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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."
This is actually a fairly smart political move.
With the swedish elections coming up in August, they are sure to gain some much needed notoriety.
Also, they are in a different position to fight the inevitable legal battle. Since they are a political party, they don't have to put economic interests first, but are actually expected to take the fight to the bitter end. If they end up losing, and go bankrupt in the process, at least they've stood up for what they believe in.
Either way, we're up for some good drama. Stay tuned.
Important stuff
If the money funneled into legal departments to hunt pirates were instead funneled into marketing and development of competitive alternatives we'd have next to no piracy.
Instead, the money that the lawyers don't pocket goes to implemention of fascist-grade DRM and to greed inspired practices such as pay-for DLC which is a massive turn off. If i want to have a game continously bleed me for cash i'd play an MMORPG(which i do; eve online, but they atleast have the sense of providing expansions for free(and quite often) so the bleeding is smooth)
buy all the legislators in as many countries as you want. hire as many lawyers as you want. you're working against tens of millions of technically astute, media hungry and most importantly, POOR teenagers
there's nothing you can do: you lose. obfuscation, encryption, obscurity, steganography, darknets, p2p, proxies... we win, assholes. you will not preserve your dead economic model. the economic model of free media on the internet will be foisted on you. adapt, or die. end of fucking story. deal with it
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Indeed, I am wearing my TPB t shirt today in support. Some of the younger managers here at work (I work for a major multinational IT co) are glaring at me :(
yup, shorter copyright per se wouldn't fix that issue.
but requiring people to register and store their material in order to get copyright could.
something along the lines of
1) you pay for an independent registered copyright storage facility to keep a copy
2) that gets you copyright for x years on the stored material
3) after x years, the hosted material goes public
with of course x = smallish number
VLC Remote for iPhone and Android
Because somebody somewhere WILL find a way to make a copy, because they know that they will eventually find a way to make a few $$ off of it? It's like this idea I had when I was in school..."DOSBox...in a box" basically taking all these old obscure 80s and 90s DOS games and putting a prebuilt DOS emulator on a disc with a GUI frontend, so that like a Linux Live CD you could just slip the disc into any PC and be enjoying in minutes.
Me and another student had gotten it to a running mockup stage just to see if we could, but when we started trying to contact those that had made the old games we wanted to put on the disc we found a minefield where companies were gone, nobody knew WTF happened to the rights, and the few that responded acted like their game from 87 should be worth more than Crysis.
So instead of a nice little disc that would allow new generations to easily play what we old greybeards cut our teeth on, thanks to copyrights it is doubtful you'll even be able to find a single copy to play or a machine that'll play it by the time copyrights end on them. The combination of copyright musical chairs and greedy pigs that think "we'll do something with it...some day, maybe" and want as much or more than it cost new simply makes it an undoable idea.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I agree with the parent. I'm almost coming to believe that artists getting paid is a bigger threat to creativity and art.
I mean, lets face it: if there was copyright in the late 18th century, Beethoven would've written 3 symphonies, 9 piano sonatas and lived off the royalties till he died of cirrosis some 10 years earlier than he did.
Send your spendthrift head of state this