Have you seen the front page of Pirate Bay?

by Flemlord • 17 years ago

154 63 17 years ago

zaius• 17 years ago

Lawrence Lessig did a speech a while ago about the read-write web: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xbRE_H5hoU

In that, he talks about how, when the phonograph came out, people were up-in-arms that it would destroy the performance and enjoyment of music as a social thing, which clearly happened. The music world is changing back to that again, and I'm kind of glad.

Also, he does a bitching powerpoint.

timcederman• 17 years ago

I love this as an illustration of how nothing changes. http://www.flickr.com/photos/nevernameless/320619642/

jimbokun3• 17 years ago

I like the phrase "authorized jobber." Much more catchy than "middleman."

rms• 17 years ago

Good article by a defense attorney on Torrentfreak: http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-trial-understanding-f...

calvin• 17 years ago

Small print on the image says, "This cartoon is NOT Copyright By..."

I love it.

devinnived• 17 years ago

It says "This cartoon is NOT Copyright By Dylan Horrocks '09".

Dylan is a cartoonist from New Zealand. Here is a high resolution version of the comic ( http://dylanhorrocks.vox.com/library/post/not-copyright.html ) , and a post about the NZ Copyright Amendment Act that inspired it ( http://dylanhorrocks.vox.com/library/post/why-i-oppose-s92-o... ).

jim-greer• 17 years ago

Hear hear. It's about time that someone pointed out that downloading gigs and gigs of movies, games, and music is just like posting a video of a kitten with copyrighted music in the background.

vaksel2• 17 years ago

Thats MPAA/RIAA's fault. They spent so much effort enforcing bullshit aspects of copyright, that they lost the goodwill of people to enforce the non-BS portion.

jonursenbach• 17 years ago

No, it's our fault for having an archaic copyright system that people are still trying to enforce instead of fixing the root issues.

sangaya• 17 years ago

The part about the kitten isn't directly relevant to the pirate bay, I'll give you that. Though I look at the cartoon as more of an over all social commentary about our current state of affairs; not "this is our situation."

All too often the copyright lawyers said DMCA takedowns against just such videos. Heck they've sent takedowns to youtube because a person was singing copy written music (cough viacom cough).

As someone already said and I'm sure many others will agree, the current system is broken.

The internet allows for piracy at a scale that far surpasses the scale of sharing tapes among friends, but it's not going away and need to be capitalized on. It's a dirt cheap distribution method that should be used to it's fullest potential.

The argument that a pirated copy equals a lost sale is total bunk. I would have bought maybe 1% of what I've downloaded. Why? Cause the other 99% is crap. And I don't know that until I've heard it. I don't hear it until I download it. The radios are owned and controlled so that the one good song on the whole album is played, and the rest isn't.

If someone can find it I'd be grateful, but WIRED had a chart in an article sometime about 2004 showing that: average length of song is trending down, number of songs per album trending down, number of new artists trending down, number of albums per artist trending down, cost per album trending up, piracy trending up, and sales trending down. So yeah, it must be solely the fault of the internet and those dirty pirates that the music business is slowly falling.....

vaksel2• 17 years ago

same goes for movies too, most of them nowadays barely go longer than 1:30.

jimbokun3• 17 years ago

"If someone can find it I'd be grateful, but WIRED had a chart in an article sometime about 2004 showing that: average length of song is trending down, number of songs per album trending down, number of new artists trending down, number of albums per artist trending down, cost per album trending up, piracy trending up, and sales trending down. So yeah, it must be solely the fault of the internet and those dirty pirates that the music business is slowly falling....."

Uh, what? All those facts seem pretty consistent with artists losing sales due to piracy. Fewer new artists and existing artists making less music could indicate that piracy is taking away incentives for people to make music. Even cost per album could be due to trying to re-coup more revenue from falling sales (not saying this is a rational strategy, but not inconsistent with losing music sales to piracy).

jacoblyles3• 17 years ago

>"The internet allows for piracy at a scale that far surpasses the scale of sharing tapes among friends, but it's not going away and need to be capitalized on."

With services available like the Pirate Bay, an artist might have millions of fans enjoying his music but there will be no way for him to capitalize on it. The only way I can see to monetize bit torrent for artists are very indirect and way out of proportion to the enjoyment they create, akin to putting google ads on a popular website. Examples include using recorded music as an advertisement for big, expensive concerts and begging people to donate after they already have your music for free.

>"The argument that a pirated copy equals a lost sale is total bunk. I would have bought maybe 1% of what I've downloaded."

How much of that did you actually buy? For many people it is 0%.

Money has flowed out of music lately. The industry as a whole is shrinking. Downloaders sometimes say it is because "music isn't as good as it used to be". The music industry blames it on easy free downloads. I am more inclined to believe the latter. There is still lots of great music out there.

That said, I don't think there is any way to stop what is happening, and it is incumbent on artists that want to survive to deal with it as best they can. Unfortunately, that might mean going back to that day job at Starbucks for most of them.

sketerpot• 17 years ago

Those guys have style, and always have.

chacha102• 17 years ago

I loved reading their Legal page that showcases how dumb companies are. When will companies get a clue that if they make it inconvenient for customers, people are going to torrent it. (One of the reasons iTunes is widely used, its easy to pay a buck for a song instead of torrenting it)

jotto2• 17 years ago

To be fair, the Pirate Bay is almost exclusively tracking pirated software. It's also unfair to compare tapes and radio to the mass distribution and indexing ability of the Internet.

kajecounterhack3• 17 years ago

I agree, which is also why I think this spectrial was a mishap to begin with. They should have not attacked torrenting in general, they needed to attack the fact that Pirate Bay did nothing to remove torrents even by request. They also needed to show that Pirate Bay tracks almost exclusively pirated software/movies/music.

They went after the wrong thing, because torrenting isn't inherently bad. It's only bad if people use it in the wrong way. Which, granted, happens a lot.

mrtron2• 17 years ago

Clearly a technology is not to blame, or Google would be at fault for linking to them as well. But using torrents the 'wrong' way?

File sharing is legal in Sweden, which is why they have been able to operate for this long in a very transparent way (in terms of who runs the massive site).

Downloading music/movies is legal for personal use for me in Canada. Annoyingly, we pay a tax, but that is a whole other can of worms.

Why would the Pirate Bay remove torrents by request? They are doing nothing wrong. The MPAA/RIAA's course of action should have been to try and track down and sue individual downloaders in the US. The reason they aren't keen on that anymore is the bad publicity of suing regular folks and especially children.

I also really dislike the term 'wrong' here because it is not clear that it is wrong to copy a file. Downloads can lead to higher sales through exposure, and to me the rampant litigation to fight change (as demonstrated by the cartoon) is wrong.

mrtron2• 17 years ago

Tapes went well beyond what you are giving them credit for - the mixtape scene in rap pre-released compilations of hits and were massively popular. Many artists claim they went the equivalent of platinum on mixtapes in NY alone. The distribution chains were also quite complex and well defined. However - it also served as a method for new artists to gain exposure so artists would actually leak their own material to good DJ's, sometimes even paying them to use their material. So it was a symbiotic relationship, like downloading music is.

It wasn't just teenage kids recording the radio. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mix_Tape:_The_Art_of_Cassette_C... if you want way too much information on it.

fabjan• 17 years ago

http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=pirate+bay+80+percent

apag• 17 years ago

For posterity (hopefully this link will last longer than the front page), here’s what was on it:

http://static.thepiratebay.org/doodles/cartoonish.gif

johnbender• 17 years ago

I think its time to create a gui in visual basic and put the ever-loving-smackdown on the RIAA

Jem3• 17 years ago

This isn't reddit. The CSI gui gag is not likely to get you massive upvotes here.

ObieJazz• 17 years ago

And yet, a link to a one-sided propaganda comic strip gets 103 upvotes.

dgordon• 17 years ago

But saying "This isn't reddit" will get you a few.

sharkbrainguy• 17 years ago

Just to make it blatantly obvious that this comic was not specifically made about this situation.

http://dylanhorrocks.vox.com/library/post/getting-ready-for-...

P.S. not strictly relevant but Dylan Horrocks is a really great guy and you should all read Hicksville

nazgulnarsil• 17 years ago

The problem with digital distribution is that it fucks with our already imperfect understanding of how an economy functions. Our explanations of how price works generally relies upon supply and demand as well as the cost of production. How do you analyze these variables when supply is infinite and the cost of production is zero?

This scares a lot of people. The more your business model relies on the status quo the more it scares you.

lvecsey• 17 years ago

I think it's wrong to assume that the economy, with the cash transaction at the heart of it, is somehow an immortal or god given / evolutionary design. Imagine if it was replaced with a smart-card where your transaction had a programmable, algorithmic component to it. Now all of a sudden the system can become a lot more creative, and even carry a 'vote' like characteristic that will survive multiple successive transfers.

ashleyw• 17 years ago

The right to violate copyright is part of our human rights?

Now I'm an occasional pirate (mainly TV, since I'm not in the US), but these guys are bonkers; I know pirating is wrong, however these guys seem to think that nobody should have the rights to their own work, and anyone should be allowed to take what they want without giving anything back to the owner. Is it just me, or is that absurd?

alexfarran• 17 years ago

I think the point is that there are other rights besides copyright, the right to privacy for example, and that where they come into conflict copyright should not automatically supersede all other rights.

tocomment• 17 years ago

doki_pen2• 17 years ago

Copyright is not a human right. This is why it runs out. It was meant to be a way to encourage people to create a long time ago. Sharing, on the other hand, is a human right. People were willing to sacrafice this right when they had no means of sharing. Many things have changed since then and we need to think of what rights we sacrifice and what we get in return.

mjgoins• 17 years ago

If you're not happy about how "one sided" this is, I'd suggest http://questioncopyright.org if you want a more reasoned argument.

The gist of it is that if we all abandoned copyright, we'd lose a few things, but the gains would outweigh the losses.

I agree, but I also don't like big-budget movies, and don't lay any closed-source games, so I guess I'm in the tiny minority.

Have you seen the front page of Pirate Bay?

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