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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 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.
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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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.
This +1000.
The IP owners may be greedy assholes, but the way to get back at them is simply to not watch the movies or listen to the music. I can't say that I find it hard to resist either - nearly all movies seem pretty pointless to me.
No. It was based on copyright infringed goods. Different crime.
Piracy is not theft. Nor is murder, jaywalking, trespass, or driving while using a mobile phone. This does not automatically make it right, nor does that make it wrong. It is its own crime that needs to be judged on its own merits.
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.
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.
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.
If the homework requires watching a particular film, then the school should provide you with a copy of the film or show it in lesson time in the same way as set books for literature were provided by the school (or at least they were when I was at school).
All. Almost all. Slashdot is the unpleasant-smelling uncle at the Thanksgiving dinner table who was laid off during the dot-com bubble, decided to retire early, and spends the rest of his days complaining about how new-fangled touch-screen smartphones don't support vi keybindings the way God and Ken Thompson intended, how systemd would never have happened under a Libertarian president, and that global warming is a feminist conspiracy.
The rest of us come here because it's mildly more entertaining than going to an actual zoo.
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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.
Sunde's socialist perspective is weird to me; I can't agree with him on that stuff. And yet, my vision is a lot closer to his than to yours.
When you give $n/month figures for music and movies, from my perspective that looks extremely dishonest, because you're presenting it as though the user only pays money. I pay slightly more money for piracy than you're paying for your 'legit' services. (Not going to say what it is, but people should be able to guess it, and the only reason I'm paying 3 times more than similar pirates, is that I have so much redundancy and overlap, in order to keep things perfectly reliable.) It's not about the money.
You're not in control of the software. You don't have competitive selection in the software, for a given service. If you want to watch HBO, you have to run HBO Now or else you don't get to watch the show. Same for Netflix, Amazon, etc. Want an integrated menu where Game of Thrones is right next to House of Cards, plays with the same player with the same controls, etc? You're fucked. Internet go down again, but your LAN is up so you wanna play from local storage? You're fucked. And if someone wants to show you an ad (I don't know if Netflix and HBO do that yet, but some services do) then you're going to see that ad.
You're running someone else's software. The software is their friend, not your friend. The software doesn't use standards. The software might show you ads. The software cannot be security-audited. The software wants information that it shouldn't need. The software doesn't play well with its competitors' software. The software leaks and has bugs that attackers can exploit to install their own malware, and that you're not allowed to fix.
That's absurd. It's almost luddism. I don't understand how technies, especially, don't see that as extremely infuriating and unacceptable. You are paying fewer dollars than me, but you are paying so much more than me, in convenience, security, reliability, and even aesthetics. WHAT. THE. FUCK.
(And you call it "no hassles." We have very different ideas of what a hassle is.)
Piracy fixes all that. As long as some people keep their standards high instead of slipping into the hell you're living, piracy will remain.
Thing is, this isn't even just about media. I'm seeing more and more people turn control of their computers (including the ones in their pockets and on their nightstands and in their cars) over to others. You're paying for so many things, and paying in so many ways that you don't even know, all because you think it's "normal" to be running someone else's software. You think it's normal for the software that you run, to serve its publisher's interests over yours.
It's not normal. It's fucking weird. And if we can push back in media, maybe we can push back everywhere.
Please. If we can make this all go back to paying-for-things with only money, holy shit, that'd be a victory for everyone. But it's not going to happen as long as you keep using those other currencies, or as long as you stay unconscious of the exchange rate.
Run your own software. (By that, I don't necessarily mean you have to write it; but it has to serve YOU.) Don't compromise. And if media won't play with it, pirate that media. Deny them the money, such that the only way they can get paid, is if they comply to standards so that you can use it with your software.
Money or nothing.
Live free or die.
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
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
This.
As someone who does the same thing, I truly feel bad for the smaller labels who promote via torrent sites, every time such a site gets shut down. Major label stuff can be discovered through almost any music streaming service, but most indie stuff either doesn't exist on a given service or is never played in "radio" mode, so you'll never hear it if you don't already know about it.
Here's the hard truth about the music industry's "war on piracy". It's not about piracy, it's about killing the indie scene so the incumbent labels are the only source for music. It's purely anti-competitive, full-stop.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
I accidentally invented dinosaurs while trying to invent beer in my cave.
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?
I find when I sit in a dark room and wait for the world to change, then nothing happens. That is basically what your recommendation amounts to.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
This.
The real theft is not copying, but rather copyright itself!
Specifically, excessive copyright term lengths are theft of the Public Domain, and DRM is theft of device owners' property rights.
(By the way, "IP" is not a thing.)
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
"That's absurd. It's almost luddism. I don't understand how technies, especially, don't see that as extremely infuriating and unacceptable. You are paying fewer dollars than me, but you are paying so much more than me, in convenience, security, reliability, and even aesthetics. WHAT. THE. FUCK."
This isn't just a characteristic in media, it's a cancer all over the place. From industrial machines to the lone person downloading music on their iphone. A lot of people accept this situation, I contribute it to our declining education, wages and salaries. I'm seeing more and more people just accept the way things are, I don't see people saying "No way, I don't want it this way". You should see the freakout I get when I ask machine manufacturers to give me full access to their software and PLC or get the hell out of my building (All of them break after that). I can't afford having a machine go down and I have no clue why and I won't find out why until the service guy flies in from the east coast or Europe somewhere when I have perfectly qualified people on the spot, including me.