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Pirate Bay Announces Sale to Swedish Company For $7.8 Million
paulraps writes "The Pirate Bay is to be bought for $7.8 million by Global Gaming Factory X, a Swedish company specializing in internet café management software, the company has announced. As well as taking over the controversial brand, GGF has also bought Peerialism, a small IT company with roots at Sweden's Royal Institute of Technology, which has developed a new file sharing technology. The acquisitions mean that GGF will be at the heart of 'the international digital distribution market,' allowing it to introduce a new pay model for file sharing." Reader pyzondar adds "However, the press statement also states that the deal will only go through 'if GGF and its Board of Directors can use the asset in a legal and appropriate way.'"
hehe, sure sold 'em that bridge.
How we know is more important than what we know.
The technology is legal, some of the files shared may not be. That will depend on your local legal code.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
The tough sell out. As would I. That fine's gotta get paid somehow.
Very, very, very sad. So what do you think the next step will be? Turning TPB into a CDN? Using advertising revenue to pay for files shared? What are your thoughts?
On The Pirate Bay blog the TPB crew gives their side of the story.
Idealism is not dead: The profits from the sale will go into a foundation that is going to help with projects about freedom of speech, freedom of information and the openess of the nets. I hope everybody will help out in that and realize that this is the best option for all. Don't worry - be happy!
>> 'the international digital distribution market,' allowing it to introduce a new pay model for file sharing."
So, it'll be Napster 2. Big corp buys out great service for the tech alone and uses it to further corporate greed.
And here we were thinking the TPB founders were selfless Jedi helping file sharers and making the digital world a better place for all. They SOLD OUT!!!
TPB was nice while it lasted.
...for Napster
The file sharing community isn't the best known for paying for downloads (although studies have shown that they buy more music/films etc), but if this company starts charging for access to TPB or per download, they'd better make sure that they won't reveal any names or info about downloaders. Otherwise all of their appeal will have evaporated.
I dreamed of Freud: What does this mean?
The "owners" of the TPB haven't made a profit: they've asked for payment to a fund for "internet projects" instead. This will presumably be some interesting new political statement.
They also aren't actually the owners as such: TPB was sold in 2006 to a shell company specifically to avoid any legal problems for the founders.
The buyers will find that they've bought another Napster: i.e. nothing but a recognised name, with a value proposition that fades away like fairy gold once the free content goes away. TPB founders start up another interesting project, with boatloads of cash to fund it, and away we go again. If you ask me this is a pretty smart move: the establishment will effectively be funding a new political project around the freedom to share...
Enter Carl Lundstrom. Had the money to put up for badly needed servers. Has seen the rise of TPB and sees the $$$. Sinks in some cash for a few servers, sits back and waits then sells out for a whopping profit.
While it may have originally been done for the spirit that they CLAIMED they had in the trial, it certainly wasn't that in the last couple of years. The lying fuckers even went to court knowing that they were going to sell out not long after and stood there and perjured themselves saying it wasn't about the money. Yeah right.
NOBODY BELIEVES YOU
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
Was nice knowing you... now, let's all move to some other tracker of of the thousands out there, and let it die like others did .I guess this cat and mouse game is going to last a while.
Well, there goes the best of the great torrent sites. I'll bet dollars to donuts that this new company attempts to Napsterize the site, turning into a pathetic shell of its former self.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Just like supernova before em. Well that's the end of that..
Well not really. It will be called something else except they probably won't have a cool name.
Personally I don't really approve of piracy because it hurts Open Source alternatives and wouldn't trust anything downloaded from PB to not have trojans on it these days.
That said, I think as a political movement they are something else. Hopefully that money will be used to help the EU Pirate Party in future elections.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
1. Set up a file sharing website with a cool name
2. Build a domain and brand worth millions
3. Profit!
4. Move to another domain
5. ???
6. Profit again!
??? is probably "GOTO 1"
But they've just launched a restriction free video streaming site as well.
I'm unsure if that is related to the buy-out or not, but if it is, it really is a statement of intent to go forward with the things that TPB stood for.
What do you bet TPB puts up geographic walls in the near future? As in, "sorry, this product is not available in your country".
That seems to be the authorities response to the internet's "route around censorship" philosophy. And it appears to be fairly effective, thus far - as evidenced by many foreign posts on slashdot of users having problems with iTunes, Hulu, or whatever.
If they're going to charge for downloads, then it's really the end of it. People will just go elsewhere. Why should anyone pay for a service when they have the same for free elsewhere? That's the whole point that created a demand for Pirate Bay in the first place, and it's the same reasoning that is going to destroy it. There's no bland loyalty here. People aren't going to keep tracking torrent from Pirate Bay just because it's Pirate Bay. They're gonna go to where it's free. What a dumb idea... (but then again I know, they got sued, need the money, bla bla bla. but what about me?)
The following comment was made by krs on another site
To clarify a bit..
TPB has been owned by a company for the last years since the raid so nothing there will really change except the names of the owners. The talk about TPB are going to be a pay site is wrong, the CEO that said that does not know what he is talking about.
Now, the BIG change is that the tracker is going to be outsourced to a new formed company that wont know what they track, just that they connect peers, and the torrent listings will be handed by an other new company that will have torrents but they will not know either content or who is using the torrents. This setup will be practically impossible to take down or find anyone liable to sue.
The 3d party company services will have APIs, so you can on your blog or whatever have your own small torrent listings just as you now pull in twitter feeds. remember how the twitter design totally havoced the iranian attempts to block it as ppl just used another side that pulled in the feeds and read it there instead? well that goes for torrents and TPB to.
All in all, this is not the end of the world as some are seeing it but a rather interesting technical improvement.
And dont worry, not a dime will go to the media industries spectrial prize money what i know of but a really nice fund for doing cool stuff. /krs - co.founder of TPB and PB, not involved in TPB anymore and have no stake in any cash.
This feels a lot like history repeating itself - It's Napster all over again...
Music industry sues P2P service -> service loses -> service turns legit -> becomes irrelevant -> gets replaced by something better, and less centralized.
I'm curious what's going to come next, but I suspect this turn of events will spur on some interesting technical developments.
Paul Leader
Something will pop up in it's place. The idealists are misplaced. The rest will just find a new way, but with the lessons learned.
By the time they pay all the taxes, I doubt very seriously anyone will be walking away with anything.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
You are assuming that the appeals fails which I doubt it will once they get a judge who is halfway decent.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
What was the point of going through the court proceedings? Why, money, of course!
Also, as evidenced by Kazaa, Napster, Suprnova, and I'm sure many others that I didn't personally use, taking a free piracy site (sure, sure, pirate bay has a few legal uses, but lets be honest here) and turning it into an "innovative pay model for sharing" just doesn't work. You're fan base does -not- transfer. Apples fan base, yeah, they buy things, iTunes can work. Jimmy down the street downloading bootlegs? Not buying. GGF just wasted 60 million kroner.
"A lot of people are worried. We're not and you shouldn't be either!":
http://thepiratebay.org/blog
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
So is TPB going the way of the Napster? Buy them out and try to turn them into some legitimate website?
What's to happen regarding the IPREDator VPN service?
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Wow, having your political party's idealistic figurehead be bought by an internet cafe if kind of a kick in the balls, huh? Does GGF now get a seat in their parliament?
What a waste of money. You can download TPB from bittorrent or any p2p share for free!
stuff |
Actually - isn't the going tax rate in Sweden 50%? Looks like you're dead on to me.
The Swedish news site Realtid.se is now running an article that make this sound less than promising, even if you wasn't bothered by the concept presented in this (Slashdot) article.
Please excuse the Google Translate machine translation, but it should still be readable:
http://translate.google.se/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=sv&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Frealtid.se%2FArticlePages%2F200906%2F30%2F20090630101501_Realtid980%2F20090630101501_Realtid980.dbp.asp&sl=sv&tl=en&history_state0=
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Actually - isn't the going tax rate in Sweden 50%? Looks like you're dead on to me.
I'd take $500K. It's not necessarily F.U. money, but it's buy-a-house money. Anyway, if I understand correctly, Swedish capital gains tax for property is around 30%. It looks like business sales are more like 28% (source). More like $756K (after penalties, etc) - still nothing to scoff at.
Anyway, without really understanding their operations and investments; I'd say that other than the possible prison sentence, those guys made out pretty well.
-Turkey
I can't believe you're all so god damn naive.
These are not honest people.
TPB was originally run by their swedish company. When they got into legal trouble, they moved the company and all assets abroad to avoid Swedish law. With the sale of TPB, the money goes to this company. The guys now have both fame and fortune, and can funnel money into whatever they feel like doing through this "fund for internet-related projects, including political activism" operated by said company without having to worry about paying the courts or any swedish taxes.
But it already did. Though, how can they be convicted if they didn't even own the company?
It's not commercially viable right now, from what they've said about TPB being a non-profit project. If a company bought it, then almost by definition, they are planning to change it.
except for, you know, the jail time.
Personally I don't really approve of piracy because it hurts Open Source alternatives and wouldn't trust anything downloaded from PB to not have trojans on it these days.
See what this phrase did to us? Free Software was about freedom, giving the users choice, and all those warm and fuzzies. Open Source can be hurt if the users decide what they want.
P.S. I've seen more trojans from Sony and retail games.
TPB, as a community is atually probably quite safe. Between DLing from trusted people, and the comments that warn quickly if it's a scam.
And I am willing to bet sites the TPB are a far bigger concern to the mdia companies that software. Of course my view is probably skewed as I run Linux, so have no interest in bootleg software.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Ya, just like Napster and Kazaa. Cash out on a good name, company turns it to trash.
Where can I download this?
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
Personally I don't really approve of piracy because it hurts Open Source alternatives and wouldn't trust anything downloaded from PB to not have trojans on it these days.
AVIs of Lost episodes are trojan-free.
In other words, profitable? HOW?
Ponder this for a moment: What did you buy?
1) A database, consisting of torrents. The "illegal" content can't be used. The legal content can be gotten anywhere. Nobody will pay for this.
2) A brand name. People go to TBP to look up torrents. If they can't do that for free, they will go elsewhere. Nobody will pay for this either.
3) Erh... beats me.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
From the press release:
Completion of the acquisitions are primarily subject to GGF obtaining financing for the acquisition
So to summarize: they're buying a company with unknown business model and unknown future legal status, for money they don't have.
I don't see that working out. Usually you at least make sure the seller has something to sell, and the buyer has the ability to buy, before you announce a sale. This is just fantasy so far.
I think it survived because it latched onto the kind of music purchasing model that attracted people to file sharing in the first place. People don't buy music at retail any more because it's essentially valueless. The $10 CD nothing to produce, the music in the store is constantly on the airwaves anyway, and the support it gives the artist is close to zero. Music had become a disposable item, so all-you-can-eat music for the cost of an internet connection was an incredibly attractive proposition, and that's what file sharing provided. And that's what the Napster service had the sense to provide when it went legal.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
A halfway decent judge for a copyright trial? Can you take a picture, I heard the National Inquirer pays well for such things.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Hmm, I haven't been able to connect to TPB for the past hour. The timing seems a tad suspicious.
See what this phrase did to us? Free Software was about freedom, giving the users choice, and all those warm and fuzzies. Open Source can be hurt if the users decide what they want.
P.S. I've seen more trojans from Sony and retail games.
You are assuming the people were accustomed to, or at least had heard of the open source alternatives before turning to piracy. Usually that isn't the case. I don't think people accustomed to open source software turn to pirating their commercial alternatives that often.
If it has a Trojan on it, it's safe, right? That's what they taught me in health class.
And that is bad why? The pirate bay may have swung the pendulum too far against copyright/IP law but that is a natural and just reaction to immoral laws. Most people would have respect for IP laws if they weren't so severely imbalanced. Yes some would still break the law but its hard to argue that a 5-7 year term for copyrights/IP with severely limited options to extend is immoral. While it's easy to call the current system of lifetime plus 20-70 years as immoral. When you might die of old age before the creative works made during your *grandparents childhood* is public domain, its easy to dismiss stupid laws like that.
The Goal: A long simple life filled with many complex toys.
The piratebay is down. Given the news, I guess that is not a surprise at all. The new owners, deleting the web page. I think that the company that did buy The Piratebay was a shell company for one the RIAA/MPAA members.
ping -c 4 thepiratebay.org
PING thepiratebay.org (192.121.86.15) 56(84) bytes of data.
--- thepiratebay.org ping statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 0 received, 100% packet loss, time 3009ms
Did you read GP's post? Then the Pirate Bay guys would have a cool $8 million to start up a new company with the intention of pirating media, where before they had no money. Why would the MAFIAA want that?
Just like Suprnova, and ShareReactor, and Mininova, and Pizzatorrent, and a zillion others. That's the end of that, and the beginning of another.
See what this phrase did to us? Free Software was about freedom, giving the users choice, and all those warm and fuzzies. Open Source can be hurt if the users decide what they want.
P.S. I've seen more trojans from Sony and retail games.
You are assuming the people were accustomed to, or at least had heard of the open source alternatives before turning to piracy. Usually that isn't the case. I don't think people accustomed to open source software turn to pirating their commercial alternatives that often.
Of course they do, because many open source alternatives are not up to par to commercial software. Gimp vs Adobe? OpenOffice vs. MS Office? Ardour vs. Cubase/FL Studio/Protools?
Open source has some amazing stuff. Apache, Cyrus, Gnome + Compiz, Pidgin, and I could go on and on, but it's naive to think that every open source alternative to a commercial product is a good one, just because it's open source.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
If they are proven guilty and even then they walk away with a lot of money.
I don't know about you, but I'd trade 1 year of prison for 1M Euro. Especially if you have a good prison (like we have in Slovenia) where you can learn something while you wait.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
..TPB is going the way of Napster?
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
The courts could have fought for another decade without denting TPB, but this news is a eulogy.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Ixnay onay ethay enetusay!
-
You are assuming the people were accustomed to, or at least had heard of the open source alternatives before turning to piracy.
No, I just assume that if they search for "Photoshop", "Gimp" is not a search result by any reasonable standard.
I don't think people accustomed to open source software turn to pirating their commercial alternatives that often.
Wrong again. Case in point: me, virtualbox and vmware. Many of us who know about Open Source, also know which tool is the best for the task. License is secondary, especially if you don't live in the US.
Hopefully that money will be used to help the EU Pirate Party in future elections.
I was hoping that too, but according to this interview with TPB founder Peter Sunde the money will go to a foundation which can only spend the money on new, unfunded projects, one of which will probably be a kind of distributed tracker.
This reddit comment has more info, too.
Peter Sunde gave two presentations last week here in Brazil. On the first one he talked about the history of TPB, and on the second one he talked about TPB services. In the end of one of his presentations (I don't remember witch one) he was asked, if someone offer to buy TPB for some money, would they sell it? His answer was that they would do what's the best to TPB (He said some more things also).
I don't know why but I felt he was hiding something.
Indeed, the party is over. The site has been defeated.
This is a massive victory for the *AA organisations. There is little doubt that the site is being sold to pay off the colossal fines incurred as a result of the Pirate bay trial.
Fortunately, you are utterly, utterly wrong about this. The TPB has been set up as a legal entity in such a way that it's founders can't access that money (they were sued personally), so they won't be able (or willing) to pay the fine with it. The company buying it is essentially investing in a foundation that will develop new products.
The only possible way for P2P to succeed, and with it a free internet, is for the system to become totally and utterly decentralised. Nothing else will suffice. There can be no one site, no one client, no one port, no one encryption method that can remain to scuttle the entire project. It must be, like TCP or SMTP, an ideal which no one controls yet everyone can use. It must not be tied to a single person, or webhost, or legal system. If it is, then the weakest link in the chain will shatter under the weight it will be forced to bear.
Oddly enough, this is exactly the kind of thing they're planning to develop.
bankrolled this on the back end? Seems like a pretty well played out end game - PB crew gets rolled in court by a judge working for the record companies, then this miraculous offer comes out that will cover their legal expenses and give them a little extra something-something for themselves, plus a chance to safe face with that little charity speech, and everyone ends up happy minus all their disposable fan base. I guess the record companies realized that once someone gets elected into politics they get a price tag :) Well played indeed.
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
This phrase doesn't even make much sense.
What OS have to do with pirated software?
factor 966971: 966971
the TPB logo :)
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
We obviously have a different idea of honesty. They have used the legal system to protect what is essentially a political project, and disconnected themselves from it financially so it *cannot* be stopped, no matter what happens to them. They are quite open about it. They are not allowed to make any money from TPB and won't benefit personally from this sale.
No, I don't think they're that naive.
Having thought a little bit about it, what I think the plan is, is this: The shares of GGF (a micro-cap stock) went up a lot on the press release. I think that's the point, and where the money in all this is.
This is a pump and dump scam.
They're betting on not enough people really reading the press release. Wannabe daytraders put money into the penny stock of GGF and are taken to the cleaners. Where the money goes - well, I don't know. To new nebulous "internet projects", somewhere? Maybe.
GGF is under no obligation to complete the deal. All they have to do is claim "no funding" and the deal is off - but not after the owners of GGF stock has been able to sell it at a much higher price than they would've been able to without this press release.
As I said at the start - this is what I think. I have no proof of anything of the above, but I'm just stating what I think this smells like.
TPB might change owner
Yes, it's true.
News reached the press today in Sweden - The Pirate Bay might get aquired by Global Gaming Factory X AB.
A lot of people are worried. We're not and you shouldn't be either!
TPB is being sold for a great bit underneath it's value if the money would be the interesting part. It's not. The interesting thing is that the right people with the right attitude and possibilities keep running the site. As all of you know, there's not been much news on the site for the past two-three years. It's the same site essentially. On the internets, stuff dies if it doesn't evolve. We don't want that to happen. We've been working on this project for many years. It's time to invite more people into the project, in a way that is secure and safe for everybody. We need that, or the site will die. And letting TPB die is the last thing that is allowed to happen! If the new owners will screw around with the site, nobody will keep using it. That's the biggest insurance one can have that the site will be run in the way that we all want to. And - you can now not only share files but shares with people. Everybody can indeed be the owner of The Pirate Bay now. That's awesome and will take the heat of us. The old crew is still around in different ways. We will also not stop being active in the politics of the internets - quite the opposite. Now we're fueling up for going into the next gear. TPB will have economical muscles to let people evolve it. It will team up with great technicians to evolve the protocols. And we, the people interested in more than just technology, will have the time to focus on that. It's win-win-win. The profits from the sale will go into a foundation that is going to help with projects about freedom of speech, freedom of information and the openess of the nets. I hope everybody will help out in that and realize that this is the best option for all. Don't worry - be happy!
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
Swedish free-lance journalist and IT entrepreneur Thomas WennstrÃm made an interview with TPB spokesperson Peter Sunde earlier today: http://www.whatsnext.se/2009/06/30/podcast-with-peter-sunde-on-the-ggfs-accquisition-of-the-pirate-bay/
I wouldn't be surprised if that was what was behind this: a media-cartel backed buyout and takedown. Bear in mind that it's not just TPB that'll go away - an awful lot of other trackers just index TPB traffic. Bring on the minibay.org.
and wouldn't trust anything downloaded from PB to not have trojans on it these days.
Sadly, I feel like I can't trust products I buy from the stores because I KNOW that they have DRM 'drivers' that crash my system randomly because of conflicts with my anti-virus programs. I now have 2 systems- one that I allow to get virused, DRM etc until it gets to bad and I have to reformat/reinstall the OS and the system I use for business, taxes, programming, etc, etc.
$7.8 million for one of the most popular websites in the world??? Why doesnt the RIAA/MPAA just offer them $10million and shut it down? Even if they killed all the torrents and sold T-Shirts they'd make their money back...
I wouldn't hold Pidgin up to the same pedestal as Apache... I use XFCE as my preferred desktop, and went as far as to install parts of KDE so that I could use Kopete over Pidgin. On a Netbook... Pidgin sucks *that* much. Seriously. Try using some of the alternatives, and you'll see how badly designed its interface is, and how limited its features really are.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
The owners and controllers of TPB got a massive financial judgment against them. After a plaintiff gets a judgment, the next thing that he or she wants to do is enforce that judgment. If the losers won't pay voluntarily, the winners get to use judicial process to take the losers' stuff. The "TPB entity" is such stuff.
The pirates sold their business because it was doomed anyway.
If they're hiding assets from their creditors, they are looking at another round of trouble with the trial judge.
http://suprbay.org/showthread.php?t=57490
"(I) have this unfortunate condition that causes me not to believe a single thing any politician says when a mic's on.
there's a surprising amount of content on TPB
There is nothing "on" TPB, and that fact is a major part of their defense. They only link to content hosted by others, they don't host anything themselves. Like an ISP, they disclaim responsibility for the legality of the content. They are not in the business of being IP cops.
impossible to say what percentage of files on The Pirate Bay is illegal
No, that's easy to say: 0.
Please don't make this mistake. We can hardly expect the legal world to get this right if you and the mods slip up on this important distinction. That Napster did host content is what the copyright maximalists used to take them down. This time, lacking that argument, the copyright maximalists seemed to have gotten their way (so far) by co-opting the judges. They don't have any legal basis. Judges are proving too easy to co-opt by playing on fears over change and disruptive technology. The judge for Napster really lost it when she exclaimed that they "created a monster". All she really did was show the copyright maximalists that the legal world was full of plums ripe for the picking.
is a No CD patch/crack legal?
I wish I could say that of course that's legal. But the DMCA stupidly criminalized much of that. So, best I can suggest is that a crack is a tool that has many legitimate purposes as well as the obvious illegitimate purposes.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
His name is Brokep over twitter here is what was said,
@brokep I think people are seeing the fact you lost the case and pretty much sold up afterwards as a bad thing.The money is talking here.
brokep@gully666uk so either there is 60M in a fund, or there is no site and no money. What's the preferred deal? We have no energy left.
@brokep You have done well to keep it up, but people mostly have reacted badly.Its pretty similar to napster and we know how that went.
brokep@gully666uk Yes, we're trying to avoid just that. It's just a site, we need to take the icon status away so lots of sites can replace that.
@brokep I applaud your stance , whether it succeeds only time will tell.You created the icon by taking on the riaa sadly they are winning.
brokep@gully666uk They're not winning. A cannon is now being loaded with money.
@brokep Let us both hope the cannon isn't firing blanks.Good Luck with your future endevors.
brokep@gully666uk Thanks. I'll need it. People hate me now for wanting to pause the 6 year free work we've been doing. Feels unfair.
gully666uk@brokep Everybody deserves to be paid for working.It's a fine line between love and hate.It's the way of the web sadly people expect allot
brokep@gully666uk I'm glad people have high expectations. But we're not that many people. And we've been fighting for a long time. We need help.
@brokep I hope you now can get the help you need.Me i am only one person with very little so from that point of view i understand why.
I think he makes some good points myself.
In the end, it just turns out to be a bunch of people scamming others so they get rich.
Not true? Judging from TFA, the amount they get is the amount of the fine they have to pay. (obviously, that's probably not the only numbers of the equation)
Animoog.org
I wouldn't hold Pidgin up to the same pedestal as Apache... I use XFCE as my preferred desktop, and went as far as to install parts of KDE so that I could use Kopete over Pidgin. On a Netbook... Pidgin sucks *that* much. Seriously. Try using some of the alternatives, and you'll see how badly designed its interface is, and how limited its features really are.
how many features do you need? I think that's WHY I like Pidgin. It has nothing that I personally would consider fluff.
But it's always fun to try something new so what alternatives would you recommend?
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
...I don't have to go back to mininova :P
Ave Molech Setting
All they had to do was bribe TPB for a small sum to shut down, but they instead paid lawyers even more (probably).
"At this point, the Bay founders probably realise just how much the entire justice system was railed against them. With the media industries monetary, political and personal connections being able to exert such heavy influence on the Swedish justice system, they never had a ghost of a chance and now they know it." The fact that they, and the people using their site, were breaking the law probably had nothing to do with it, right?
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 30, @08:40AM wrote:
I can't believe you're all so god damn naive.
These are not honest people.
Whereas, anyone can see that your name is your bond.
Of course they do, because many open source alternatives are not up to par to commercial software. Gimp vs Adobe? OpenOffice vs. MS Office? Ardour vs. Cubase/FL Studio/Protools?
An illegal copy of MS Word, instead of Abiword or OpenOffice? You're kidding, right? It's a normal word processor, it doesn't julienne fries. They're all the same. As for the rest, they get more and more obscure. Gimp does not offer everything that Photoshop does, but how many people require what Gimp doesn't have? Maybe they think they do, but the idea that hordes of people require Windows to do their professional photography and autocad'ing is overstating things, to say the least.
Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others. -Groucho Marx
I for one welcome our new(read: old) overlord: pretty pretty money! Aren't you a big fat wad of pretty money?
Just like supernova before em. Well that's the end of that..
Well not really. It will be called something else except they probably won't have a cool name.
Personally I don't really approve of piracy because it hurts Open Source alternatives and wouldn't trust anything downloaded from PB to not have trojans on it these days.
Have you ever actually downloaded something from thepiratebay?
Agreed. Nobody cares about these "legitimate services", because they are always expensive, locked-down, and have too many conditions and hoops to jump through.
I understand that the guys are fighting an uphill battle in the courts, so they probably had no choice but to do this so they could pay their legal fees and judgments and hopefully walk away with a few bucks to start a new life and go on to something new.
However, I have a major problem with how this story always plays out. The same way it played out with Napster and Suprnova and other services. It's a major hypocrisy on all sides. Corporations which usually are completely draconian and absurd essentially buy the structure and eyeballs of a service formerly facilitating "questionable" delivery of content. On the other side, proponents of sharing and haters of extreme intellectual property laws, selling out to the corporations they've been fighting the whole time.
The only loser in these things is always the audience.
Think about this business plan. How is it even legally? It's certainly not ethical, no matter what side of the fence you're on (and I'm a huge TPB fan).
Site (such as Napster, etc) gains enormous fame and attention and audience providing what is supposedly a very questionable service using mostly content that they do not own and is not free to give away.
Once they have enough attention and eyeballs, corporations come a knocking.
Corporations make the founders of the service extremely wealth and then pervert the service by turning it into something "legit", thereby losing 98% of the audience (seriously, who has ever used Napster once they went "legit"?).
This seems similar to the following proposed business plan:
I want to start a movie company, but I don't have any money or infrastructure. Instead, I decide to start stealing movie reels from Warner Brothers down the street. Then I promote and sell those movies as if they were mine. After a few years, I've stolen enough of someone else's product and sold it as my own that I've made enough money to finally go legit.
Now, using ill-gotten finances from someone else's products, I become a fully legitimate movie producing powerhouse. And everyone in the business and industry regard me as legitimate.
How can these even be allowed to happen? Isn't there someone regulating this stuff? How can a legitimate company have beginnings doing questionable things and not pay for it? It's like the Mafia suddenly deciding "Hey, we're tired of laundering money and killing people, so we're going to start a string of burger franchises". And everyone just saying "okay, cool".
It's naive to think that every open source alternative to a commercial product is a good one, just because it's open source.
No, but if people couldn't easily pirate, say MS Office, then they might look harder at Open Source alternatives, which would then get more users, and possibly more talented contributors to improve the quality of the product.
What in the world are you doing where you "allow" your system to get infected? My primary computer at home does everything for me, it's my entertainment, communication, development machine, etc. I don't run a software firewall or virus scanner. I don't bother to install Windows updates. I have IIS and MySQL running on it 24/7. Power outages are the only reason I shut it down. I have a Linksys NAT router on the network. We even have a static IP. This particular computer has never gotten infected in the two years or so I've had it. The computer before this one got infected a single time when my roommate used IE to browse for porn.
So, just what exactly are you doing where your computer eventually becomes unusable because of the crapware you've "allowed" on it?
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Just for humor's sake, look what turns up on a search for "Photoshop": http://www.google.com/search?q=Photoshop
You can learn a few things in the prisons here in America, too. I'm just not certain that you really want that type of education!
For conscience is the wound, and there's naught to staunch it
I guess you get whatever your government wants you to get.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Easy, if someone wants crop/scale/adjust some images, then they want some sort of image manipulation program. Say 3 options they run across are:
Photoshop clearly has more features, but the average person also won't use most of them and would not pay $700 for it. Obviously it would make sense to use GIMP or Paint.NET. Now, when piracy comes into the equation, the comparison becomes:
Paint.NET and GIMP kind of lose their appeal, don't they? Piracy hurts both free and proprietary software.
GGF obviously just wants TBP for it's user base. They're buying into all the site hits. I wonder how many of us will stop using the site if they do acquire it...
So now can we get off this delusion that the owners of the pirate bay are heroes somehow out to protect our rights in the face of evil corporations?
The production costs for WALL-E: $180 million.
Double that for marketing and distribution.
The number of studios producing CGI feature animation at this level: 1.
The Amazon price for the three-disk Blu-Ray edition of WALL-E with BD Live and digital download copy: $24.99 Wall-E
That is - at least theoretically - 150 GB of content for about one half the cost of one month of broadband cable.
Pixar's return from the geek who links to Pirate Bay: $0
http://www.gadgetking.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/ThePirateBay2.jpg
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
June 2009 - to be remembered as the worst month ever: First Ed McMahon dies, then Farrah Fawcett, which lead into Micheal Jackson and BILLY MAYS' death.. Now just before the end of the month we add The Pirate Bay to the list and you all have now witnessed the worst June in history. I for one am not liking this. You shouldn't either.
PPN
Long live the Pirate Bay. :((
How can the ex-owners of the Pirate Bay not know their history? They will become another Napster. A "industry-platform", with ads en-masse, filters for "illegal" content, an about page that allows you to win bullshit bingo in under one minute (= full with words like "leverage", etc), and so on. Nobody will use them anymore. And the next generation will pop up.
Oh well, they got my last vote, but after that sellout, they will not get the next one.
This is the best indicator, that they too will become just another party, that follows the money, and the money alone, just as the green party did.
Interestingly, they just announced that they will join the green party's fraction in the EU "parliament".
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Good god man! Kopete has the worst user interface known to man. That may make it fit in well with the rest of the KDE desktop, but to load kde libs to use it on a netbook is insanity.
Point taken.
factor 966971: 966971
Stop using that unword! It is proof that you bought in to the **AA bullshit propaganda.
Piracy = stealing shit on the high seas, sinking ships and murdering people.
It is intended by the **AA, to make you associate those actions with file sharing, exactly because it is such a horribly wrong association.
So every time you use that word, yo spread **AA fearmongering. You essentially assist an help them.
Please stop it. All of you.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
It's never about what you need. It's about what you *can* use. Gnome and also Pidgin is notorious in deciding for you what you want to use and how you want to use it. Everything is hard-wired, and every function that you don not absolutely need is removed.
They act as if they specifically wanted to have the most retarded users and the most featureless interface, for the sake of "simplicity", when in reality, you can have an endless number of features and options, and integrate them well.
The key point here is: Good defaults.
Defaults are like having all features, and having everything wired in the most intuitive way for most users. But allowing you to change everything. And I mean everything.
So you can have Gnome's simplicity AND KDEs features.
KDE partially tried that, but still has to become better.
But Gnome fell into a doctrine, and totally failed that one. I find them very arrogant. Especially their lust to decide what I should need or not need on the desktop. Who are they to decide?
I think it's just the laziness of coding in the other features, combined with ignoring the power of defaults, with the power of a cult.
KDE people do not hate the Gnome ideas, of keeping it *efficient* (what Gnome they misunderstood as "simplicity", but really isn't the same thing). They only think you should have a choice.
But apparently, Gnome people hate KDE people. Which is no wonder, with that cult-like doctrine behavior.
Whatever. If you want to limit yourself, go ahead. More power for us free people.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
What OS have to do with pirated software?
Pirated software is a competitor on the same price point.
Bullish Machine Tzar
Wouldn't work that way in Australia. The Government can confiscate funds which are the proceeds of crime. For example if you commit a crime and make a fortune writing a book about it you won't be allowed to keep the money.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Probably you are right and the same thing applies everywhere.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
My question is what measures the authorities will resort to to get the fines paid. Is it possible that they will just keep imprisoning these guys over and over until they cough up the cash?
The goal should be to make the law reflect the fact that people should be able to share copyrighted works, as long as they aren't making money on it.
Try to find the big events in the history of The Pirate Bay. Next, try to find the big intakes of new members of The (Swedish) Pirate Party.
Next, try and see if they line up somehow :)
I say The Pirate Bay is doing a lot towards changing peoples' attitudes towards copyright. The future will tell whether The Pirate Party can convert that attitude to legislative changes.
This is interesting. However you're stating than the appeal of open source software is not its quality but it's price tag.
which should serve as testimony to how bad and irritating Pidgin is. Said netbook is still quite zippy.
And don't call me "man". I'm not.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
I already named one alternative to Pidgin... one that supports the 2nd line (comment) for MSN names, one that doesn't need me to install a completely new build every time MSN or Yahoo changes their servers around, one that's able to send/receive offline messages for said networks, and one that supports webcams and voice chat. The fact that it has a better graphical interface that's more pleasing to the eye while also being more functional is just icing on the cake.
Seriously. Pidgin is just plain fugly, and lacks a great many features that alternatives have.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
Just use e-mail account generation and store all the pr0n as gmail attachments. duh.
What? I did not state that THE (as in singular) appeal of OSS is its price tage. That is certainly one of its appeals, but it is not the only one. However, for 95% of computer users out there it is, by far, the biggest one. Obviously, this is Slashdot, so the majority of the people here probably fall into the 5% that use OSS for all the other reasons as well, but pretending that your average (ie. NOT YOU) user cares about any other aspects of software then cost vs. quality is crazy. I simply proposed a situation (in context to the parent and GP's post) that showed how OSS can lose a (as in one of many) advantage that could be enough for an average user to choose proprietary software over OSS.