Why the free software community cares about The Pirate Bay

http://news.northxsouth.com/2009/05/16/the-pirate-bay-free-software/

by brl • 17 years ago

18 37 17 years ago

news.northxsouth.com

daeken2• 17 years ago

This article, IMO, exemplifies a lack of understanding by members of the free software community. You can't say "The international free software movement has decisively placed themselves in opposition to laws which restrict information freedom by prioritizing intellectual property and the ownership of information by corporations over the civil right to information and software." while supporting licenses like the GPL which depend solely on copyright law to restrict the way software is distributed.

anigbrowl3• 17 years ago

Indeed, but there are two qualitative differences: the GPL's terms are fair, and those who get sued for violation are actively making money out of the copyright infringement. So are some music and video pirates, but many more are just inclined to share, same way I used to put songs on cassette tape for friends in the 1980s.

alain94040• 17 years ago

I strongly disagree with the premise of this article.

There is a major difference between free software, which obeys and even relies on copyright to enforce its rules, and this generalized pirate movement which wants the right to copy anything, anytime, freely.

Herring• 17 years ago

Or you could listen to the FSF. They disagree & they're responsible for the gnu & the gpl.

http://torrentfreak.com/the-war-on-sharing-why-the-fsf-cares...

triplefox• 17 years ago

Or if you want a strictly economic explanation: The law is a cosmetic blemish upon what could be a top-to-bottom free system.

The high level would be original free software and media - tools and inspiration.

The medium level is derivatives; things made using the tools and media built upon other media.

The low level is the consumer level, where the best things are filtered and distributed to the public.

The system takes the lowest-cost option at each step: remixing material and building on open source is easier than starting from scratch. Digital distribution is easier than physical distribution.

But it is entirely dependent upon the source material being permissive-use. When it isn't, derivatives become illegal material, and people will subsequently choose not to make value-added derivatives because any profit motive that would have existed is gone; settlement and legal fees are likely to wipe out any gains.

This doesn't affect the consumers of media, however, because consumers are largely anonymous and hard to target by the legal system. Thus you get widespread piracy, but few derivatives.

seculo21rojo• 17 years ago

This article is right on. And, in fact, I don't think it goes far enough.

The fight for the Public Commons is a struggle that has been going on for a long time and it just so happens that the internet is another battlefield in which it takes place. Especially since the end of World War 2, and the growth of contemporary corporatism, there is a struggle between privatization (where a few people profit off of resources that should belong to everyone) and the Public Commons (where resources are used for the benefit of the public, i.e. everyone).

This struggle becomes more and more acute every day. People are giving their lives in defense of the Public Commons. In Bolivia, people took to the streets to fight Bechtel's attempt to steal water resources from the Commons and claim ownership of it for themselves so that a few individuals could benefit by selling Bolivians the water that belongs to them in the first place. Many Bolivians gave their life in this struggle because it required defending themselves against Bechtel's private death squads. But, in the end, the Commons won -- but at a great sacrifice. And there are hundreds of examples of this type of conflict happening all over the world, every single day. And, this is why what The Pirate Bay is doing is justified. Because it subverts and sabotages the efforts of the RIAA cartel while promoting the ideals of sharing and co-operation in the world.

I cheer every time Final Cut Studio is downloaded for free via BitTorrent. Microsoft and Adobe and Apple and all of these corrupt corporations use bribery and extortion to do what they can to destroy the Public Information Commons. Shell and Exxon and Bechtel use private death squads to murder labor activists and indigenous communities to fight other forms of the Public Commons.

A former CIA agent tells the story about how he & other operatives in Castro's Cuba would pour cement into milk headed for children in public schools. The "contra" terrorists who fought the Public Commons in Nicaragua raped and killed a group of Catholic nuns and when Archbishop Oscar Romero spoke out about it in a sermon, these butchers gunned him down during the mass.

This is the level of reality that defenders of the Commons face. Peer-to-peer networks make it possible for one of these international criminal cartels to fear their utter annihilation, to be replaced by the Public Commons.

How any decent human being could "strongly disagree with the premise of this" is beyond me. This is why I support The Pirate Bay and any other project which would sabotage a future of corporate privatization.

quoderat2• 17 years ago

In a war of large corporations with nearly-unlimited resources against someone who just wants to listen to some music, I'll take the someone who just wants to listen to some music every time.

I'm a fan of the underdog, especially one who's had progressively more power removed from their bailiwick -- fair use? Almost gone. Time-shifting? They'd take that away if they could. DMCA? What a travesty.

Time the balance shifts the other way for a while.

daeken2• 17 years ago

I agree, I just dislike all of this being linked to the free software community, and dislike the hypocrisy of a good portion of the community with respect to copyright.

gustavo_duarte3• 17 years ago

You mean 'just wants to listen to some music' _without paying for it_.

Regarding the DMCA and fair use restrictions, I agree it's something we must fight against, but I don't think piracy is an effective way to go about it.

anigbrowl3• 17 years ago

Arguably not: http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2009/04/study-pirates-buy-...

One reason that people listen to music for free online (which I usually do via YouTube) is because the selection of music on radio is dreadful - most commercial radio is owned by the same handful of companies, and it's the same greatest hits mixed in with the latest heavy rotation day-in day-out. I don't even own a radio any more - and as an ex-DJ, I am pretty sure I have spent far more on music than you will in your whole lifetime.

quoderat2• 17 years ago

No. I have both downloaded and bought far more music than most people on this site. I no longer own my massive collection of 3,000+ CDs -- they got stolen -- but have rebuilt it up to about 500.

I've also probably downloaded 1TB+ of music over the years, so I could give it a good listen before I bought anything.

Not to mention the hundreds of concerts I've attended over the years....

DanielStraight8• 17 years ago

So what about when a group like Pirate Bay decides to start using GPL'ed software without following the GPL rules because they don't care about copyright?

I'm sorry, but I think music theft is about one of the lamest things you can do. If you really like music, you'll support the artists. I don't want to hear the BS line, "oh, they don't get any money from the record sales anyway." Sure, so when the record companies collapse and there's no one to distribute their albums or pay the recording costs, then what? They may not get much money DIRECTLY from record sales, but that's really not the point. If you steal music, you are completely and utterly useless to the music community, and it would be better off without you. You are a short-sighted mooch, and you're just bringing people down for your own temporary benefit.

jimmyjim2• 17 years ago

> Sure, so when the record companies collapse and there's no one to distribute their albums or pay the recording costs, then what?

What a ridiculous thing to say. What would happen then? The middlemen would be cut out. Artists will distribute their creations themselves. If they're not savvy enough for that, optimized CMS will sprout about that'll make it easier for them to do so. The best thing is that record-chosen records won't come to top, the best and most preferred things will (to use a crude example, they'll find their way to the top in a Digg-like fashion). This is exactly what needs to happen. This is exactly the turn that needs to be taken. As for the recording costs -- well, the only people that can afford it at the moment are the artists that are ALREADY at the top. Musicianship is a risky business to get into in the first place, and it's just really their responsibility to make smart and systematic decisions themselves in the circumstances they're in. Beside that, the matter of the fact is that it's becoming very possible to do more 1) with less people, and 2) with less money. Case in point: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1UPMEmCqZo -- a HQ video, that anyone reasonable would have to admit beats professionally-created movies in terms of quality (I'll myself admit that the acting isn't the best it could have been).

When this happens, a new connection will be born between the artists and the customers. And I think this newfangled connection might encourage a few more people to purchase music (which, hopefully, will go at a cheaper cost than before due to this new, middleman-less, direct artist-to-customer relationship).

pj• 17 years ago

I think you really underestimate the difficulty in distribution.

gustavo_duarte3• 17 years ago

I also have hope for more independent creation, especially since I prefer indie / weird art to blockbuster stuff. But as much as I like your scenario, copyright still plays an important role in it to enable creators to live doing this.

I wonder if people's attitudes will change when The Pirate Bay is ripping off these independent artists, as opposed to the Big Evil Cos.

DanielStraight8• 17 years ago

I agree with the other poster that said you underestimate the difficulty of distribution.

Consider cases that may be closer to home:

Which do people use more, Windows or Linux? Which one can you get from your computer supplier (let's not bother with the 0.0000001% of computers that come with Linux)?

How do most people on Linux get software, install from source or a package manager? Which one involves a middleman? Same answer to both, the package manager.

How do most people get food? A grocery store or farmers?

Middlemen are a very necessary part of society. It is simply impractical for everyone who wants food to have to personally get it from a farmer. No farmer has enough time to sit there and sell food to everyone who needs to eat, and no one has time to get all their food directly from the people that produce it.

Similarly, you CAN go searching MySpace and SoundClick and CDBaby, hoping for a gem (and I have found some), or you can turn on the radio, hear something you like, drive to Target and buy the CD. In order to find a complete library worth of music direct from the artists, you have to spend all your time searching for music. The artists would also have to spend all their time promoting and wouldn't have any time to actually make music.

Your CMS is just another middleman. Even if you steal music, you're using a middleman, the P2P network. People who steal music don't even make the effort to get it from the artist directly.

YouTube is just another middleman in your video example. Here's a question. How did you find that YouTube video?

The very fact that you're on Hacker News means you aren't opposed to middlemen. Hacker News is a middleman! There is very little original content here. It's all links. It's a one-stop shop for stuff you COULD find on your own, you just don't have the time to. Where's the direct hacker-to-news relationship?

Now, Hacker News doesn't charge for their service, but if they did, breaking in to get the current article list without paying would be no different than music theft. And yes, it is theft. I don't care what the legal term is.

cschwarm2• 17 years ago

I think your point of view is too idealistic. You're attributing too much responsibility to the record companies. Sure, a handful of them dominate the market and their oligopoly has negative effects.

But the economic attributes of the product itself is the origin of the current market situation.

Consider the following though experiment: People form a club or cooperative. There's a monthly membership fee which is used to pay recording costs for artists, administration (legal fees, secretaries, etc.), and the necessary rights to distribute the recordings to its members.

In other words, no large anonymous record company owns the music, anymore -- but just normal people like you an me. But would such a club or cooperative act very differently to a record company? I don't think so:

1.) The club would not allow free redistribution of the recordings. Otherwise nobody had an incentive to be a club member in the first place and the club could not collect enough money to pay artists. In fact, the club would probably also restrict the amount of downloads per month. Otherwise people may be try to become members for a month, download all stuff, and then cancel membership to join another club to do the same thing, again.

2.) The core problem of such a club would be allocation of the collected membership fees. Which artist's music should be bought and recorded? Should the club make lots of low quality recordings or a few high-quality recordings or some mixture thereof? How much money should be spend on advertising of the recordings and club membership? These questions may be answered by some sort of Digg-Style voting but that presupposes that people are motivated to participate. In most cases, though, people have better things to do. This opens a window of opportunity for the most motivated to skew the results, for example, artists. We've seen something similar also happen to Digg.

3.) If a consumer is not sure which style of music and artists he or she likes most, it's most rational to become member of the largest club. In other words, there's also a strong tendency for the large clubs to become the larger, while the small ones are likely to become (relatively) smaller. It will also result in a sort of oligopoly where the largest clubs set the "price" for club memberships. This can also be seen elsewhere, for example in the blogging scene. Although there was nearly no commercial interest in the beginning of blogs, its readership quickly formed a Pareto distribution, as shown by Clay Shirky.

Overall, if people would really be concerned about the recording industry, they have all means to make them go away in the near future -- for example, by starting clubs and cooperatives. Most people, however, don't care that much. Otherwise, they would have already done it, right? ;-)

aceofspades19• 17 years ago

Repeat after me, downloading music is not theft, its copyright infringement

anigbrowl3• 17 years ago

I've never downloaded pirate music or movies. Software, yes. But I have worked in the music business.

Looks, all but the most successful recording artists make nothing off studio albums. The money comes from live performance and (if they're lucky) radio royalties. Revenues from CD sales or the like make an absolute pittance - most of it gets eaten up along the distribution chain, billed for marketing or whatever, and the the record companies engage in a great deal of creative accounting. If you ever read up on contract law in the recording industry you'd be horrified.

Your dollar spent in a record store benefits the the artist to the tune of about $0.01. You want to really support someone you like, buy a ticket and go to hear them sing/play, for which they'll get a decent percentage of the ticket value.

sho• 17 years ago

Too right. In most cases if you pirate the CDs and then spend the money on concert tickets instead, you're helping the artist.

Say you like an artist. They've got 3 CDs out. You could buy them all, or you could spend the ~$70 on tickets to their next show. What do you, as the true fan who wants to support the artist, do?

If you buy the CDs and skip the show, they get maybe a dollar or two, depending on their negotiating clout with the label.

If you pirate the CDs and buy the tickets, they could get a good chunk - maybe $20-30. Bring a friend, double that. Buy a T-shirt - maybe about $5 or so. Make sure you buy the shirt at the concert, they'll receive more, usually.

It's true - ethical fans pirate!

This is only true for artists attached to major labels, though - if they're selling their own, NIN-style, buy the music if you really want to support them. Or hell, fedex them a money order ...

johnnybgoode4• 17 years ago

Sure, so when the record companies collapse and there's no one to distribute their albums or pay the recording costs, then what?

I'm just going to throw this out there without going into a lot of detail at first. I'm not saying you're doing this, but why does anyone assume that music funding should be at the level it's at now? Maybe some of the resources that go into the music business would, and should, be directed elsewhere. There isn't enough space here to list all of the possible alternative uses.

In other words, artificially propping up the record industry is costing us dearly.

DanielStraight8• 17 years ago

I can honestly think of very few things that are a better value for $10 than a CD.

...in fact, I can't think of any.

jacoblyles• 17 years ago

If you're going to opine about the virtues of the public commons, then why not support artists who produce copyright free content? There are plenty out there. The hypocrisy of the pirate movement is seen when the lion's share of the content they consume is the high-budget stuff produced in big studios. This is in stark contrast to the free software community, in which genuinely free software is used far more than pirated commercial software.

Content pirates are parasites that are killing their host. They take and offer nothing in return. They certainly don't add the magnitude of value to the world that is offered by the free software movement.

greendestiny• 17 years ago

I think piracy actively harms free content producers, and without it free copyright would be a lot more prevalent and of higher quality. I wrote this blog post elaborating on it a bit, but didn't think I made the point all that well: http://greendestinyonyc.blogspot.com/2009/04/if-piracy-didnt...

Why the free software community cares about The Pirate Bay

Related Stories