The Growth Of The Pirate Bay As A Political Movement
from the good-or-bad? dept
Tim Lee points us to an LA Times article on the growing success of The Pirate Bay's political movement, noting that its membership is growing in Sweden and is nearly equal to that of the country's Green Party. This is ironic for a few reasons -- most of all being that the entertainment industry was so proud over the raids on the Pirate Bay's servers last year, insisting that it had killed off the site. Instead, the site was back up in days, and the attention propelled what had been a fairly minor search engine for BitTorrent trackers into the limelight -- helping to get it many more users and to get the political movement some traction. In fact, we've now seen other political parties take on some of the Pirate Bay's platform. To be honest, I have mixed feelings about this. I don't support the Pirate Bay's position that unauthorized downloads are defensible. Instead, I think that copyright holders need to come to the realization that they're actually better off by letting people download content -- not that it needs to be forced upon them by users taking matters into their own hands. That said, by taking such an extreme position (and having it get some attention), perhaps it's more likely that content holders will come to this realization. They'll simply be forced to adapt and will start coming up with more successful business models that actually benefit from free downloads rather than trying to block them and sue their best customers.
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China's minions
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Of course, selling cd-keys direct from the publisher and converting warez into new sales isn't a horrible idea either, is it? Microsoft is already doing that via WGA's Get Legit BS.
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Power to them
Pirates provide a better product, one that isn't going to take me a days time to convert into the different formats I'm going to use. I don't want to have to put a game in my PC everytime I want to play it- that's 99% of the reason I prefer PC games to console games.
People should realize that those songs they buy on itunes and similar sites can suddenly 'vanish' after relatively mild upgrades. I'd love to buy tv shows online but I don't trust my continued access to them like I get waiting for a retail dvd box set.
Power to the pirates- it's not about getting something for free, it's about getting a better product. Companies should wise up to that fact. Many people would be more than happy to pay the buck or two per song and tv show, it's the added expense of the hassle in our brand new shiny digital lives that we don't want.
Why should anyone PAY for a song that can't readily port between their cell phone, mp3 player, computer and stereo system? Once upon a time pirated products were worse than the real thing- companies need to catch on that just ain't true anymore. It's the fact the pirated product is better, NOT that it's free, that is costing companies $$.
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Re: Power to them
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Freedom
People are starving, and spiderman cost 500million dollars to make... I can wait a year to watch family guy once on TV, or I can watch it the day it comes out a zillion times and laugh allot more.
And when you see 30k seeders and 40k leechers on a new episodeof family guy, it makes you feel pretty human to be obtaining material these ways.
I think we will probably see more in-program advertising before they decide to free up the net.
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Arrr!
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The entire structure of copyrights, patents, intellectual property in general is obsolete and useless. It has long stopped encouraging innovation.
The faster the entire system collapses, the better off we'll be.
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Re:
Protecting the status quo simply by making it the only legal option is the dominant approach of fascists. Are you promoting fascism, Mike?
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Simple solution
People will still rebroadcast them with the adverts removed, but they will be slower and less convenient.
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I'm curious what makes them think it's ok to 'steal' the 'Pirate Bay' and use the name in that manner?
If the RIAA and MPAA don't see an issue with this, why should any see an issue with respecting their property rights?
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The Pirate Bay
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The Pirate Bay is hardly a political force
Furthermore, their political influence in Sweden remains non-existent as their platform of free-downloads-for-all simply isn't very convincing in a country that has major economic and social issues to contend with, namely should they join the euro and should they rethink the famous Swedish welfare model. For these very large issues, the Pirates have no public stance -- not surprising then that they are not even an after-thought for Swedish voters, as I suspect all the international "movements" they have inspired.
For more details, check out this Times article:
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article645660.ece
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LOL
DRM must die. Thanx to Techdirt, I will probably never put serial key protections on my software projects. Whether my projects will be open source is a different issue (will vary from project to project), but it's a losing battle. If I develop games, I will more than likely offer up mod tools on my site for two reasons: (1) If I don't, fans will conjure some up on their own. (2) I, being the creator, could probably make the best mod tools since I know the game infrastructure inside and out.
I will find other ways to make money. I will not make my non-scarce good into a scarce good.
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The only people releasing movies,music, and software will be starving slaves who support open source. The quality of movies, music and software will drop.
The world will turn communist and force people to create some sort of cheesey entertainment. Nobody will be paid extra for working harder or trying harder.
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Re:
The only people releasing movies,music, and software will be starving slaves who support open source. The quality of movies, music and software will drop.
The world will turn communist and force people to create some sort of cheesey entertainment. Nobody will be paid extra for working harder or trying harder.
Yeah and Jack Valenti will suck my balls from beyond the grave. Ooooh I can't wait.
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09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 - The number string that is causing censorship in blogs (HD-DVD key for Linux use)
Fight the DRM with information, I just thought that this would be most relevant to this story being you can download hd content to your pc, but only legally buy buying it, not if you already own it and want to transfer it to another medium
This is the website contact address that sent the cease and desist take down notices to Google..... Have fun with it (DOS-it? :P)
webmaster@proskauer.com
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Pirating is in some cases certainly legitimate, for example, if a company which poduces DVDs will not release one for your region, and will not release un-coded versions. In this case, they are in no way loosing a sale if you pirate thier disk, because they aren't selling them.
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