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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."
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.
I dont think their purpose even is to completely win the battle, but to make it inconvenient enough for casual people to get stuff for free. It's the same thing with DRM - it doesn't keep the hardcore pirates off who are there to break it, but it surely keeps casual people from copying to friends and so on.
If the big torrent sites will start having lots of trouble with law and courts, they will close the shop. All the big sites TPB, Mininova, Demonoid and Isohunt are either down or on changing their model (mininova) under pressure. Yeah lots of small sites and copycats will obviously pop in, but they wont be that kind of "big" sites anymore and will have less users and casual people will have harder time finding what they want.
It's useless to care about the pirates who would do it anyway, is a smaller group and usually dont have that much disposable income anyway. But it's the casual people and adults - your idea about piracy will change after you start getting more disposable income, like happened for me and lots of my friends and now happily buy what we enjoy (and another reason was the quality improvement and easiness of Steam and Spotify and other legit services).
To put it in a little more perspective, the industry, whoever is fighting digital distribution and any kind of piracy... make it easier and more appealing to purchase your product than pirate it. It really is that simple.
.99 cents on a song than it is to waste a good hour hunting down a torrent or similar and wait for it to download, just to possibly find out it wasn't what I was looking for.
iTunes and the likes are a perfect example. I consider my time pretty valuable to me, so when a song pops in my head that I haven't heard in 10 years, and I want to listen to it, to me, it is more beneficial to me to just spend the
Steam is another great example. I'd rather pony up $5 to buy The Dig than to scour the internet for hours trying to find a pirated version, just to wait hours/DAYS! to get it, only to find out that it was a CLASS release (remember those folks!?) with no sound and video compressed so bad that you can't make out what you are seeing.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
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.
PirateBay isn't a web site, it's a culture. You can't stop culture with laws.
To put it in a little more perspective, the industry, whoever is fighting digital distribution and any kind of piracy... make it easier and more appealing to purchase your product than pirate it. It really is that simple.
iTunes and the likes are a perfect example. I consider my time pretty valuable to me, so when a song pops in my head that I haven't heard in 10 years, and I want to listen to it, to me, it is more beneficial to me to just spend the .99 cents on a song than it is to waste a good hour hunting down a torrent or similar and wait for it to download, just to possibly find out it wasn't what I was looking for.
Steam is another great example. I'd rather pony up $5 to buy The Dig than to scour the internet for hours trying to find a pirated version, just to wait hours/DAYS! to get it, only to find out that it was a CLASS release (remember those folks!?) with no sound and video compressed so bad that you can't make out what you are seeing.
This, I think, is going to be key to stopping piracy as we know it today.
Digital distribution has the potential to lower costs by eliminating packaging. It can expand the marketplace by making truly ancient and fringe titles available. It can facilitate impulse buys and periodic sales. And it can give you the instant gratification of getting something without having to go out to the store or wait on shipping.
It is genuinely easier for me to buy a song on iTunes - even if I won't use iTunes or an iPod to play it back - than it is for me to track down a torrent.
It is genuinely easier for me to buy a game on Steam than it is for me to track down a torrent and wait for it to download.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
While this is true to an extent, I can tell you that the average consumer knows something is wrong but they just don't know the solution. My mother is one of these 'average consumers'. She has no knowledge of torrents or P2P software yet she realizes the problem of "what happens when my digital music collection gets wiped by hardware failure" and thus refuses to buy into it. Saying that these limits only affect those that know how get around them is false. Anyone who has been subjected to an inconvenience due to DRM will have a negative view of how things work regardless of it they are a pirate or not. They just might not know about the potential (illegal) solutions or they may be unwilling to break the law and also unwilling to buy music (my mother).
So these initiatives to stop piracy by the media companies may reduce piracy but they will not boost sales. This is the biggest reason the media companies are going to fail. They are trying to get non-paying customers to pay rather than trying to give paying customers what they want. In the process they are turning more and more currently paying customers into non-paying customers. What I am trying to say is that even if they stomp out piracy 100%, if less people are buying their music they have still lost the battle.
The fix is not to make it inconvenient to pirate stuff... I realize this is what they're trying to accomplish with DRM and whatnot. But that isn't the fix. The fix is to make people want to legitimately purchase your product.
Or, even better, to abandon the idea that you're manufacturing a product in the first place.
People whose business is making products don't have a piracy problem. Wyeth (maker of Advil) hasn't gone out of business just because you can find store-brand ibuprofen on the same shelf, and the store-brand manufacturers haven't gone out of business just because you can find Advil on the same shelf. They all make money by charging a little more per pill than it costs them to make. And the price doesn't fall to zero, because it actually does cost something to make a bottle of pills.
Piracy is only a problem for people whose real business is designing stuff but who are afraid to embrace a business model in which they get paid for designing stuff. Instead they pretend that they're manufacturing a product, even though the marginal cost of each unit is approximately zero -- it'd be like a therapist charging you every time you went out in public without fear, for the rest of your life, instead of charging an hourly rate for the time she spent treating your agoraphobia. They treat their business like a lottery, hoping to hit it big by selling a ton of copies, rather than coming up with an honest valuation of their "designing stuff" labor and leaving distribution up to those who can do it more efficiently.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
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.
Buy a house and raise a family, then tell me how much disposable income you have. "
You know...there ARE other choices don't you? Frankly, I've never really wanted kids...I'd rather have my disposable income to come and go as I please, travel, buy fun toys, chase different women, etc
And even if you want to settle down and stick with one chick...not all of them want to be saddled with kids either. Face it, it is a choice you make. If you don't have a job making enough money for house, kids and family AND the fun things in life, well...life is full of choices, each with its consequences.
Choose, and live with the choice and quit bitching.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
>>>I've never really wanted kids...
In evolutionary terms that makes you a failure. It's as if your genes never existed, since they stop here and go no further. But even if we ignore that.....
There's a difference between charging for a song, and extortion. $1 per song isn't too bad if the song was CD-quality and had no time limit on usage (i.e. rest of my life). But to charge $1 for a poor-quality lossy-compressed song whose license-of-use can be revoked any time "they" feel like it is pure theft in my opinion.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Mmm... no. What DRM does is make it a nuisance to use a legally-bought copy, making a copy downloaded from a torrent site - which has been disinfected of DRM by a skilled team of professional pirates - superior in every respect. Even disk checks have that effect. And of people can copy games from their friends, they just need to get a crack afterwards.
As for DVDs, every time I see an unskippable "you wouldn't steal a car" piece before getting into actual content, I can't help but think that if a bought car forced me to watch similar propaganda every time before driving, and a stolen one wouldn't, then yes I would steal a car!
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
I've never really wanted kids...
In evolutionary terms that makes you a failure. It's as if your genes never existed, since they stop here and go no further.
First, that's not necessarily true. If he's "chasing different women," as he put it, illegitimate children are not ruled out. Even if his careful, birth control isn't foolproof. He could also be making some of his disposable income by donating to a sperm bank, and if he's being successful in other endeavors in life, he could get pick and spread his genes :)
Evolutionary speculation aside, why the hell would you care if your genes get spread or not? Oh, I get that those who don't care might be less likely to pass on their genes, so the majority will care. From a pure rational analysis though, spreading your genes gives you absolutely no benefits. Sure, having a family might make you happy, and that's a rational reason to have one. If the extra disposable income and lack of family-related responsibilities are what make him happy, than that's the rational choice for him. The human species might have a stake in the evolutionary game, but the individuals most certainly don't.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
In other words, open investments for new movies to the general public, and the resulting product belongs to the public... great concept, actually. Movies with stupid premises that no one in their right mind would go see, wouldn't get funded enough to be made. Meanwhile, blue-ray device manufacturers would toss money towards projects that would benefit most from the format, helping keep alive the special effects budget. Book-to-movie projects could get funding from bookstores and the like, simply because those increase sales for the books they came from.
If the end product sucks, you blame the company you invested in, and groups that cannot turn out anything more than a generic throwaway movie are forced from the field.
The problem this runs into is, you would need a population enlightened enough to go along with this mindset... not gonna happen.