How the Pirate Bay Will Be Legalized

Death Metal sends along this excerpt from Torrentfreak about how Global Gaming Factory, the company who is buying The Pirate Bay, plans to change the site in order to avoid the wrath of the entertainment industry: "In a letter addressed to [shareholders], the company confirms that the new Pirate Bay will become a pay site, while revealing some additional details on how GGF plans to legalize it. To please the entertainment industry, GGF will install a system that will allow the copyright holders to either authorize the 'illegal' torrent or have it removed from the site. If the copyright holder chooses the first option, they will be compensated every time the file is downloaded. In addition, the board says that it will pay penalties if it has to. 'The holder will be able to leave the file and obtain compensation or ask for removal of the file. GGF will also pay any penalties that may arise,' the GGF board announced."

Comments

Model

[pete-classic]

So, the business model is to take away the things that people are probably most interested in, and start charging for whatever is left?

I can't wait for the IPO!

-Peter

Re:Model

[MaerD]

Maybe. I think what they are going for is a "pay a monthly fee and get all the games/music/etc you can download" and plan to pay the rights holders from the monthly fees..
I doubt that will really happen without DRM out the ying-yang, which will lead to the model of "oh crap, we're bankrupt".

Re:Model

[interploy]

In the future, this will be the poster child for business schools for how not to make a business plan.

"Let's take a site synonymous with software piracy, alienate all the current users by making it legal, then try to sell it to all the other people who still think of it as the 'bad bad illegal download site'."

Maybe someone should inform them there are already legitimate markets for what they're trying to do: Netflix and Steam anyone?

Re:Model

[MBGMorden]

Indeed. There are already a lot of sites out there for the same thing. Granted, many of them are private and invite only, but they'll usually open their doors to the public every now and then. Once you build a good ratio at one you can usually get people on that one to give you an invite to others.

The bottom line is the internet is an incredibly adaptive creature. It responds to the will and desires of it's users. If the users want to exchange "intellectual property" for free, then they will find a way. Always have, always will. I remember downloading stuff from BBS systems decades ago. I remember grabbing games and software from Usenet binary groups. I remember downloading Starcraft, MP3's, and video game ROM's for emulators from 0-day FTP sites. I remember when Napster was introduced and when severless systems like Gnutella came about. The methods have changed (and become more and more advanced), but I can't remember any time in history when one couldn't stroll onto the internet and with a little effort find pretty much anything you wanted to download.

the by-nobody-going-there-anymore dept.

[clone53421]

From the looks of their plan, nobody-going-there-anymore is about right.

Wow

[GofG]

Will it keep the name "The Pirate Bay"? That name implies piracy.

If they go through with this

[grahamsaa]

The pirate bay will soon be very legal. . . and very dead.

not gonna work

[pak9rabid]

That's like buying a whore house and getting rid of all the whores.

Re:not gonna work

[Kjella]

a party full of drunken horny half naked cheerleaders, when suddenly all the hot ones disappear, and the fugly ones turn into whores. Seriously, if we can't get whore-based analogies right

Maybe I've looked at the wrong teams, but the lesser half of a druken horny half named cheerleading team turning into whores still sounds pretty good to me...

How much will the pay site cost?

[badfish99]

The copyright holders are now getting fines of about $100000 per illegal download, if I remember correctly. So if the Pirate Bay will pay this as compensation every time it slips up, it's going to have to be a rather expensive pay site, isn't it?

misunderstanding the issue

[Aurisor]

The IP cartels' opposition to piracy isn't just about the piracy itself; they are scared to death of the creation of a decentralized alternative to their existing systems for finding and exploiting artistic talent. The only reason they would embrace *any* method of distribution they don't have total control over is absolute desperation.

It's not about monetizing piracy. If they can't sell you a new version every couple years, control release dates, price a product differently in different regions, censor products for certain markets, or control how the product is presented then your distribution channel is a *threat* to them and they are going to try and take it down. If a kid can record a hit album with two grand worth of hardware and software - and, even worse, distribute it with two hundred bucks worth of hardware, how can they make their millions?

It's not about money. It's about them retaining the control they need to foist their ideal business model on the rest of the world.

Re:misunderstanding the issue

[damburger]

What is the difference between money and control? You take a nation, you divide up control of its productivity into a couple of trillion units, and you call those units 'pounds' or 'dollars' or 'euros'. The idea that the economy is something pure and abstract which can be separated from the grubby world of power and control is a fallacy spread by neoliberals, who want to convince you that corporations are somehow more ethical and accountable than governments.

Re:Neat

[Lumpy]

They are not trying, the guys that owned TPB are goign to take their cash and run giggling all the way while the company that bought it will stand there looking at a fresh turd in a paper bag and ask... Wait, this is not what we though it was....

Kudos to TPB leaders, they got a sucker to buy their golden gate bridge.

So let's see if I get this straight.

[Junior J. Junior III]

• It's legal for me to make a backup copy of my media, in case of theft or destruction, except that owning or building the tools to allow me to create the copy is not legal -- although arguably this makes any turing machine attached to a CD/DVD/Blu-Ray drive illegal.
• It's legal for me to watch tv or listen to radio for free by receiving transmissions, and I can even record them and keep the recording indefinitely as long as I only use it for personal use, but it's illegal for me to stream media over the internet and capture the stream, and it's illegal for me to transmit over the internet.
• It's legal for me to trade or lend CDs, DVDs, etc. with friends I know, or to buy or sell used copies, as long as they're legitimate (not pirated), but it's illegal for me to use the internet to facilitate either the search or the trading or to expand my group of "friends", even though I could go to a public library and essentially achieve the same ends by swapping media with a large group of people (the public) who I don't actually know.
• If something is out of print, or censored, or otherwise unavailable, but copyrighted, I have no legal recourse to obtain a copy.

Did I miss anything?

Re:So let's see if I get this straight.

[Desler]

WROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG.

No it's not. You don't have the right to publicly broadcast someone else's copyrighted work without their permission. Such a right for the copyright holder is codified in the 1976 Copyright Act. There are exceptions but streaming copyrighted content on the internet without a license isn't one of them.

Re:So let's see if I get this straight.

[Desler]

Copyright isn't something you have innately, it is something that is gifted to you for a limited time in EXCHANGE for making that material available.

The problem with this statement is that it's pure bunk. There is no obligation on the part of the copyright holder to make their content available to purchase in order to maintain their copyright.

Re:So let's see if I get this straight.

[shaitand]

The statement was to the purpose of copyrights, not the requirements for getting one.

I don't remember saying anything about existing laws or requirements being functional in accomplishing that purpose.

The biggest irony of all is...

[Joce640k]

The biggest irony of all is that by getting wildly rich the guys from TPB make it more attractive for other people to set up torrent sites. The RIAA is just cutting a single head off a huge hydra.

Multifail! You get zero points!

[Hurricane78]

The Pirate Bay already *was* legal. What they did now, is openly state that they themselves think it's not legal. Which would probably be the biggest failure they could possibly do.

If it weren't for their plan to try, what a bazillion of other sites tried in this exact form, where they all failed horribly without exception, and where there still are retards trying it again and again. Are they drunk? Did they learn nothing? Did they never read the news? Or is it like flies flying into an bug zapper?

Re:Multifail! You get zero points!

[shutdown -p now]

Pirate Bay *was*, even by the laws, perfectly legal. They did not offer anything protected trough copyright. They offered unique IDs, and sources of where to get something like that. But that is also true for the catalog of a video rental store. Or a link list to an internal database of copyrighted material. If the actual *holder* (the source) gives it away without having the right do to so, *that* would have been copyright infringement. Everything else is not.

Indeed. "Everything else" is aiding and abetting. When you know that a guy is using your service to illegally distribute copyrighted material because the copyright holder himself repeatedly tells you that's the case, and you just tell him to fuck off, and keep helping the guy doing what he does... no, it's not illegal in and of itself - but if the guy does indeed turn out to be infringing on someone's copyright in the end, then you have to take your share of responsibility.

In any case, I am not a Swedish lawyer, but I bet that neither are you, and we don't know all the nuances of Swedish law to really judge if the verdict was bought, or was merely applying the law as intended. And virtually all secondary sources of information available to English speakers are biased, some extremely so (so please don't give me any Groklaw links, or I'll hand you a bunch of RIAA ones).

Of course, if a court somewhere rules in a way that goes against your beliefs, then it's easy to dismiss it as a conspiracy theory with bribed judge and/or jury, and those mysterious guys with big pockets. But you should also entertain the thought that, perhaps, your beliefs just aren't all that mainstream outside Slashdot...

so...

[SCHecklerX]

Who is going to pay the people who take the time and effort to encode (pirate, if you must use the term) the stuff? Yeah, it's not their original content, but certainly the *value* in the stuff you get from TPB is the format, and that stuff doesn't just magically happen, you know. I mean, if I wanted a permanent copy for myself, I could rent and rip myself. But I have better things to do with my time. And for stuff I only intend to watch once, well, TPB is a better option than blockbuster or netflix.

Profit!

[AttilaSz]

1. Create a moderately funny home video. Heck, create crappy home video.
2. Upload to PirateBay
3. Instruct your 1000+ machine BitTorrent botnet to download it 24/7
4. Ask GGF to pay royalties for downloads.
5. Profit!

Re:Price

[LandDolphin]

" I am also downloading Star Wars in HD. Bought the movies in VHS years ago, so certainly not going to pay full price for it again. "

If you don't want to pay for it in a better format than the format you purchased it in, than jsut enjoy it in its VHS format.

Just because you've purchased a copy of it (what 10+ years ago?), does not make you any less of a "pirate" than someone who has never purchased a copy. It certainly does not make your downloading of the content any more "justified".

You've shown in your post that their is a desire to obtain the content, but you are to cheap to be willing to pay for it.

How do out-of-print works promote the Progress?

[tepples]

If something is out of print, or censored, or otherwise unavailable, but copyrighted, I have no legal recourse to obtain a copy.

Why would you have a legal recourse? No one is obligated to sell you a product, let alone sell you one in the form you desire.

If nobody can sell me a copy because nobody knows who owns the right to sell me a copy, how does this situation "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts"?

Re:Price

[shaitand]

A new format does not a new copyrighted work make.

Re:"Legalized"? It wasn't ever illegal!

[Paleolibertarian]

That word would be cowed. As in ordinary people just trying to make a living are cowed by threats and intimidation and overt buying of judges and juries by the corporations who actually controll the governments of the world and always have.

Essentially the new TPB is now paying protection money to IP owners whether the infringement is illegal or completely legal such as "Fair Use."

Anyone who goes up against a large corporation which has a huge well paid legal department and expects justice from the courts is a fool.

Sure there may be small victories here and there but "small" is the operative word. This is why the courts had to create the Class Action suit so that the people who know they're getting sodomized could feel like there was some way they could obtain justice.

It's the same reason that democracies let the people vote. The people still get sodomized but they feel good when they vote out the current sodomizer until they get sodomized by the next.

BOHICA!

Edwin