Usa is not "most countries".
Whoosh.
The law does not deserve our automatic respect. The law does not deserve our unquestioning obedience. The law does not issue from divinity, nor does it necessarily reflect the will of the people.
Yes, people are quite flagrantly breaking the law of the land as it is written. The question is; is the law just. In the case of copyright law, the answer is no. It is clear that copyrights laws, and the fines imposed under them, are injust. Faced with this, there is a very serious question as to whether that law should be observed or respected at all.
You are correct though. Lack of respect for some laws leads to lack of respect for the law in general, and that can and has lead to the breakdown of society. But what you have failed to realise is that a general lack of respect for the law is caused by unjust laws. It's true. People are smart enough to realise when they are being had. The truth is that unjust laws do more to undermine our legal system than any amount of teenagers downloading files off the internet.
May the Maths Be with you!
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.
If not that site, it would be another. I fail to see why we should demonize the owners.
Everyone wants to scapegoat media companies to make them the bad guys in the narrative instead of the pirates ripping artists off.
The media companies have been lobbying the government(s) to create more laws further expanding copyright and their control over their copyrights. I hate to break this to you, but copyright has nothing to do with helping artists. It never did. Copyright was intended as a means to promote creation of art, which would enter the public domain in a set number of years. Copyright was created to help society, not artists.
Yet now we have the communistic handwringers who believe that copyright is a god-given right to have a stranglehold on your creations, of any kind, and profit from it no matter what. They associate intellectual property with physical property, which is an incredibly bad generalization on both sides. Not only does it grant ownership of ideas (which should be a concerning prospect), but it lowers the value of real property. How long before someone "pirates" your car, and no one cares, because there are so many more file sharers that need brought to justice?
Everyone wants to forget that artists willingly sign their contracts.
Which is the problem. As above, copyright was NOT intended to allow companies to leverage their copyright capital to create artistic monopolies, which is essentially what we have now. Sure, you can create some indie movie - but no one will ever see it, because the market is controlled on all ends by the media cartels; and if you ever did become successful, I find it likely that you would be sued by the cartels for similarities to their copyrights (which is nearly impossible to avoid).
Piracy is nothing more than freeloading.
On a small scale, yes. On a massive scale, no. Piracy is restoring the balance that was destroyed by Disney and friends years ago. It is a counter to something which was brushed under the carpet for this long. People are just now realizing what is wrong with copyright, en masse, because of the internet and thus piracy. It is becoming clear to most people that artificial monopolies and intangible value are hurting society. Because of this, the media companies are fighting back; attempting to control the internet, pass more draconian copyright laws, etc. And they are winning, thanks to apathy and people like you.
Software developers, musicians, filmmakers, authors, and so on--"Fuck their rights!"
Exactly - fuck their "rights"! They do not have the right to do what they have been doing, and only have it because they have spent millions to mislead the public into thinking they do.
If some artists must starve, which is just about as likely as Iraq having attacked us with WMDs, for society to function, than so be it. The artists and cartels have shown they do not, as a group, care about those starving in third world countries. Some may speak out, but only for publicity: if any one them truly cared, they would live a middle-upper class life and give their profits to the real poor, so why should anyone care about them starving? In my opinion, the world has bigger problems than that, and the lives that copyright has destroyed far outweigh a few broke artists.
Change is coming, like it or not, and your fictional right to control every word you write will end. I will not shed a tear.
Great Intellect...
No no, if it were an ad for a tech job the requirements would be more like:
must be 20-something and have 30 years sexual experience.
Me lost me cookie at the disco.