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The Pirate Bay Sinks And Swims
mikael_j writes "This morning the German ISP that had been hosting The Pirate Bay's website and search engine shut the site down. A few hours later the website was back up, this time with hosting provided by the Swedish Pirate Party, which issued a press release (in Swedish) explaining why they have chosen to host The Pirate Bay."
Obligatory "the more you tighten your grip, Tarkin..." reference.
As for the rest, well, we'll see. Copyright law all over the world is fucked up right now; the original idea, the contract that someone would have exclusive rights to their story so as to make money for a certain time, before being required to give it up for others to be inspired by (since they used the language and ideas of the commons and doubtless had their own inspirations from there), is all but lost. We've already reached the point where many works have died, never to be seen again, simply because some shithead stuck (for instance) the degrading original film negatives into a vault to become unusable while there were no other copies around.
Ideally, copyright terms should last no longer than patent terms, and registration should be mandatory before copyright can be enforced. Our current "everything is copyrighted by default including my fucking grocery list if I claim it's really a poem" regime is unsustainable and worthless.
TPB going down isn't even that big a deal anymore, since they shut down the tracker and went full DHT. At this point, you can pretty much get by with something like IsoHunt. All we need for torrents anymore are search engines. Having someone actually run a tracker has become completely unnecessary.
But it does lots of good PR for TPB to keep getting brought down, then popping up a couple hours later. Makes the authorities pursuing them look utterly incompetent.
Check out my world simulator thingy.
Clearly you've missed his point ;-) If the movies had been properly pirated they'd have been available to all comers on a site like, I dunno, The Pirate Bay. Pirating would have saved those movies rather than hurt them.
True, but the news here is that TPB is now hosted by the Swedish Pirate Party.
The pol-lice state is coming
Doo dah
Doo dah
The pol-lice state is coming
Oh doo dah day.
Oh doo dah day
It's on its merry way
The pol-lice state is coming
Oh doo dah day.
the moment they put up an international donation page, they would get flooded with money. remember obama's campaign and how he floated on $5 donations as opposed to clinton and won.
Read radical news here
Unfortunately, The Pirate Parties (including the Swedish one) are now the party to go to for a lot of reasonable views on many issues. Not just copyright, but other IP issues and even some non-IP issues. We should be worried by the fact that even some people who are massively in favor of copyright reform (such as myself) are not happy with The Pirate Bay and think that at minimum a lot of what Pirate Bay does is unethical. Having one of the Pirate parties directly associated in this way already reinforces perceived connections between the Pirate parties and outright software piracy to an extent that really isn't helpful.
No, we will not.
This is game of whack-a-mole. Those teenagers need to be able to access shared stuff. That access needs to be reasonably open if masses are to benefit from it and it is singple-point-of-failure. Whacking website or proxy is as easy as dropping packets to certain ip address. Obscurity means useleness for millions and win for media companies.
You still need to download data to your computer. No encryption or steganography gets around the fact that any reasonably fast download will be up on radar due to its size.
Obsuscation, Steganography and Encryption is not going to help much either. People of both ends of pipe need to know wtf is going on, and if you want something more than couple of people, it needs to be public.
Efficient sharing is open. Open means vulnurelable. They own pipes, and they own people who make laws about pipes. Best we can do without pipes is sneakernet.
True hope is that those millions will turn to adults and vote for change. Reality is that as they turn to adults, they will have different issues than free music or movies.
-- Technology for the sake of technology is as pathetic as eschewing technology because it's technology.
If they're any good, that already happens, law or no. That particular issue isn't copyright related (though copyrights are indeed screwed up), but rather just an indicated of just how fragile our storage is these days. For the latest copy of Avatar - sure, it's everywhere, but for less mainstream stuff that hasn't (yet) acheived popularity, things can be wiped out completely by a random hard drive crash or simple degradation. Sure, even when we had books they could be destroyed, but to me it seems that our current medium is just a bit more fragile compared to books - which basically will last a LONG time absent fire or flood.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
If they're any good, that already happens, law or no.
Whooooosh!
I don't know how trustworthy the swedish legal system is, but here in Austria, most judges are political puppets who would be pressurized into sinking the PP together with TPB simply because it's politically opportune and because they can (a good example is the current trial against legal animal rights activism where anyone can see how unfair such a political trial can be: tierschutzprozess.at). It's a glorious move on behalf of the PP for sure, but it'll be an uphill battle and the heroes only win reliably in movies.
But hey, if you don't fight, you can't win...
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
Do you realize how many movies and records from the early days are destroyed forever. There is a crapload of Chicago blues artists and awesome songs that will never be heard again because of Copyright law.
Honestly, Copyright does more harm than good if you look past the "money money gimmie gimmie" though pattern of the greedy and think of culture and history.
The rampant greed of today is no different than the burning of the library of Alexandria. Lots of information, literary works, and art are being DESTROYED for no reason other than plain old greed.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Ideally, copyright terms should last no longer than patent terms, and registration should be mandatory before copyright can be enforced. Our current "everything is copyrighted by default including my fucking grocery list if I claim it's really a poem" regime is unsustainable and worthless.
and
A good, clean, full copy that can then be used to master additional copies in various formats.
Generally speaking, this is not available.
What if you had to apply for the copyrights to your work but in doing so you have to turn over a master to the copyright office and when the copyright expires the copyright office turns the master over into public domain,
This scares me.
What we need to be doing, is killing the middle man. The RIAA, the MPAA, the greedy non-artist studios that do nothing but leech off of the artist.
Don't say "free as in beer media" is the future. Say that buying directly from the artist, at whatever price the artist dictates, is the future. That is the free you want.
Because if you make it so that artists can't make money at all, then you will kill creativity. Don't give me anecdotal evidence to the contrary, one artist here and there already sitting on millions or on another job do not count as success with 100% free art. At the end of the day, a lot of art takes years of 80 hour weeks to produce, and you can kiss non-D movies and non-flash games goodbye if everyone stopped paying the artists involved.
I don't know about you, but that kind of loss of history and culture gives me an awful sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. The original artists would probably feel the same way if they knew that the things they created vanished forever because some asshole in a 50th story office didn't want anybody to hear or see something they didn't pay for.
they gave songs away for free for decades: the radio
they gave shows away for free for decades: broadcast television
and before either, there WAS no recorded music or images. yet we still had shakespeare and mozart
art is not dying, creativity will never die, in fact, those who truly love art are not motivated by the almighty buck, they are motivated by love of the art. they'll waste millions to make art, and we'll benefit from it. meanwhile, art made for profit, the usual mindless pop movies and music, will we miss them?
and finally, if you give away your songs for free, what really happens? well, for 0.01% (the rest stay poor, JUST LIKE BEFORE THE INTERNET) you get famous. then you make millions from concert gigs, advertising endorsements, personalized content... in other words, you'll still make $ from art, only via ANCILLARY REVENUES
so sorry chicken little, the sky is not falling
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
As opposed to without copyright law where the works would be destroyed in exactly the same way, except this time conditional on them existing in the first place?
Copyright (like all property law) doesn't cause greed, despite it's natural association with greed. Just like wagging a dog's tail doesn't make it happy.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
If you think the "medium" as a CD with a PDF vs a book, you're right. But the current "medium" is much more than that. With a couple of clicks I can make a copy of my book to a server located 4000 miles from here. With a couple more it's replicated in all continents.
The problem is that people haven't change their habits to accommodate this new reality, and continue to use computers as they've used pieces of paper.
Oh, and if you're talking about media (not text), we're *much* better. Remember that film/vinil are analog and therefore are in constant degradation, and every copy is lossy. Digital encoding has bring the possibility of actually maintaining the same quality for indefinite time.
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Did I mention it is a company I have absolutely no desire to keep working for? I am not customer facing, so the dress code is virtually non-existent. People here wear Che Guevara shirts to work all the time. Maybe a shirt depicting a mass-murderer is more acceptable? It's a sick world.
Since when do pirates ask for your money?
That conviction only ruled that the tracker was illegal. The Pirate Party is only hosting the TPB home page and the search engine, they don't host any torrent-files nor do they have a tracker anymore.
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
I think Richard is saying that if the Owners of Avatar want the original movie to sit in a vault and rot, that is up to them. You don't get a right to copy someone's stuff if they don't want you to. Is it a loss? oh yes. But it's the right of the owner.
Avatar did not spring into being in a void. It is based heavily on a shared culture that's built up of all the creative works that have come before it. Avatar, as it is, would not exist if it weren't for all the shared works that came before it. If Shakespeare had decided to cram his stuff in a vault and let it rot, Avatar simply would not be the movie that we have today.
To a certain degree, the owners of Avatar owe it to the shared culture that allowed them to make this movie.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
(either by law or corporate mandate)
There's a difference?
Really now... And I suppose the following:
The Mona Lisa ...are all figments of everyone's imagination.
The Statue of David
Plumbing
The Steam Engine
Vast portions of our art and history had NO Patent or Copyright "protection" to speak of and yet they were done. Your premise is, sadly, an old saw- and very, very much wrong.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
what they believe is what the future of society believes. if you don't understand that this is a fight over the habits and beliefs of teenagers, you don't understand the fight at all
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Your analogy is poor. For a start, their entire position is that the search results (i.e. "the gun selling") isn't illegal. So it's like saying that *LEGAL* gun selling doesn't increase the number of gunshot victims.
Despite being anti-gun and living in a low-gun country, I'd have to say that's not such a bold assertion. Yes, LEGAL arms are sometimes used to kill people, but a vastly more significant portion of gun-crime happens with ILLEGAL guns. Especially in my country where legal arms are incredibly rare... I know one person who has a specialist gun collector's license out of all my friends and acquaintances.
A better analogy would be that it's like saying that people who mention a bootsale (yard sale) where they know pirate DVD's are for sale are somehow complicit if you then decide to go to that sale and buy some.
every mp3 is completely free and ad-less. because the mp3 IS the advertisement... for the concert gig where you sell tickets, for the musician who will endorse your product, for ALL SORTS OF ANCILLARY REVENUE STREAMS
"Where is that money going to come from?"
gee, i dunno, i didn't know your average guitar and laptop with free software was a major investment. especially considering the teenager holding that guitar and pushing record on that laptop is mainly doing it to get in girl's pants, like very other wannabe musician in history. but gee i'm sorry, i didn't want to brust your bubble: as we all know its IMPOSSIBLE to make art without money first, that moeny is the only motivation. and art motivated by money is always the highest quality that everyone desires, not at all shallow vapid and empty. yup, yup
the world is not ending son. only the distribution model that the internet killed. get used to it
so what is your alternative distribution model? control the internet?
good luck!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I could swear that the Library of Congress is trying to preserve all the information that you say is being lost.
Isn't that part of their purpose? http://www.loc.gov/about
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Not necessarily true. In fact, because P2P filesharing is so immensely popular, anonymous P2P systems a la Freenet, Gnunet et. al. will be even more effective, once enough people are being pushed (nudged, or coerced) to join them. It's only a matter of time until most of the Internet traffic will be a big end-to-end encrypted binary blob that no deep packet inspection can open. Sure, that's just the technical workaround and not a cure to the social disease that Copyright has mutated into, but sometimes, societies are driven by technology too.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
why do believe you need money to make art? why do you confuse a DISTRIBUTION MODEL with an essential passion of mankind?
and how did mozart and shakespeare function? patronage, that's how
and why do you NEED an ancillary dvd market to support crap movies? as you say, avatar made bazillions... in the movie theater! can the world survive without direct-to-dvd crap?! pfffffft
musicians will make millions... at concert gigs
sure, only 0.01% of them
JUST LIKE IN THE PRE-INTERNET ERA
but with the long tail (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Tail) greater quantization of the market due to more efficient distribution (the internet) means the world is not a binary existence between signing a contract (and making millions) or making nothing. instead, all those starving musicians... some will make $100s, some $1,000s, %10,000s, $100,000s... where before the capricious opinions of record company execs decided your fate between nothing and millions. and even THEN made you sign contracts where they got the lion share of $ anyways. in fact, artists will be RICHER because even though there is less money in play on just concert gigs and other ancillaries, they get the money DIRECT, not 10% of what some record exec rams down your throat due to holding all the power. now, on the internet, YOU, the audience decides who will make $$$, not some asshole snorting blow off a hooker's ass. its a far more efficient, egalitarian model. the artist is freer, the audience has more cultural riches... and the old school media conglomerate dies. let me find my tiny violin somewhere...
you fail to think the issue through. you only grasp part of the issues you talk about. just think all of your concerns through. you will see for yourself: THERE IS NO PROBLEM (unless you are an old school distributor). the sky is not falling chicken little. the world has survived far greater shocks to social and legal convention due to technological progress. open your brittle mind, see the better future for what it is
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Perhaps the culture where choice of t-shirt slogan (and not work performance) is the measure of one's "professionalism" is why his desire to work there has evaporated?
I can see the fnords!