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Pirate Bay Founder: 'I Have Given Up' (vice.com)
The future of illegal torrent websites doesn't look good. As torrent websites continue to disappear, the founder of The Pirate Bay believes the trend is the just the beginning. From an article: While it might look like torrenters are are still fighting this battle, Sunde claims that the reality is more definitive: "We have already lost." [...] Take the net neutrality law in Europe. It's terrible, but people are happy and go like "it could be worse." That is absolutely not the right attitude. Facebook brings the internet to Africa and poor countries, but they're only giving limited access to their own services and make money off of poor people. [...] Well, I have given up the idea that we can win this fight for the internet. The situation is not going to be any different, because apparently that is something people are not interested in fixing. Or we can't get people to care enough. Maybe it's a mixture, but this is kind of the situation we are in, so its useless to do anything about it. We have become somehow the Black Knight from Monty Python's Holy Grail. We have maybe half of our head left and we are still fighting, we still think we have a chance of winning this battle.
i'll have to go back to usenet like i used before all this stupid shit anyway
also fuck the web gopher 4 lyfe
don't give up sad torrent man
we will win
you just have to keep fighting
captcha: mystics
good times.
Half the shit I found by torrenting that I ended up buying... I can't even add up.
I have zero sympathy for IP owners, have fun playing whack-a-mole with video streaming sites you greedy fucks
Face it the movement was based on stolen goods. The end of the movie was already known before it started.
I understand someone wanting to prevent people from benefiting without paying for their product.
I also understand the consumer fed up with being endlessly deceived and abused as the vendor tries to wring every last cent from them.
While piracy has given the appearance of the balance of power being with the latter group, it really never has been. Until our culture and laws change, it never will be.
while I don't use these sites in general (too much weirdness and people poisoning the pool with malware), we do have Internet issues we need to address. Net Neutrality certainly has it's flaws. It's a mistake to say it's the end of Internet piracy however. China pretty much dominates that market (2nd by countries in South America possibly). The IP laws certainly need to be changed from having a virtually unlimited timespan on government protection so people can sit on their laurels. But piracy is certainly far from dead. It's just moved around a bit as all successful forms of live and business tend to do to survive.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
Than being able to download Game of Thrones. Net neutrality only really matters to techies, and we're fighting for our jobs too...
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Every FUCKING day the same shit, different subject. "Torrents are dying", LOL. If it's not torrents it'll be something else. Private trackers? Go back to anonymous FTP sites? SneakerNet? Memo to RIAA, MPAA, and all other myopians: You're playing an ENDLESS game of Whack-a-Mole; you may have think you've bonked the last one on the head, but another will always pop up somewhere else. People who want to pirate will continue to pirate and there is NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT so GIVE UP ALREADY! You will NEVER win. EVER. You'll destroy the Internet and everything you're trying 'save' if you even TRY, so DON'T BOTHER!
YOU CAN'T STOP THE SIGNAL, MAL.
Peace, out.
In any political/social justice fight, just because you aren't winning doesn't mean you should give up. We all get burned out and disillusioned from time to time. The man did his part and had earned a well-deserved break.
PLEASE STAND UP! :-D
After reading TFA, he doesn't seem to mention file-sharing or torrents much- or at all.
He DOES say - " I'm hoping Donald Trump wins this year's election. For the reason that it will fuck up that country so much faster then if a less bad President wins"
BTW... "News" for nerds? The article is dated December 2015.
This is exactly the same thing that happened with Napster and others.
It wasn't JUST the enforcement that caused music piracy to switch from widespread to niche, it was the ability to buy songs on iTunes, and more and more streaming options.
Normal people will jump to piracy when they can see they're being screwed. The music industry wouldn't adapt until people started pirating at a widespread pace, and then they did.
Sure, many people still pirate music, but a majority of people stream it, either by an ad-supported service or by paying for a subscription.
The same thing has finally happened with video. HBO is a good one to use as an example. Game of Thrones was only available with HBO on a pay-TV subscription. They added the ability to buy seasons online, but that was too expensive for a single show.
Then, they did HBO Now (again, Apple helped make that happen), and many people decided that the price was fair for the benefits it gave them, and far fewer people were torrenting it.
The lesson is that when corporations get too greedy, people work around them. They can still be plenty greedy, though, and as long as people feel they're getting a reasonably fair deal, they'll go legit.
Enforcement alone didn't kill TPB, businesses adapting caused fewer people to fight against the enforcement.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
We are. And we don't want it to look like an illegal file sharing website run by a privileged guy who spouts Marxist ideology.
Not only are we "not interested", people actively reject Sunde's ideas about how the world should work. Many of us still remember how socialism actually works from first hand experience.
This battle was lost before it started. That it was fought at all was pretty impressive. Dig back a bit, Sunde gave up shortly after getting out of jail. I don't spite him, I just wanted to correct that.
Maybe you should stop executing your movies?
First, a lot of people are "executing [their] movies" without even being aware of the possibility of executing a movie. By default, Windows Media Player and possibly other video players supporting WMV digital restrictions management will attempt to automatically acquire a license when playing videos restricted by DRM. This process has been shown to lead to malware installation.
Second, videos can be deliberately mis-encoded, with the purported solution being to download a "codec pack" that turns out to be a trojan.
Third, videos can be deliberately mis-encoded to exploit vulnerabilities in parsing of video streams, audio streams, subtitle streams, or the container that multiplexes them. Not all users are up-to-date on patches, particularly when the patch is buried in a service pack in the hundreds of megabytes to gigabytes.
What are you all talking about? First this article says 2015. Second, I torrent daily, never been affected really by any site going down because its a game of wack-a-mole anyways. I can ALWAYS find what I want with less than 2 minutes of research using duckduckgo or Startpage etc. I really don't understand why this... oh wait, clickbait!
P2P will always be in demand because someone somewhere will always want the most popular files. Case-and-point, I lived in Brazil for 10 years of my life. Trust me they will never give it up. There will always be a demand.
This moron is just irrelevant now. TPB was great! But seriously check out whats available on TOR and the next gen of p2p you won't be disappointed!
slashdot haters gonna hate more than reddit it seems
J$W$ DID WTC. HITLER NEVER USED CHEMICAL WEAPONS
Read the quote - this is about the future of the open internet. And that pessimism is warranted. Just look at net neutrality in the US, and the power the big companies wield. Something big needs to change or we're looking at a very different, locked down internet.
but what he says is very relevant of course.
I'll keep fighting this until the end.
Because
no surrender
Who said there wasn't a god. buhbye bandwidth wasters, we're taking back our internet.
Sunde may have founded The Pirate Bay, but he hasn't had anything to do with the site in roughly a decade.
... but he shouldn't deliver such wrong statements. Piracy (or whatever you prefer to call it) is far from dead and, IMHO, is actually winning the war. Fee-based business dealing with the most demanded and easily-copyable goods (e.g., videos or music) have went through a tremendous evolution in the right direction (the one which is beneficial for the the highest number of people), mainly thanks to the tremendous impact of piracy and sites like The Pirate Bay.
:)), but just pro-reality, pro-honesty, pro-the interest-of-the-many and against egoist and unfair impositions from monopolistic alternatives. Saying that big corporations have won this war is clearly wrong and precisely this guy shouldn't support such a misleading idea. If he seriously believes in something other than getting money for himself, he should better think twice before coming to certain conclusions and/or stop thinking that the whole world (of piracy) starts and ends with him.
I have seen a signature around of a Japanese proverb about a nail which describes pretty well what happened to this guy: he was the most important one and, consequently, the easiest target. But this doesn't mean that everyone else has to go through the same problems. Exactly the same than the fee-based businesses had to adapt their offer to compensate the loses from piracy, perhaps he should have modified his activity to survive.
This comment isn't meant to be pro-piracy (how could I know anything about that if I don't even own a boat!
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
The Pirate Bay facilitates theft, which costs people jobs. Then they try to spin it like they're the good guys. I despise self-serving, profit-driven, anti-social corporate-backed legislation as much as the next guy, but stealing is still stealing, and abetting crime is still abetting crime. The Pirate Bay and its founders are not social justice warriors. They're just thieves.
Some of us are even over 50....and CLOSE to 60 :)
I go back far enough to remember tubes in televisions and radios (valves to those of you in England).
Worked on and burned my fingers on many of them also. ;)
I use to download torrents, for movies I didn't want to pay 20 bucks for, then I'd find them in the 1-5 dollar bins and buy them, delete the torrent, rip it to ISO. Got a pretty good LEGIT library of videos now.
Sunde is not specifically talking about sites that sell illegal goods/services, he's talking about the Internet as a whole. He's saying freedom has taken and nobody seems to care. Everything is tracked by both corporations and Governments.Digesting, monetizing, profiteering and assessing your threat level from your online behavior without your consent or even knowledge, you can no longer have an opinion that differs from the masses without ramifications (job loss, social outing, potentially incarceration), you can't go to certain sites, you can't even have certain information - it's the illegalization of information that's the scariest, the outlawing of ideas... and we're there.
I think people are just realistic about the fights they can win. I think the better path to solving these kind of problems is to get the government to create a media library in the interest of preserving entertainment history:) that way the government pays for the servers:)
Food. Shelter. Education. Transportation. Health Care. Those matter. Facebook, Snapchat and even Netflix less so. And we're not talking about Facebook or even Netflix going away, we're talking about them cost a bit more to use. And the next Youtube will bleed a little more money up front. That's it. Compared with coal jobs going away without any real replacement or the various American healthcare crises that's not even small potatoes.
If you want NN stop abandoning the lower classes. If you want them to spare time for your issues spare time for theirs.
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Online piracy is currently the predominant form of active anti-semitism globally. Movies are made by jewish people, as the scriptwriters, the directors, the financing movie moguls, all of them and even the large part of actors are ethnically, culturally and often religiously jewish people. Hollywood is the mini-Israel, but too many gentiles don't want to pay for watching jewish-made movies, because anti-semitic folly is rampant among them.
Similarly, the leadership, the manangers and the financial investors of major entertainment / music labels are jewish people. Most of the pop-culture performing musicians are not, because such a form of "art" (if it can be called art at all) is too shallow for the excellent jewish minds, so they are tending towards performing the more worthy classical music instead. Nonetheless, jewish progressive musician Bob Dylan recently got the Nobel Prize in literature.
All in all, if you dislike jews for whatever reason and don't want to "enrich" them with your purchase, please practice what you preach and refrain from consuming jewish-made media. Piracy is not a solution, because that amounts to actively practiced anti-semitism, which is totally intolareable. It is not different at all from the Crystal Nacht, when german mobs of 1933 broke jewish shops' front glass and took whatever they wanted for "free".
Even if you cannot stop online pirating due to pathological addiction, please only download anime and manga, because jewish people do not live in Japan, thus your actions will not be directly hurtful towards the Chosen Nation. On the other hand, be warned that far-east asian media is all too often perverted and immoral, it will surely sicken your mind and defile your body. What you pay is what you get...
Torrents catalogs, search, reviews can be distributed over users near same as download data. But torrents websites not involving with this because money. They made millions from ads.
The music and movie industries won once we let them call it 'piracy' and we adopted names like 'the pirate party' and 'the pirate bay' its filesharing. You are sharing information, not stealing. Poll a country and ask if they are against internet piracy, you will get a large population that says they are against it. Ask if they are against filesharing, and almost no one will say they are against it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VrCCpaEoxI
ah yes. brazil. the ghetto of the internet.
dont pirate me bruh.
In TFA the guy hope Trump will win the future election, hello?
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
Following the original TPB cases, it's evident that this is doomed, not just because the citizenry of the world aren't behind it, but because nations will flat out break their own laws to stop it.
The Net neutrality law is a good thing, not bad. It makes sure all data is handled the same and not certain types of protocols being limited in speed.
The linked article is from Dec 11 2015, I remember reading it when it came out. I don't get it. Is Slashdot participating in a disinformation campaign to weaken the morale of those who still want to try to do something about these issues?
First, if the copyright holder doesn't want to distribute the film, they have the right to make that decision.
How does giving them "the right to make that decision" "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts", as the preamble to the copyright clause of the United States Constitution puts it? What benefit does the public derive from a dog in the manger?
Second, for the specific content you mention, you can buy DVDs online.
The DVDs I found of Song of the South and Spartakus and... don't appear to be licensed by the copyright owners. The DVD of Emperor of the Night is authentic, but it's region coded to be unplayable in Slashdot's home country.
The problem with uncensored internet (or uncensored anything, really) is that uncensored means it allows "insert thing that I don't think should exist here". If "thing that I don't like" can be prohibited so can "other thing that I don't care about". As long as the majority of people think that prohibiting "thing that I don't think should exist", we'll have arbitrary censorship.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
Perhaps back to old school bbs.
I dont know but it will be back bigger than ever.
All it would take is one billionair with remorse.
So, you like, just have extra money to throw away on the off-chance that HBO will produce something -- ANYTHING -- worth watching this time?
No.
I activate a month of HBO now when they have something I know is worth watching.
That means for $15 I can watch all Game of Thrones up until now, all Westworld up until now, all of Silicon Valley up until now... or a much of movies or what have you.
I can watch as much of that as a like in a month, and turn off the subscription, having spent only $15...
When Game of Thrones starts up I'll pay them $15 over the course of a few months to watch the season. But what I could do, if I were super cheap, is wait until the end of the season, pay them just $15, and be done with it.
I am spending less money than a movie ticket on a month of entertainment I know I'll enjoy...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
there is always a means of transmission be it by donkey / soulseeker / direct connect or others. As last restort you can still use the post. I mean that is how i used to get my c64 and amiga games, but lets hope it doesn't come to that ;)
There will always be pirates. Pirating in the current form with torrents is debatable but all things change. I can tell you I do enjoy Netflix's service but I pirate the living shit out of Music, Movies and tv Shows. That will never change....just maybe evolve into something else.
This one hits home. While I haven't downloaded from thepiratebay.org in awhile, it's access was important to me, it showed an open Internet. I guess it's 4chan.org now, this only because it's hosted by cloudflare.com as well. https://www.robtex.com/?dns=4c...
Centralization will disappear but good luck keeping hashes out of blockchains.
Archie is for winners!
The whole point of copyright is to create artificial scarcity so that authors are financially motivated.
What "financial[] motivat[ion]" arises from enriching scalpers or from not making a work available at all? The economic goal of "artificial scarcity" could be served just as well by a regime of compulsory licensing with a reasonable royalty payable to the copyright owner, such as mechanical licensing of musical compositions used in sound recordings.
They have more patience than innovators or businessmen.
Then time is money, so business folks get out, but you can live forever.
I live in India and love Korean movies. It's impossible to buy\get Korean movies here without torrent sites. Some of the not-so-known movies are only available on torrents - you have to wait for weeks to download because of lack of seeds but it's worth it. Lack of torrents will also limit the exposure to different cultures and films.
I am a law-abiding citizen; however this situation is complex and penetrates to a core of who and what we are. Our politicians wish to paint this as a basic issue, where as its not. For quite some time, we have noticed that the music and entertainment industries have used copy protection as a way of telling the common man that he is controlled, that he will not do certain things. In America, this is not so cut and dried: we have a concept of freedom. I tend to pay for my entertainment, however the people have spoken that we will not be held up by an elitist minority and have de facto boycotted television, movies and other entertainments. We are not our music and movies...the majority of our lives dwell in our jobs and careers and individual projects. So their point is moot.
The reason why I'm pro-torrent is because I need from time to time, older versions of various programs and data. Unfortunately, with the persecution of these sites, it has become more and more difficult to use the not-so-sexy, but NECESSARY, features of torrenting. Hopefully our leaders in this area will continue to struggle.
When you use words like net neutrality, you get a picture in head. Something very specific, and one that means something. We all think we know what the term means, but we don't. Almost never, do we, slashdot, as a collective group, understand what's actually being talked about when governments and telecoms use the term. And it's never implemented the same way, or to the same ends, twice. We need to call it something else. It's time.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
Nor is it licensed, which, unlike contract, does not require an exchange of equivalent value to be valid. Because you do not need a license to use a copyrighted work. Copyrights do not restrict or forbid the use of the product.
What about the contract with copyrights? Goes to public domain, limited times, and was for sheet music, recordings and writings only. Not non-expressive content like object code and executables? Since they (you? probably. you talk like a parasite) broke the contract, the contract of copyright itself is null and void.
Maybe this idea is a viable idea to create an alternative for torrents?