The Pirate Bay Responds To Raid

An anonymous reader writes The Pirate Bay's crew have remained awfully quiet on the recent raid in public, but today Mr 10100100000 breaks the silence in order to get a message out to the world. In a nutshell, he says that they couldn't care less, are going to remain on hiatus, and a comeback is possible. In recent days mirrors of The Pirate Bay appeared online and many of these have now started to add new content as well. According to TPB this is a positive development, but people should be wary of scams. Mr 10100100000 says that they would open source the engine of the site, if the code "wouldn't be so s****y". In any case, they recommend people keeping the Kopimi spirit alive, as TPB is much more than some hardware stored in a dusty datacenter.

Comments

The Pirate Bay

[phantomfive]

Working hard since 2003 to preserve your right to consume media without the annoyance of paying.

Re:The Pirate Bay

[TechyImmigrant]

Working hard since 2003 to preserve your right to consume media without the annoyance of paying.

Working hard to enable people to download movies and music that will work on their streaming and mobile devices after they've paid for the original DRM encumbered media that forces them to watch adverts and FCC warnings every time they use the media.

There, fixed that for you.

Re:The Pirate Bay

[Raisey-raison]

Working hard since 2003 to preserve your right to consume media without the annoyance of paying.

Intellectual property was created for the benefit of society. There have been numerous studies showing that IP has massively overreached and it no longer does that. Those who have benefited have resorted to rent seeking behavior by ever expanding its scope. They can legally bribe elected officials by using campaign finance contributions. In effect they get to write the laws. So how about they pay back all the money they took beyond what reasonable IP would look like. Seven years copyright protection is enough for most movies and music. And 14 years for almost everything else.

And how about we expand fair use back to what it was and should be so that students can get greater access to copyrighted works? How about we also repeal the Copyright Term Extension Act.

It really is the case that the movie and music industries are trying to steal from everyone else. But because they have politicians in their pocket books you don't call it theft. Piratebay was merely evening an unfair playing field.

Re:The Pirate Bay

[ArcadeMan]

And if you pay you're the one getting the annoyance.

http://img.labnol.org/di/pirat...

Re:The Pirate Bay

[Richy_T]

If you don't understand either the definition of theft or what Pirate Bay actually does, sure.

Re:The Pirate Bay

[TheCarp]

> Man, I don't deceive myself into thinking I 'deserve' to consume whatever some artist makes.

Perhaps cave paintings should then be scoured off out of respect for the artists whose hard work is being used by others for free.

> Secondly, if copyright were actually set to 14 years like you propose, the main ones who would benefit would
> be giant corporations. Would Disney pay for the rights to Starwars if they could just wait it out and take it
> for free? No, they wouldn't.

Bullshit. Just because you can pick a few examples of places where big corperations would win out, doesn't mean that those are the rule. I mean are you really suggesting that entire industries, with deep enough pockets to do all sorts of analsys for themselves, have spent millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars fighting to extend and strengthen copyright....you really are suggesting they have misspent all that money and they are really the ones who stand the most to GAIN by just....not doing that.

Its not that I would never buy that argument but, I think its going to take a bit more than "look they could have just used star wars" to do so. I mean its true but, that is such a simplistic view, when it would ALSO open the door for everyone else to use it, including many smaller outlets.

I mean seriously, if every yahoo out there making star wars fan fiction could actually try to make a buck off it, well, few would actually see any returns, and most would still be shit, but, I have trouble imagining there wouldn't be a few that rose out of there above the rest and who could put some real production value into it. Perhaps we would have some movies out by now in that universe that rivaled the originals or even surpassed them.

Re:The Pirate Bay

[agm]

and if the content creator wants to shun an entire region of their content rather than get paid, there is nothing stopping someone from downloading the content, that is not offered legally to them in other ways.

If something is not available to you legally then it is not available to you. Nobody has a fundamental right to the content that others create.

Re:The Pirate Bay

[NatasRevol]

Mickey Mouse says "LOL" at limited time.

Re:The Pirate Bay

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure if you go back and read all of Shakespeare and then compare the actual story-lines to current movies, you would find quite a few similarities.

For example,

Lion King is based off Hamlet
Ten things I hate about you is based off Taming of the Shrew
West Side Story was based off Romeo and Juliet, as well as many other movies.

Those are just a few off the top of my head.

When you see enough and read enough, as well as expand your world history, you realize how few unique ideas people come up with.

Go read the Canterbury Tales (free off the Gutenberg Project) and you will see how much our humor really hasn't changed.

Re:The Pirate Bay

[agm]

You make it sound like you have a fundamental right to content someone else produces. You don't.

Re:The Pirate Bay

[Jason Levine]

Copyright is an exchange. The government protects content, for a limited time, in exchange for the "owner" releasing it into the public domain.

This leads to the biggest problem with Copyright today: The length. When copyright was a 14 year term followed by an optional, one-time 14 year renewal, it was a sane trade-off. You get a monopoly on this book you wrote and in exchange, the public gets full access to do whatever they want with it in 14 or 28 years. If you grew up loving a story, you could write a new story using that character when you got older.

Nowadays, though, copyright length is too long. If my younger son (age 7) reads something published today that he likes, he'd need to wait around 95 years (depending on the situation and assuming no more extensions of copyright - which is a big assumption) before it landed in the public domain. Since it is unlikely that my 7 year old will live to 102, his children or grandchildren might benefit from that work going into the public domain.

This whole system was supposed to encourage authors to produce more works, but if I (at age 39) publish something today, how does it encourage me to make more works when my work is still under copyright and I'm 125 (or would have been had I still been alive)? Is an Isaac Asimov story published in 1950 really encouraging Isaac to write more because it remains copyrighted until 2045? (I can see it now. Zombie Asimov rises from the grave and, after a light brains snack, locates some typewriters and begins work on five new novels.)

Re:The Pirate Bay

[TheGratefulNet]

other shoe: the 'content' owners think that they should get a forever return on the sale/rental of the content.

the duration started out reasonable but they decided to BREAK THE COVENANT and since they feel they can break rules at-will and pay to have custom laws made for them, I concluded they are acting in bad faith and any contract where the other party is in bad faith is nullified.

NULLIFIED.

so, they get what they wanted. a content 'war'. one that they can't possibly win.

fuck, THEY started it. they escalated it. we're just trying to give them a bit of their own medicine. maybe next time they'll respect the rule of law and not mickeymouse around with the protected duration (see what I did there?)

to have a law respected, both sides have to respect it. since that doesn't happen, well, we have what we have today.

aka "what goes around, comes around'.

Re:The Pirate Bay

[Psykechan]

Actually, you do. Once something has been released to the public, no matter how, it becomes part of the public domain. Copyright is a limited privilege that is granted to the creator during which time they are exclusively allowed to distribute content in order to make money off of said content. This was created to further the creation of more works for the public.

I believe that denying the content creators financial gain by circumventing copyright is wrong. However, if content creators continue to extend copyright or use DRM to make sure that their content can not ever return to the public domain, they are stealing from the public. Having the public return the favor is to be expected.

This vicious cycle can be solved, but neither side seems to care enough to fix it.

Re:The Pirate Bay

[ArchieBunker]

Given the acoustics and volumes that bands play I would rather listen outside. If you don't wear earplugs you WILL have hearing damage. Either way earplugs or not its gonna sound muffled.

Re:The Pirate Bay

[meta-monkey]

Also, remember that we, the copiers, are the ones with the fundamental right. If you sing a song, I have an unalienable free speech right to sing the same song. Just because you sung it first doesn't give you the right to use force (your own or through government) to shut me up. I have a right to use my copy machine to copy the book you wrote, the movie you produced, the song you recorded (so long as I did not commit theft of actual property or trespass to obtain the source material).

So we as a society can encourage you to create, though, we will permit you a limited monopoly on reproduction so you can make a profit. This is a voluntary curtailment of my natural rights to free speech and use of my physical property. But only so long as the terms are agreeable and the enforcement is reasonable. I need to get something for what I'm giving up. But once you go power-mad and demand 90+ years of monopoly instead of 14, start spying on people, hacking their computers, blocking access to websites, criminalizing use and modification of property I own, throwing people in jail, so you can make billions on pop garbage then no. Fuck it. Not worth it. Let's go back to the natural rights. I'll keep my right to copy and you can keep your right to suck it. If you can't make a profit, boo-fucking-hoo. I don't need Action Blockbuster #324123 or Teen Pop Idol 14 badly enough to let you do those things to me.

If you want to be reasonable, we can talk. But if you're get too big on yourself and forget who actually has the natural rights here, and that we are doing you a favor by curtailing those rights, for which you should be eternally grateful, then like you said. Contract breached. Null and void. Fuck 'em.

We need more open file storage

[hessian]

I appreciate the reasons for the war on piracy, but TPB was more than a pirate nexus: it was a great place to links to downloads via bittorrent that everyone could get to.

The internet needs to return to its wild west days of open file storage. True, lots of people are going to pirate, but that's technologically inevitable. The anti-piracy people are destroying necessary stuff along with what they fear.

Subject

[Anonymous Coward]

How much do you wanna bet the only reason he quoted the movie Spartacus is because he just torrented it?

Re:"wouldn't be so s****y"

[ArcadeMan]

Slashdot is run by people who live in the United States of America, where you can show people getting shot or worst on live TV, but you can't say "shit" or show a nipple.

You mean...

[Anonymous Coward]

the 800 pound Gorilla, George Lucas, vs the 1200 pound Mouse, Disney?

Because no offense, but Lucas hasn't been a little guy since the 70s. And he's certainly fucked over plenty of ACTUAL creative types thanks to long term copyright (Look at the way they've shat all over the extended universe. Most or all of which I believe they own, since one of the stipulations for using GL's valuable Star Wars IP was assigning the copyrights to one of the LucasBrand copyright arms.) Nevermind all the studios they shuttered just before the Disney deal, and the years of butchering their creative talent prior to that.

Furthermore since Disney would only get the 14+ year old version of things and not all the major changes in storyline etc that happened in the intervening years they might very well license it so they could creative material that was up to date and properly aligned with the current generations expectations of the Star Wars universe are. And in the case they weren't, and stuck to that 14+ year old storyline, it would most likely be due to the new creative material sucking, and the Free Market demanding an alternative canon 'fork' that aligned closer with what the consumers want out of Star Wars. Funny how under the current copyright terms that can't happen, eh? The free market and aligning with consumer demand are in fact being impaired by excessive copyright terms, thus stifling both creative and commercial competition to IPs which are in many cases based off public domain works with a 'spin' to begin with.

I'm Happy to Pay

[Kunedog]

Working hard since 2003 to preserve your right to consume media without the annoyance of paying.

More like "without paying twice" or "without paying in perpetuity."

DRM and copy protection are very much about crippling second-hand sales. Hell, they're about stopping first-hand sales too, in favor of forcing pay-per-view and rental models.