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.

Comments

Re:Stolen Goods

[tepples]

Piracy is not theft. Nor is murder, jaywalking, trespass, or driving while using a mobile phone.

However, copyright infringement resembles trespass more than it resembles theft.

download, then buy

[p51d007]

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.

Re:download, then buy

[BronsCon]

Quick question, and please answer honestly as you're not being judged or "rated" on your answer. It's "for science", shall we say.

How many of those would you have bought if you had not torrented them first?

Re:download, then buy

[BronsCon]

I've only gotten a few responses thus far, one of which really had nothing to do with the question being asked. The other two, however, are precisely what I was expecting and align with what myself and my friends and family do, as well. If there are any RIAA or MPAA execs (or execs of their member companies) here, take note.

Piracy can either equal sales or no sales, entirely on the quality of the content. Piracy does not, de-facto, equal lost sales (in fact, it never truly equals lost sales, though it may mean no sales); for quality content, however, it does equal more sales, form people who would otherwise not have purchased.

For shit-tier content, though... Yes, piracy = no sales, and rightly fucking so! The whole reason I started pre-pirating my purchases is because the quality of content dropped dramatically over a very short period, right around the time the industry stopped allowing returns and I got burned one too many times.

Stop making shit content and it will sell!

Re: oh no

[Gr8Apes]

The rest of us come here because it's mildly more entertaining than going to an actual zoo.

This comment was enough reason to come here today. It was certainly more entertaining than the zoo, and only took 3 min