Slashdot Mirror
Pirate Bay Closure Sparked P2P Explosion
Barence writes to share that the closure of The Pirate Bay seems to have done nothing to stem the flow of potentially copyrighted materials. In fact, there has been an estimated 300% increase in the number of sites providing access to copyright files, according to McAfee. "In August, Swedish courts ordered that all traffic be blocked from Pirate Bay, but any hope of scotching the piracy of music, software and films over the web vanished as copycat sites sprung up and the content took on a life of its own. 'This was a true "cloud computing" effort,' the company said in its Threats Report for the third quarter. 'The masses stepped up to make this database of torrents available to others.'"
"The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."
It's kind of pathetic to watch the industry and the courts try to stomp this out. Perhaps if more judges, politicians and corporate leaders were familiar with history, they'd know that once the genie is out of the bottle, you can't put it back in. Smashing printing presses didn't exactly stomp out the increasing speed and distribution that information often unfriendly to Our Betters (kings, politicians, merchants, Church leaders, whoever) received with that technology. Everyone had to bloody well learn to live with a completely altered information landscape.
The whole battle against P2P is looking increasingly like tilting at windmills. Perhaps, at the end of the day, that's an awfully good description for this whole cabal; they are indeed qixotic.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
a handful of selfish greedy people are no match for millions of selfish, greedy people
I have feverishly been engaged in whacking moles, and cannot for the life of me comprehend why they continue to pop up.
Keep trying, suits.
For every Web site you shut down; for every IRC server you pay to have DDoSed; for every eMule node you raid; five more will spring up in their place.
You can pollute the edonkey net with malware; we'll move to IRC. You can kill public websites; we'll make private, invite-only underground darknets, that you can't see, find, or regulate.
The society that you are trying to prevent the formation of is, in good part, already here. We will continue working to establish it, for the ultimate benefit and enrichment of all; ironically even you yourselves in the end.
The end of scarcity is inevitable. You can attempt to stand in the way, you can slow it down, marginally...but you will not stop it.
This is similarly ineffective as going after drug dealers. This addresses the symptoms, but not the underlying causes.
That's a delightful theory, rather like "If we make hiring prostitutes/taking drugs/whatever sufficiently onerous and legally dangerous, people will stop doing it."
By turning filesharing into a vice, the media companies, politicians and courts are in fact only increasing the attraction. There's a peculiar psychology to it. People like guilty pleasures.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I think the media companies thought that when they brought the Pirate Bay to trial and won a conviction that it would scare everyone away from file sharing (legal or otherwise) and that people would go back to buying DVDs, etc. What really happened is that they generated a lot of news which basically informed countless masses unaware that torrent was even a word that they could use these things to get free movies, music, etc. off of the internet.
It's almost a little bit like the Streisand Effect in that they're really only making the problem worse. If they really wanted to do something about piracy, stop talking about P2P and go after the people who are burning physical copies that they're selling. These people are actually distributing thousands of full copies of product for which they have no license to reproduce. That's a battle that the record companies, movie studios, et al. might actually be able to win.
The real bias problem in Television news isn't a liberal or conservative bias (with the exception of Fox news) but has to do with pro-corporate thinking. There are very few times that a news organization even acknowledges there is a second side to the debate when it comes to so-called "piracy" or copyright issues. I think these major reporters are so immersed in the corporate system that they are blind to the fact they even have this bias... it's the way they live, it is how they are getting paid and I believe they think there is no other way to look at many of these issues. I think that's one reason reporting this shoddy gets on the air... in the corporateThink world a connection between a kewl dood putting up a torrent of a porn dvd he ripped to mp4 and a white slave trader doesn't seem that outrageous.
Similar to the ads about "if you do drugs, you're supporting terrorism"?
Odd, that, since the only money going to terrorist nations is their share of any fuel you might have burned while driving to the street corner. So, ride your bicycle to get your fix and the link is broken.
"Terrorism" is the new obedience card.
Oh, yeah, that reminds me. I'm low on sheet plastic and duct tape. Gotta go...
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
While greed is a great motivator, I still like to think there's a little bit of Gutenberg in us. Distributing copyrighted works is not purely a selfish act.
PirateBay isn't a web site, it's a culture. You can't stop culture with laws.
Wow. That has to be the lowest UID of any troll I've ever seen. Congratulations on being the oldest troll on Slashdot!
We aren't celebrating piracy. We are celebrating new technology crushing attempts to suppress it by the ignorant and arrogant cartels clinging to a dead business model.
Time to trot out this old but still pertinent quote again:
From "Life-Line" by Robert Heinlein (1938)
"Before we leave this matter I wish to comment on the theory implied by you, Mr. Weems, when you claimed damage to your client. There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back, for their private benefit. That is all"
Are you saying making those illegal and having consequences when caught have absolutely no effect on if people will do them?
Of course they have an affect. Countries with legal prostitution and drugs have lower use rates of both.
"Piracy" essentially means armed robbery and murder on the high seas. The recent abuse of the term to refer to unauthorized duplication is idiotic. But of course, the more the media conglomerates and their toadies bellow "piracy" at the top of their lungs, the more a vapid and mostly uncritical public will eat it up, and eventually repeat it. I'm not justifying unauthorized duplication or redistribution; I'm just sick of the MP/RIAA's bullshit. They are organizations that have engaged in highly questionable practices for years, and still cling to their outdated gangster ways. They have monopolized the public airwaves for years through payola schemes, to the detriment of artists and listeners. I find it hard to shed a tear for them.
Worse yet, their attacks have laid waste not just to independent artists and labels, but to promising technologies as well, which is probably what pisses off slashdotters more than anything else.* File torrents are a legitimate source of lots of perfectly legal content, and enable small entities to put out content without paying for tons of bandwidth to do it. Shutting down TPB is a slap in the face of lots of people who never "pirated" a song in their life.
What really gets me is the hypocrisy, though. The RIAA knows better than anyone that delivering free music to waiting ears is the best guarantee of album sales. After all, that's why they've been caught in payola schemes over and over - they buy off the radio stations because they know that if their songs are played for free, we will buy the album. They also know that if their songs aren't heard, sales will never take off. I don't think that underneath it all they are concerned that "piracy" will hurt their sales; they are concerned that they are losing control of the "free" distribution, and they are afraid of technology they don't fully understand.
*Although, I've also found a large number of technically proficient people are also very musically inclined (myself excepted; I suck at playing music). It may well be that many here are pissed off because the recording industry has turned out music that is the equivalent of a typical American beer; bland and mass-produced, succeeding on marketing instead of merit.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
Yay, I hope a bunch of Hollywood "professionals" can come up with Seven Samurai!
Yeah, Fox News is the ONLY biased television news organization. The rest of them are strictly objective. The fact that Fox is the only new organization that leans to the right of the spectrum, while every other news organization in the US leans left easily explains why Fox is so popular.
I don't see how piracy is an idiotic term, especially from the standpoint of the people whose products are being stolen.
Pirates sailed the high seas, yes, they murdered and stole, yes. However, of note to the people who 1)produced the goods and 2)bought them, the goods were being stolen, not merely destroyed. Entire markets sprung up where people could acquire LARGE amounts of stolen goods, no questions asked. The people selling were mum about their sources. The people who did the act were difficult to pin down. Often somewhat honest tradesmen were the only people the enforcers could find who had any connection to the theft. People who wanted legitimate goods or who placed a special order would pay higher prices to make up for the drop in sales and the efforts to find the culprits. Granted, there were other expenses not happening here, such as loss of ships, etc.
What we have now are markets where large amounts of stolen goods being acquired, no questions asked. The people distributing them are mum about their sources. The people who did the act are difficult to pin down, lost in the vast ocean--a metaphoric one, but it's a good metaphor. People who want legitimate goods are paying high prices (whether this would not be true if there were no pirates is another question) and forced to deal with DRM. Honest tradesmen, and now unfortunately honest consumers, are being forced to deal with the wrath of the producers. Granted the distribution of a single image is of no cost because the MARGINAL production cost is almost nil, but that fact doesn't mean that the people producing software didn't have large amounts invested in the project.
If you're going to argue that the whole of the argument is how much software should cost, don't. When coders are sponsored by the state and producing software is free, then it will be reasonable to expect to get software for free. Until then you either will or won't get it for free by the whim of whomever made it.
I've always been calling this the Sand-trout effect, as described by Frank Herbert. Many sand-trout form one giant collective aka the Worm (TPB, suprnova, mininova, etc etc), but as soon as you try to kill it, the collective scatters and form new Worms using the former as a template.
It's the same as when you tried to strike down terrorism by smacking down Iraq.
The Worm is immortal and cannot be destroyed. Once the genie is out ...
F off, we were calling ourselves pirates before the media even knew it was going on.
Except that most of what passes for 'left' in the US would count as moderate right in Europe.