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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.
Face it the movement was based on stolen goods. The end of the movie was already known before it started.
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.
The problem is that cable providers have only gone from "I am the only service in town so I will charge through the nose for it" to "Torrents are illegal so I'm not responding to it". No company seems to be willing to be realistic about how changing times should be changing their business model and customers are very much being caught in between. Netflix was able to make some progress but really they are not the service they should be because the current broadcasters have been granted so many ways to create barriers.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I think it's more than that.
If you take a step back and look away from just piracy, content-sharing illegal or not, what he's talking about is the acceptance of Corporate provided, and dominated, structured privacy-controlled platforms. Or the reverse, personal documenting platforms. Pick your narrative... Yes, you could say this started with Facebook, others, but it doesn't restrict it to just social media. Consider browser tracking, purchase tracking, etc.. and extending into the commoditization of every aspect of online life, that has come to fruition.
I think people conveniently forgot, that they have, or had the ability to shape what systems of communication were the winners and losers. And what we see is that convenience won, over personal privacy and their online future 'portfolio', from that.
I have to wonder. Every time I sign up on a new website, be it for work, product purchases, whatever.... just how many databases, across how many sectors of society, are being updated. And I'm not even talking about whether this extends to Government surveillance. That's a whole OTHER discussion.
The Corporate 'profiling' of everyone's online life is VERY disturbing once you go down that rabbit hole. The potential of where it might lead, is what the real concern is. There's a reason students of history are cautious and concerned with this. The question is, how do we get the majority of everyone else, to realize that. And more importantly, act on it.
Some of us are over 40.
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Sunde may have founded The Pirate Bay, but he hasn't had anything to do with the site in roughly a decade.
Awwww.....how quaint!
I remember when I felt the same way, and swore I wouldn't become that guy either.
Enjoy becoming him.