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."

Comments

Baby eating monsters unite

[Anonymous Coward]

Meanwhile I take piracy very seriously and treat my baby-eating as a hobby.

Re:Baby eating monsters unite

[that IT girl]

Mmmm... babies. The other white meat!

Re:Baby eating monsters unite

[Anonymous Coward]

That's racist! I prefer dark meat babies!

Re:Baby eating monsters unite

[DanielG42]

Only on slashdot would a post like this be modded insightful.

Re:Baby eating monsters unite

[Zwicky]

Insightful!?

OK you've convinced me. I've just been out to the children's playarea and picked one up. How do I prepare it, just drop it into a pot of boiling water or what? Grill? Barbacue?

There is one advantage I have noticed to this: I'll cook it last as it is currently chopping vegetables. A HUGE timesaver!

Re:Baby eating monsters unite

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

How do I prepare it, just drop it into a pot of boiling water or what? Grill? Barbacue?

Catching the infant by the ankles and swinging it brusquely around in tight circles usually does the trick.(And it's won't bruise the meat!) After this, it's best to oven roast at about 160 degrees centigrade until the flanks turn golden brown.(Some people use a rotating spit, but be careful to secure the limbs!). Remember to add a little oil if the child is lean.

The meat should be tender and moist when serving, and is quite filling. Serve with a light salad and cool rice. A fine Californian red is a perfect accompaniment both during and after this meal. For ambiance, the deeper sounds of the viola will aid digestion, or if they are not too shrill, the wails of the mother can be most uplifting.

Not radical Robin Hoods?

[autophile]

...far from being the radical Robin Hoods of the digital age, Peter Sunde and Fredrik Neij are actually 'polite, humorous and down-to-earth.'

What, did they expect them to be carrying RPGs, in small boats, off the coast of Somalia or something?

Re:Not radical Robin Hoods?

[pembo13]

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.

Re:Not radical Robin Hoods?

[Hatta]

There are plenty of RPGs on The Pirate Bay.

Re:Not radical Robin Hoods?

[Colonel Korn]

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...

Re:Not radical Robin Hoods?

[orielbean]

that's why they got the tanks - to protect the fish who have no thumbs to pull triggers with.

Re:Not radical Robin Hoods?

[genotype]

Right, and the Somalis who were dragging US troops behind their cars were just street cleaning. They're very misunderstood.

surprising?

[pak9rabid]

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.

Re:surprising?

[Kjella]

And does this surprise anyone? I think most will find that most people that work in IT are this way.

Most people are. The people on top (any top, IT or not) mostly aren't. I'm not sure what top they think TPB is on though, but it's certainly doing well at something.

Re:surprising?

[globaljustin]

And does this surprise anyone?

I could see how mainstream, non-geeks would get the idea that the guys who run a "piracy file sharing website" (as some in the MSM portray it) would look like that picture of Stallman from that /. story a few days ago...you know...stereotypical "anti-establishment" look...scraggly beard, Castro hat, dread locks or green-colored hair...

Geeks shouldn't be surprised at all...but people who are on the outside looking in only have what they've heard in news reports to guide their perception, and I can at least understand why they would expect some anarchist types to be being TPB

This just in:

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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.

Re:This just in:

[gstoddart]

but, contrary to depressingly popular belief, the desire to not be fucked around with doesn't inevitably lead to all sorts of outrageous depravity.

But, there will be depravity, right? :-P

Cheers

Re:missing semicolon

[xZgf6xHx2uhoAj9D]

An endash isn't even typographically acceptable there. It should be an emdash.

Oh like Robin Hood is going to TELL you

[elrous0]

It's called a secret identity for a reason. I bet if you check with their dry cleaner you'll find that they go through a LOT of tights.

Re:First?

[Milkyfresh]

I'm looking for another guy to bareback my gf (late 20s, white, cute to average) while I watch. If you're disease free, white, well hung, not too old, not too fat, etc, and live near Virginia Beach, let me know.

I can meet 2 of those 6 requirements. Why do these tech jobs always have a huge list of required skill sets?

Re:First?

[RulerOf]

If you're disease free, white, well hung, not too old, not too fat, etc, and live near Virginia Beach

Well, you've come to the right place for disease free and white.

Not sure how close our mothers' basements are to Virginia Beach though....

I was just reading

[hey!]

about the origins of the Robin Hood legend.

In the earliest documented version of the legend in anything like recognizable form, Robin and his Merry Men beat and rob a monk, then later on they decide to kill the monk and his page because they were afraid they would testify against them.

The whole system of sheriffs was a form of oppression forced on the population by their Norman overlords -- that much the later legends sort of get right. Monasticism was a byproduct of a Christian society in which the highest echelons made their living by murder, robbery and extortion, and in which sins could be expunged through gifts to the church. The history of medieval monasticism was a story of reformist zeal followed by rapid accumulation of wealth and corruption, recapitulated over and over again.

But notice: While it's obvious why robbing and killing sheriffs and monks might be considered admirable, apparently this doesn't stop at that. Killing the page was considered quite as merry and shrewd.

There's a lesson in this.

When the law becomes abusive, it's too much to expect that resistance to it take the form of highly principled disobedience. 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.

Re:I was just reading

[larry bagina]

He may have been an indentured servant, sex slave, or something to that effect. More prisoner than apprentice.

Re:I was just reading

[Creepy Crawler]

Well, you're going to get caught for the killing of that sheriff anyways, so why not?

Link to copyright: Well, you buy a game and it doesn't work. You instead go download a no-cd or crack.
Next time, you just go download the game from whoever has it and go get the patches. Why not? The no-cd and cracks are illegal.

Later on, after getting screwed with bad purchases one cant use and cant take back, one downloads everything they can. Movies, songs, applications, data.

The sites are easy to find.
BitTyrant - modded azureus for opportunistic sharing
WASTE - encrypted P2P private nets. high security for friends and contacts only
TOR - onion router for hiding ones tracks and researching things that are considered "unpalatable"
HTTrack - multi-platform friendly web mirroring
IRC - get a good client. Stay away from MIRC. Xircon, BitchX and others are usable as well as scriptable.

Using TOR or another onion router-like tech, one can use IRC and initiate file trading via those channels. One could highlight a drop of a GPG'ed package at any number of file dumps online. Or, they could send it via email split in X many pieces.

Let me know if there's anything that might be interesting to get. I could post links.

Re:I was just reading

[hey!]

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."

Re:I was just reading

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:I was just reading

[hey!]

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.

Re:I was just reading

[M8e]

Usa is not "most countries".

Re:I was just reading

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

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.

hobbies

[gEvil (beta)]

My hobbies include &ndash too!

Eh

[Reality Master 101]

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.

Re:Eh

[meringuoid]

Sorry, TPB guys, but I don't believe you're not making a *phenomenal* amount of money from this thing.

I can quite readily believe they're not making money doing it. Where's the funding going to come from? Advertising? Well, maybe, but (a) all advertisers know that TPB's audience consists by definition of people too cheap to pay for stuff, (b) most mainstream firms probably won't want to be seen as associated with such a notorious site, and (c) I bet the frequency of Adblock Plus among TPB users is pretty damn high.

I suppose they sell the odd bit of merchandise from the kopimi store, but that must only barely cover their costs.

Full disclosure: I don't actually have the faintest idea what kind of advertisements they show on TPB. Adblock Plus, y'see. So I suppose it could be argued that I'm pirating TPB itself :-)

Re:Eh

[Anonymous Coward]

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".

Re:Eh

[Hatta]

If the artists want their share of whatever profits these guys make from free downloads, the artists should create a free download site and steal their business. The fact is, most musicians simply aren't willing to compete in that arena. If they want to leave that money on the table, it's hard to blame TPB for taking it.

Re:Eh

[Grym]

These guys are leeches. Artificial middlemen not just creaming off the profit from others' labour, but removing every last penny and walking off with it.

You realize the irony of this statement, right? Taken out if its anti-TPB rant, it quite easily applies to the Recording industry distributors. In fact, it almost better applies to them because TPB's so-called profits and effect on music sales are pretty questionable. Whereas the coercive and immoral contracts of the music distributors are widely accepted facts.

What do these guys contribute other than crap about being regular guys indulging a hobby?

The Pirate Bay provides a very valuable service. It excels at displaying what an immoral farce copyright laws and globalization have become. It is a modern day speakeasy. The fact that they STILL (after years of press) get threatening DMCA requests, which do not and should not apply to them (being that they aren't subjects of the United States government) is very telling.

Blowback. If you clampdown too hard, people will resist. Hard enough, and they will revolt and maybe even seek revenge--justified or not. U.S. Copyright law has progressed far beyond its constitutional mandate. Article 1 section 8, clause 8 states the following: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." And yet, "limited time" has come to mean 75 years AFTER the death of the author. There have been serious arguments made in on the congressional floor to construe "limited times" as infinity minus one day. In what reasonable way is that "limited"? Furthermore, there are countless examples where modern copyright and patent laws serve only to obstruct progress. Rarely do stated arguments even involve the actual mandate of patents and copyrights anymore. We speak in terms of losses to artists and inventors despite the fact that this is rarely ever the actual case (most copyrights and patents are held by multinational corporations) and not the intended focus of these protections.

"Intellectual Property" laws have become tools of oppression and exploitation. It should not be surprising that people are resisting them, even if such resistance has ulterior self-serving motive.

-Grym

Re:Eh

[Rick Bentley]

I'm sorry, the songs have all been BROADCAST! They have been on the radio, you can record them and play them back at your leisure. The Internet just makes this easier on a massive scale.

The recording industry and musicians have NOT tried to keep their songs secret. Back in the day when the only way to listen to a song whenever you wanted to was to buy the LP, selling LP's made sense. Now selling/leasing/licensing songs doesn't make sense. I can transfer a song from here to Australia for no incremental cost in my broadband. No one had to burn a CD, ship something, carry inventory, or anything else for this to happen ... so why do they expect to make a margin on it?

If the musician comes to my town maybe I'll plunk down $120 for two tix to see him live, $50 for a t-shirt. If I really like him then maybe I'll buy a CD so I can get a quality lossless copy and album cover, or a poster for my room. But this stuff that has already been broadcast on the airwaves for free? I'm not paying for it.

Any swedes willing to translate?

[etnoy]

Peter Sunde alias brokep, recently wrote an excellent essay about how TPB has been treated by Swedish media. For those who (like me) can read Swedish, the link is provided here.

I don't have the energy to translate it right now, but if any other Swede would like to, please do. Until that, try the google translation

Very large?....

[Angostura]

... , or "avast"?

The Best Things in Life are Free...

[Anonymous Coward]

... but all good things (that can be attacked by the RIAA/MPAA will) come to an end.

As much as I love Pirate Bay, the central website model can't last.

Systems like Cubit seem promising. Hopefully in a years time we'll have moved to a more distributed model for torrent file search and delivery.

Re:The Best Things in Life are Free...

[meringuoid]

As much as I love Pirate Bay, the central website model can't last.

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.

Re:missing semicolon

[gstoddart]

An endash isn't even typographically acceptable there. It should be an emdash.

Wow, typography humor. That's something you don't see every day. =)

Next, an in depth discussion on kerning. ;-)

Cheers

News for pirates, torrents that matters ?

[Anonymous Coward]

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 :)

Re:News for pirates, torrents that matters ?

[Bragador]

You attach to much importance to appearances.

The Sinai Desert?

[Eli Gottlieb]

And their favorite film is Donnie Darko, about a human with powers over time?

Crap. We've got a couple of Fremen-in-training here. Arrest them before they can cut off the flow of spice!

I`m a "regular guy" too.

[ZDRuX]

I run a music torrent tracker. People are more than happy to pay me for the great service I provide which according to the users, is 100 times better than they commercial offering out there. And nobody is calling me names because I make a few bucks to pay for the server. I have record labels coming to me asking if I can "secretly" release their un-released tracks on my tracker and make it look like they've been pirated by a "warez" group so it looks authentic, because more people will download "unreleased" material and they`ll get the word out about their label. I have also been contacted by bigger labels asking me if I'd be nice enough to remove a specific song they've released because it`ll be a big money maker, and I do. None of these people including the labels and the artists want to go to court, and they're quite happy with having some of their stuff released on trackers, as long as the people downloading the tracks think otherwise. A lot of this stuff is NOT what it seems, and a lot of the times - labels and artists are on "our" side, but they can't say it and have to depend on my discretion. Many big-name artists have an account on my tracker, and have many gigs of downloads and uploads.. you have to remember, they are also "users" just like you and me. So this whole image of owners of the pirate bay being money-grabbing hooligans is absolutely out of whack, I`m a regular guy, you are - and so are they.

Re:I`m a "regular guy" too.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:First?

[genner]

(late 20s, white, cute to average)

Cute to average.....dang I'm too good looking for the job I guess.

Re:missing semicolon

[vertigoCiel]

Keming n. 1. The result of improper kerning.

Re:First?

[zobier]

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.