The copyright industry has had far too much power for many years now. But when I talk to people about this nobody cares. For most people the products of this industry are just "content" which they use to waste their time so I suppose it makes sense that they don't care too much about it. The tragedy is that the copyright industry controls a large and continually growing part of our culture and their power is only increasing.
I was there when a UK music tracker called OiNK's Pink Palace was shut down. The police raided the home of the site owner before dawn and even the home of his father who had no idea what his son was up to. Copyright industry writers wrote the news article, claiming it was "extremely lucrative" and included gems such as "Within a few hours of a popular pre-release track being posted on the OiNK site, hundreds of copies can be found".
The site's owner was found not guilty in court several years later, but not before the copyright industry essentially ruined his life.
But how does this happen? If you talk to most people they don't understand copyright at all. They think it's some kind of privileged status that you have to pay for, like a trademark or something. Most people are not even aware that they hold copyrights. And why would they? Can the average person summon the police to help protect their copyright? Of course not. It's not even a criminal matter. The police being involved seems nothing short of corruption.
IMO both the patent and the copyright laws, at least in the US, are broken. The original goal was good: encourage individual inventors to make technology that the whole society will benefit from at a price of some limitation on use by society for a short period of time. In the current system, "the whole society will benefit" part does not work because time limits are too high -- at the modern technology pace, in 20 years most inventions are obsolete.
I think the best way to fix it is to drastically shorten the time the invention is protected, which would require major compromises. Unfortunately, the discussion now seems very polarized: it seems to be "all information should be free" against "copyright everything and it needs to last longer, longer, longer" as major camps with little in the middle.
Copyright hoarders (not necessarily content creators) consider anyone sharing the content they hold copyright to as competition and attack will full fury, destroying humans' lives and jamming the local jurisdictions. They use all available strategies - top-down (PB in Sweden), bottom-up (cease and desist letter plague in Germany). How anyone competent allows them for doing it is unimaginable, there must be fraud and corruption involved.
For me it sunk in upon seeing the the Department of Homeland Security now puts their seal anti-piracy warnings. So the copyright industry now has a direct line to "the terrorists hate our freedom."
That's the real disaster. It's a completely irrelevant industry, small by any measure and with a completely dispensable value lobbying against essential things like the freedom of press and affordable education material. And winning.
It gets better: I overheard a cop once saying that he has an Amazon Fire Stick and he streams movies and shows to other cops. He then said its not illegal if you stream it. The cops get involved cause they don't understand it anymore than others do in some cases. You just gotta get to some ones boss and you are forced to follow orders even if they're wrong. I live in the USA btw so might be different from elsewhere. Cops are not lawyers I guess...
I think the content industry is the one really driving this whole net neutrality thing, even more than the ISP business. If you follow the money, content is around a $2 trillion annual business, and ISPs are only a few hundred billion.
Not here to play devil advocates but the distribution of pirated content is actually extremely lucrative.
They get at least a few dollars per thousand views. It adds up really quickly when any video will quickly get hundreds of thousands of views, multiplied by the number of episodes, multiplied by the number of shows.
Pirating content is serious business. It can also be free and makes no money to the site owner but that's usually not how it's done.
Reminds me of the case with TPB. The court argued for large sums of ad revenue and the founders were like: “no idea where that money went because we never saw it”
He was running a website that revolved around violating millions of copyrights. Why shouldn't he go to jail? What gives you the right to take someone else's painstakingly created artistic creation and give it away for free to thousands of people, depriving them of the exclusive right to sell their own work.
Copyright is both a criminal and civil matter. The civil court system is useful for many things, but it is limited to monetary damages, which is not very helpful when the damages are in the millions and the defendant isn't very wealthy. The penal power of the criminal system is not appropriate for individual people downloading music, but it certainly is for a sophisticated operation involving the illegal distribution of millions of copyrighted works to hundreds of thousands of users.
== Edit ==
Some responses, since I'm rate-limited:
>In most cases i read about it's more a matter of the current copyright holder versus the facilitator. Not a matter of the creator versus the actual downloader.
Two points.
1. How do you think the current copyright holder got the copyright? They acquired it from the creator by either paying in advance or after the fact or as part of some ongoing deal.
2. If you run a market that you know is used almost exclusively by people selling contraband, do you think that's legal just because you're not the buyer or the seller? In case you don't know, it's not, and you'll go to jail just as if you had sold the contraband.
>If the defendant isn't wealthy after distributing all that content, is the content worth millions? Or is the government-enforced business model worth millions?
Yes, intellectual property isn't worth anything without government enforcement. But we've decided to, as individual societies and as an entire world by treaty, to provide such enforcement, because we think recognizing such property rights is good for our society.
And as for the first point, how much you make by violating other people's rights isn't that relevant. If I steal a truckload of iPhones and give them away for free, I still stole them. I realize IP is very different from physical property, but the profit of the crook isn't that relevant in either.
. . .it treats them as a commodity whose purpose is to fill a box and make money. In effect, it disparages the works themselves. If you don't agree with that attitude, you can call them “works” or “publications.”
>At the time there were some rumors that Sweden would be placed on the US Trade Representative’s 301 Watch List. This could possibly result in negative trade implications. However, in a cable written April 2006, the US Embassy in Sweden was informed that, while there were concerns, it would not be listed. Not yet at least. “We understand that a specialized organization for enforcement against Internet piracy currently is under consideration,” the cable reads, while mentioning The Pirate Bay once again.
Typical, not so subtle, blackmail.
One wonders what would happen if, say, the leader of some disclosure website was residing in Sweden and a superpower wanted him...
(From a comment below on TPB case: "The judge was Thomas Norström. Swedish public radio revealed that the judge, Thomas Norström, is a member of several copyright protection associations, whose members include Monique Wadsted and Peter Danowsky – attorneys who represented the music and movie industries in the case. According to the report, Judge Norström also serves as a board member on one of the groups of which Mrs. Wadsted, the Motion Picture Association of America’s attorney, is a member." -- hurray for independent justice in any case..)
The best part: The vast majority of all Scandinavians honestly believe that we have almost no corruption and that out justice system is so close to perfect that it is hardly necessary to discuss improvements.
It never ceases to amaze me how much influence the MPAA has.
Movies, while extremely popular, don't generate that much money: in 2016, total box office results in the US were under $12bn [1]. That's the entire industry.
Apple alone makes that much money in three weeks' time.
Amazing, that you can apply such pressure to politics, with so little.
American box office results are far from the only source of revenue for movies. Their is foreign box office, DVD/Blueray sales, digital sales, digital rentals, streaming fees, and broadcast fees.
In Blockbuster's heyday their revenue alone surpassed American box office sales.
> Movies, while extremely popular, don't generate that much money: in 2016, total box office results in the US were under $12bn [1]. That's the entire industry.
It's underestimated since it's a global business, plus they there's a very long tail for every movie to turn a profit, DVD/BR releases, TV, and online reselling, renting, etc... and the fact movies remain their property for 75 years+, and for some companies like Disney they retain the copyright forever, and keep sellings goods like cupcakes as well.
It's because so few care about copyright. It is seen as something dry and stodgy that only affect artists and their publishers/labels.
This perhaps because once the cassette recorder, never mind the VCR, came to be, most nations on the western side of the wall decided to not go full police state and thus added a "friends and family" clause to their copyright laws.
This meant that a person could create a copy, if it was meant for a direct friend or a relative. This avoided having to park a copyright cop in every home in the nation.
Never mind that producing analog copies from tape to tape cause of a noticeable loss of content with each generation removed from the original.
But the computer, never mind the internet, changed all that. It made mass copying not something that required massive machinery in a warehouse, but something every kid could do in their own home. Especially as bandwidth and storage capacity kept improving at a massive rate.
And digital copies do not degrade like an analog one does.
What about licences for when the movies come out on dvd and are shown on the numerous tv channels in 100+ countries. I can imagine then this figure amounts to a multiple, maybe $40B?
That's a large industry definitely and a powerful one.
And despite all these efforts, I'm still a happy user of the pirate bay whenever I want to watch something that I can't find on iTunes or Amazon. For me, the Pirate Bay has been the most reliable way to find stuff over the last years, for so many things it's still better than all the paid alternatives that I use.
So much money wasted on futile attempts to suppress a website...
There's the extremely annoying tendency at least at German streaming providers (iTunes, Amazon/Google Video) to remove rental access to movies about nine months after DVD release or when a second movie of a series is about to arrive at the theatres. Only buy access remains accessible. Now that physical video rental stores are on terminal decline, online stores have an effective oligopoly without real competition and push customers towards paying a maximum. The only alternative in this case remains thepiratebay.
I subscribed to Amazon Prime, thinking that I can stream series and movies that I was interested in, only to find, that only things that I could watch were shows produced by Amazon itself(Man in the High Castle etc), channels and movies were restricted content because of my location. I don't understand why it's still an issue.
Yup, and now we're getting into an even worse situation. We're going from bundled cable packages to numerous walled garden streaming platforms that, were one to subscribe to them all to get most of the content they'd get from cable, it would surpass whatever the monthly cable bill was by a large amount.
I am new to the US, got Netflix and Amazon Video but soon realized they hardly have what I am interested in. So I got myself a Vpn (BlackVPN, if that matters) and started using Popcorn Time. I am still a bit wary to download torrents, something I used to do a lot back home.
So, any suggestions on what more I can do before starting torrenting?
So I see that you run https://eggerapps.at/ , where you sell various pieces of software that I'm sure you've spent a lot of time creating and perfecting.
How would you like it if I set up a mirror with cracked versions of all of your apps, and then successfully diverted all of your sales to it?
And then when you sue me, how would you like it if I openly mocked you? I'll post your takedown letters on a section of my site where I call you a fool, do the digital equivalent of spitting in your face, and continue to flagrantly violate your rights.
That's exactly what the Pirate Bay does and I don’t understand how someone who sells their painstakingly created intellectual property could support that, let alone admit to participating in it.
Edit: na85, and what if I only divert 10% of the sales? Why should I now be totally innocent?
If you're interested in learning more about The Pirate Bay, the founders and the trial, watch the documentary called TPB AFK (The Pirate Bay : Away From Keyboard) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTOKXCEwo_8
One of the founders of TPB, Peter Sunde started:
* Njalla (https://njal.la/) - a privacy focused domain registration service
* Flattr (https://flattr.com/) - a tipping/micropayment service to support content creators
I'm sure there are many reading this who have absolutely no sympathy for pirates. They're stealing and that's that.
Well, how do you feel about your government blackmailing, extorting, or otherwise "strong-arming" other sovereign nations in order to foist its laws upon them and then hiding that from you? (It really is a minor miracle this cable was released at all.) Is it truly worth stooping to such measures to ensure that Micky Mouse remains copyright protected for all time everywhere? Don't other nations have the right to make their own laws? How would you feel if some other nation foisted it's laws on the U.S. in such a manner? Why does the U.S. government go to such extremes for private enterprise anyways?[1]
Piracy is bad. What the U.S. government has done in response is worse.
[1]I suggest you google the United Fruit Company's history the next time you're eating a Chiquita banana for a real eye opener.
I remember the piratebay trial being a gigantic farce where some of the judges had ties to copyright organisations. It's crazy how much power have these mafia-like organisations.
Let's get one thing straight: Torrent sites do not host content. They host community.
The only thing thepiratebay.org, what.cd, kickasstorrents.cr, etc. did or continue to do is the same that a forum or news site like reddit or hackernews does: provide a community with a purpose.
While hackernews is a community for discussing news or interesting things, etc. WhatCD was a place for discussing music, quality releases, and sharing good encodings, rather than the transcoded lossy->lossy formats you see flying around most places. Naturally, WhatCD's as a community wasn't concerned with things like copyright owner's profits, etc., even though many of its users certainly were, but simply couldn't find an alternative, as a lot of music is not even to be found, let alone sold in particularly high quality lossless formats.
When what.cd was taken down, none of the copies of copyrighted content were deleted. The community was broken up.
If piracy is to be considered such a serious crime, taking down torrent trackers is like going to a meeting of known criminals, and - rather than arresting them - evicting them. It has only a minimal effect, as they are free to gather elsewhere.
What bothers me the most is that the only thing being dismantled is the thing that clearly contains the most value to individuals, and society at large. Community is a good thing.
When WhatCD was taken down, a countless amount of valuable data that could be found practically nowhere else was suddenly destined to be hidden from society at large, and the community it had cultivated was scattered, without a care for what that meant.
Sure, quite a few people find that, while using copyright enforcement as a business model, piracy significantly detracts from sales. Sure, there is a culture that undervalues creators, but it is not a black and white problem, and most popular solutions have serious consequences that go practically ignored.
Got to love the 'privacy' instead of 'piracy' typo in the first cable screenshot:
"2. Summary. In a visit to Sweden last month to raise the growing concerns about Internet privacy in Sweden, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPA), together with ..."
Canada has been on the 301 watch list for a long time now. There have been some attempts to get off it (theatre camcording law) but it turned out that that the real reason a country is put on the list is a lack of fawning obedience to the US copyright cartel. A country that is perceived to not be toeing the line is put on the list. If there no actual policy reason to be there the copyright cartel just makes stuff up.
So these days the list is meaningless and is roundly ignored by Canada. Sweden probably should of did the same thing.
"The new confessions of an economic hitman" by John Perkins is a very good exposition of the close ties of state and corporate powers in the US and how they co-operate to increase the capital wealth of the elite.
It's more autobiographical than a research document, and has some unproven claims, but no one has punched holes in the important claims there AFAIK.
Wow, 10 years ago already? This was quite big here in Sweden back when it happened. It's scary how quickly these things slip out of our conscience (at least mine).
It's chilling what you can get away with by just staying cool for while... Or is the short term damage in PR not worth waiting it out for the long?
People aren't stupid they know it's wrong to download a movie or music they didn't buy. But everyone agrees the response by the US law enforcement is overreaching and out of proportion.
Convenience is the real reason people went to websites such as the Pirate bay not stealing, people don't buy fast food for their health.
The rise of cheap and reliable streaming video websites such as Netflix changed that. That's all anyone wanted a convenient reliable way to legally watch and pay a reasonable amount.
To remove pirated movies from the interwebs there are two options really: either attack content providers / trackers etc, or, find the users directly.
In Germany, as soon as you start a torrent client, your traffic is being monitored by bots and agents, and if you upload something inappropriate you (or your host) will get a letter from a law firm with a heavy fine. (I know of two friends who had to pay $600 and $3000.)
The copyright industry is a direct arm of American soft power projection into the rest of the world. For the content industry it's about money, but for policy makers and the geopolitical strategists who have the ear of those policy makers, it's about furthering the nation's position in the world.
The content industry punches above its weight in getting the government to protect it overseas for this reason.
Interesting aside: is the redacting technique vulnerable to an analogue of the "timing attack" on certain crypto?
The name of the employee in the wires has been redacted. I wonder if the physical size of the redacted box, together with the fact that this is a name, together with a database of public employees, could be used to uncover the identity of the person.
By comparing the size of the redacting box with the lines above and below, we can guess that 6-9 characters are masked out (including the space). This is an a rough parallel to a timing attack used against crypto. The DB of public employees could be thought of as a list of candidate inputs.
Weak redacting?
This reminds me of a law in Poland where a person accused of a crime can not be named. Media will blur out photos and state something to the effect of "Mark W. an executive at XYZ Corp., stands accused of ...". If the accused is a well known actor with a unique first name, this becomes a running joke.
It's interesting that even after all the scummy things the movie industry has done, people still desperately want to pirate their content. People who base their opinion on a principled opposition to copyright, should be leading the charge in promoting other means of compensating content creators. Stop signalling how much you desire the copyrighted product, and start signalling how much you desire the non-copyrighted one! IMHO The only people who should be pirating are the people who don't have a principled stance on copyright.
Many interesting points which contradict the behavior of the lawyers of said MPA during the court hearings.
“However, it is not clear to us what constraints Sweden and even U.S. authorities would be under in pursuing a case like this when the site is legally well advised and studiously avoids storing any copyrighted material.”
A focus by the prosecutor was the claim that the founders did not have well legal advice. The idea was to prove to the court that the accused did the infringement knowingly and was aware that what they did was illegal. Here we can read that this supposedly obviousness of wrong doing was not so clear to the very high paid lawyers arguing it.
"Both Bodström and Eliasson denied any direct involvement of the Justice Ministry with the work of the police and prosecutors in the Pirate Bay case."
That they surely did. It is very illegal for them to directly act in any specific legal case. If it ever was proven it would directly end any political carer. When similar document was earthened it was said that just because the US believe they influenced Swedish politicians it still doesn't mean that they did it, so no proof of foul play has been made.
I wouldn’t be as miserably ashamed for this as I am, if it weren’t for the fact that the popular artists my country has produced since, oh... 1996? Aren’t worth defending from piracy.
You can harp on how there’s no accounting for taste, but the truth is that the industry this sort of thing protects certainly does account for taste, and only invests in the kind of lowest-common-denominator/mass-appeal trash that makes them the most money.
And so, we are left to suffer the guilt trip that because we don’t adhere to an honor system of donating funds for better artists (paying and not pirating, copying, stealing, sharing, music and movies), we get the artists we deserve. But that’s clearly not true, because the money made off the garbage produced today, doesn’t make it into any kind of honor system that benefits the interests of better artists.
How about producers of bad music and movies demonstrate that they are willing to donate into the honor system first?
The profits that the industry sees are not reinvested. The artists, mysteriously, continue to worsen.
[+] [-] cup-of-tea|8 years ago|reply
I was there when a UK music tracker called OiNK's Pink Palace was shut down. The police raided the home of the site owner before dawn and even the home of his father who had no idea what his son was up to. Copyright industry writers wrote the news article, claiming it was "extremely lucrative" and included gems such as "Within a few hours of a popular pre-release track being posted on the OiNK site, hundreds of copies can be found".
The site's owner was found not guilty in court several years later, but not before the copyright industry essentially ruined his life.
But how does this happen? If you talk to most people they don't understand copyright at all. They think it's some kind of privileged status that you have to pay for, like a trademark or something. Most people are not even aware that they hold copyrights. And why would they? Can the average person summon the police to help protect their copyright? Of course not. It's not even a criminal matter. The police being involved seems nothing short of corruption.
[+] [-] ptero|8 years ago|reply
IMO both the patent and the copyright laws, at least in the US, are broken. The original goal was good: encourage individual inventors to make technology that the whole society will benefit from at a price of some limitation on use by society for a short period of time. In the current system, "the whole society will benefit" part does not work because time limits are too high -- at the modern technology pace, in 20 years most inventions are obsolete.
I think the best way to fix it is to drastically shorten the time the invention is protected, which would require major compromises. Unfortunately, the discussion now seems very polarized: it seems to be "all information should be free" against "copyright everything and it needs to last longer, longer, longer" as major camps with little in the middle.
[+] [-] expertentipp|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JohnTHaller|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TallGuyShort|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marcosdumay|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] giancarlostoro|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imglorp|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] user5994461|8 years ago|reply
They get at least a few dollars per thousand views. It adds up really quickly when any video will quickly get hundreds of thousands of views, multiplied by the number of episodes, multiplied by the number of shows.
Pirating content is serious business. It can also be free and makes no money to the site owner but that's usually not how it's done.
[+] [-] scirocco|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wildmusings|8 years ago|reply
Copyright is both a criminal and civil matter. The civil court system is useful for many things, but it is limited to monetary damages, which is not very helpful when the damages are in the millions and the defendant isn't very wealthy. The penal power of the criminal system is not appropriate for individual people downloading music, but it certainly is for a sophisticated operation involving the illegal distribution of millions of copyrighted works to hundreds of thousands of users.
== Edit ==
Some responses, since I'm rate-limited:
>In most cases i read about it's more a matter of the current copyright holder versus the facilitator. Not a matter of the creator versus the actual downloader.
Two points.
1. How do you think the current copyright holder got the copyright? They acquired it from the creator by either paying in advance or after the fact or as part of some ongoing deal.
2. If you run a market that you know is used almost exclusively by people selling contraband, do you think that's legal just because you're not the buyer or the seller? In case you don't know, it's not, and you'll go to jail just as if you had sold the contraband.
>If the defendant isn't wealthy after distributing all that content, is the content worth millions? Or is the government-enforced business model worth millions?
Yes, intellectual property isn't worth anything without government enforcement. But we've decided to, as individual societies and as an entire world by treaty, to provide such enforcement, because we think recognizing such property rights is good for our society.
And as for the first point, how much you make by violating other people's rights isn't that relevant. If I steal a truckload of iPhones and give them away for free, I still stole them. I realize IP is very different from physical property, but the profit of the crook isn't that relevant in either.
[+] [-] qwerty456127|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kakarot|8 years ago|reply
. . .it treats them as a commodity whose purpose is to fill a box and make money. In effect, it disparages the works themselves. If you don't agree with that attitude, you can call them “works” or “publications.”
[+] [-] coldtea|8 years ago|reply
Typical, not so subtle, blackmail.
One wonders what would happen if, say, the leader of some disclosure website was residing in Sweden and a superpower wanted him...
(From a comment below on TPB case: "The judge was Thomas Norström. Swedish public radio revealed that the judge, Thomas Norström, is a member of several copyright protection associations, whose members include Monique Wadsted and Peter Danowsky – attorneys who represented the music and movie industries in the case. According to the report, Judge Norström also serves as a board member on one of the groups of which Mrs. Wadsted, the Motion Picture Association of America’s attorney, is a member." -- hurray for independent justice in any case..)
[+] [-] marvin|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robert_foss|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ckastner|8 years ago|reply
Movies, while extremely popular, don't generate that much money: in 2016, total box office results in the US were under $12bn [1]. That's the entire industry.
Apple alone makes that much money in three weeks' time.
Amazing, that you can apply such pressure to politics, with so little.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/187069/north-american-bo...
[+] [-] astura|8 years ago|reply
In Blockbuster's heyday their revenue alone surpassed American box office sales.
[+] [-] ekianjo|8 years ago|reply
It's underestimated since it's a global business, plus they there's a very long tail for every movie to turn a profit, DVD/BR releases, TV, and online reselling, renting, etc... and the fact movies remain their property for 75 years+, and for some companies like Disney they retain the copyright forever, and keep sellings goods like cupcakes as well.
[+] [-] digi_owl|8 years ago|reply
This perhaps because once the cassette recorder, never mind the VCR, came to be, most nations on the western side of the wall decided to not go full police state and thus added a "friends and family" clause to their copyright laws.
This meant that a person could create a copy, if it was meant for a direct friend or a relative. This avoided having to park a copyright cop in every home in the nation.
Never mind that producing analog copies from tape to tape cause of a noticeable loss of content with each generation removed from the original.
But the computer, never mind the internet, changed all that. It made mass copying not something that required massive machinery in a warehouse, but something every kid could do in their own home. Especially as bandwidth and storage capacity kept improving at a massive rate.
And digital copies do not degrade like an analog one does.
[+] [-] jacquesm|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wellboy|8 years ago|reply
That's a large industry definitely and a powerful one.
[+] [-] 1_2__4|8 years ago|reply
But movies are part of Intellectual Property, which is the US's biggest export (in real dollars).
[+] [-] jakobegger|8 years ago|reply
So much money wasted on futile attempts to suppress a website...
[+] [-] sveme|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jyriand|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dirlewanger|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dom96|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 6ak74rfy|8 years ago|reply
I am new to the US, got Netflix and Amazon Video but soon realized they hardly have what I am interested in. So I got myself a Vpn (BlackVPN, if that matters) and started using Popcorn Time. I am still a bit wary to download torrents, something I used to do a lot back home.
So, any suggestions on what more I can do before starting torrenting?
[+] [-] wildmusings|8 years ago|reply
How would you like it if I set up a mirror with cracked versions of all of your apps, and then successfully diverted all of your sales to it?
And then when you sue me, how would you like it if I openly mocked you? I'll post your takedown letters on a section of my site where I call you a fool, do the digital equivalent of spitting in your face, and continue to flagrantly violate your rights.
That's exactly what the Pirate Bay does and I don’t understand how someone who sells their painstakingly created intellectual property could support that, let alone admit to participating in it.
Edit: na85, and what if I only divert 10% of the sales? Why should I now be totally innocent?
[+] [-] johndoe90|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacobr|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ploggingdev|8 years ago|reply
One of the founders of TPB, Peter Sunde started:
* Njalla (https://njal.la/) - a privacy focused domain registration service
* Flattr (https://flattr.com/) - a tipping/micropayment service to support content creators
* A VPN service - https://ipredator.se/
Another link that you might find interesting, his interview with Vice : https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/qkjpbd/pirate-bay...
[+] [-] thomastjeffery|8 years ago|reply
https://thepiratebay.org/torrent/8118457/TPB.AFK.2013.1080p....
While I do recommend adblock, there is no reason to be afraid of the site, or of torrenting this copyleft material.
[+] [-] Marazan|8 years ago|reply
He never gets mentioned much for some reason*
* Because of his far right connections
[+] [-] beloch|8 years ago|reply
Well, how do you feel about your government blackmailing, extorting, or otherwise "strong-arming" other sovereign nations in order to foist its laws upon them and then hiding that from you? (It really is a minor miracle this cable was released at all.) Is it truly worth stooping to such measures to ensure that Micky Mouse remains copyright protected for all time everywhere? Don't other nations have the right to make their own laws? How would you feel if some other nation foisted it's laws on the U.S. in such a manner? Why does the U.S. government go to such extremes for private enterprise anyways?[1]
Piracy is bad. What the U.S. government has done in response is worse.
[1]I suggest you google the United Fruit Company's history the next time you're eating a Chiquita banana for a real eye opener.
[+] [-] realusername|8 years ago|reply
(edit: spelling)
[+] [-] thomastjeffery|8 years ago|reply
The only thing thepiratebay.org, what.cd, kickasstorrents.cr, etc. did or continue to do is the same that a forum or news site like reddit or hackernews does: provide a community with a purpose.
While hackernews is a community for discussing news or interesting things, etc. WhatCD was a place for discussing music, quality releases, and sharing good encodings, rather than the transcoded lossy->lossy formats you see flying around most places. Naturally, WhatCD's as a community wasn't concerned with things like copyright owner's profits, etc., even though many of its users certainly were, but simply couldn't find an alternative, as a lot of music is not even to be found, let alone sold in particularly high quality lossless formats.
When what.cd was taken down, none of the copies of copyrighted content were deleted. The community was broken up.
If piracy is to be considered such a serious crime, taking down torrent trackers is like going to a meeting of known criminals, and - rather than arresting them - evicting them. It has only a minimal effect, as they are free to gather elsewhere.
What bothers me the most is that the only thing being dismantled is the thing that clearly contains the most value to individuals, and society at large. Community is a good thing.
When WhatCD was taken down, a countless amount of valuable data that could be found practically nowhere else was suddenly destined to be hidden from society at large, and the community it had cultivated was scattered, without a care for what that meant.
Sure, quite a few people find that, while using copyright enforcement as a business model, piracy significantly detracts from sales. Sure, there is a culture that undervalues creators, but it is not a black and white problem, and most popular solutions have serious consequences that go practically ignored.
[+] [-] pferde|8 years ago|reply
"2. Summary. In a visit to Sweden last month to raise the growing concerns about Internet privacy in Sweden, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPA), together with ..."
[+] [-] upofadown|8 years ago|reply
So these days the list is meaningless and is roundly ignored by Canada. Sweden probably should of did the same thing.
[+] [-] fsloth|8 years ago|reply
It's more autobiographical than a research document, and has some unproven claims, but no one has punched holes in the important claims there AFAIK.
[+] [-] jesperlang|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dghughes|8 years ago|reply
Convenience is the real reason people went to websites such as the Pirate bay not stealing, people don't buy fast food for their health.
The rise of cheap and reliable streaming video websites such as Netflix changed that. That's all anyone wanted a convenient reliable way to legally watch and pay a reasonable amount.
[+] [-] wimagguc|8 years ago|reply
In Germany, as soon as you start a torrent client, your traffic is being monitored by bots and agents, and if you upload something inappropriate you (or your host) will get a letter from a law firm with a heavy fine. (I know of two friends who had to pay $600 and $3000.)
[+] [-] vinceguidry|8 years ago|reply
The content industry punches above its weight in getting the government to protect it overseas for this reason.
[+] [-] koliber|8 years ago|reply
The name of the employee in the wires has been redacted. I wonder if the physical size of the redacted box, together with the fact that this is a name, together with a database of public employees, could be used to uncover the identity of the person.
By comparing the size of the redacting box with the lines above and below, we can guess that 6-9 characters are masked out (including the space). This is an a rough parallel to a timing attack used against crypto. The DB of public employees could be thought of as a list of candidate inputs.
Weak redacting?
This reminds me of a law in Poland where a person accused of a crime can not be named. Media will blur out photos and state something to the effect of "Mark W. an executive at XYZ Corp., stands accused of ...". If the accused is a well known actor with a unique first name, this becomes a running joke.
[+] [-] ksk|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thriftwy|8 years ago|reply
I mean, this is known point of vulnerability.
Maybe it's because owners of popular bittorrent software don't want that feature?
[+] [-] belorn|8 years ago|reply
“However, it is not clear to us what constraints Sweden and even U.S. authorities would be under in pursuing a case like this when the site is legally well advised and studiously avoids storing any copyrighted material.”
A focus by the prosecutor was the claim that the founders did not have well legal advice. The idea was to prove to the court that the accused did the infringement knowingly and was aware that what they did was illegal. Here we can read that this supposedly obviousness of wrong doing was not so clear to the very high paid lawyers arguing it.
"Both Bodström and Eliasson denied any direct involvement of the Justice Ministry with the work of the police and prosecutors in the Pirate Bay case."
That they surely did. It is very illegal for them to directly act in any specific legal case. If it ever was proven it would directly end any political carer. When similar document was earthened it was said that just because the US believe they influenced Swedish politicians it still doesn't mean that they did it, so no proof of foul play has been made.
[+] [-] implosificated|8 years ago|reply
You can harp on how there’s no accounting for taste, but the truth is that the industry this sort of thing protects certainly does account for taste, and only invests in the kind of lowest-common-denominator/mass-appeal trash that makes them the most money.
And so, we are left to suffer the guilt trip that because we don’t adhere to an honor system of donating funds for better artists (paying and not pirating, copying, stealing, sharing, music and movies), we get the artists we deserve. But that’s clearly not true, because the money made off the garbage produced today, doesn’t make it into any kind of honor system that benefits the interests of better artists.
How about producers of bad music and movies demonstrate that they are willing to donate into the honor system first?
The profits that the industry sees are not reinvested. The artists, mysteriously, continue to worsen.