The Pirate Bay's New Owners: Service Providers Will Pay Us, We'll Pay Users
from the in-theory... dept
One of the things that got a lot of attention with the announced sale of The Pirate Bay to GGF was the claim that the new owners would launch new business models that would compensate copyright holders. Many took this to mean that it would stop offering tools where people could freely exchange content themselves -- but that's not what GGF said. It just said it would compensate copyright holders. That could involve a variety of different business models, as surely they recognize that trying to charge directly would simply lead to mass abandonment of The Pirate Bay. And, indeed, it appears that GGF isn't planning to charge users at all. Instead, it's actually trying out a business model based on BitTorrent's original purpose: making sharing files more efficient by breaking up the pieces so that a single source doesn't bear the brunt of the bandwidth costs. GGF's argument is that they can use the community at The Pirate Bay to reduce congestion for ISPs and bandwidth costs for other service providers. On top of that, GGF claims that rather than having users' pay, its plan is to pay users for providing a service to those who have files to distribute. In an interview with the BBC, GGF's Hans Pandeya explained the plan:"More than half of all internet traffic is file sharing and P2P [peer-to-peer] traffic and buying Pirate Bay gives us one of the biggest sources of traffic.This is the sort of thing that sounds good in theory, but that the entertainment industry will never go for. GGF is right, in some ways. The fact that individuals are sharing the content via BitTorrent actually is helping decrease the distribution costs, but as we've seen, the entertainment industry likes to ignore that, and assume that the entire value is in the content, not in the distribution. I can't see the entertainment industry seeing this as a viable solution, even if it makes some amount of sense (distribution is expensive, GGF can use TPB to reduce distribution costs, that seems like a service worth paying for). I just don't see the industry buying into it.
"We can then use this massive network of file-sharers to help [internet service providers] reduce overload.
"Let's say a popular song comes out. Rather than a million downloads from a site - which would cause a considerable strain on that ISP - we can take that song and put it out on P2P.
"The copyright holder still gets paid, the users still get their file, the ISP doesn't have a million people all grabbing a file and - for the users who share that song - a payment for putting that file on the P2P network."
Separately, I have to take issue with one comment from GGF:
Mr Pandeya said that one of the biggest hurdles in overcoming illegal file-sharing was that there was zero cost to the users, while legitimate sites required users to pay for content. The only way to make something more attractive than free was to pay users to share files.On this, he's fundamentally wrong. There are many ways to make something more attractive than free without paying users. In fact, there are many cases where paying users actually makes something less attractive than free because they're doing things for non-monetary reasons, and the money actually changes the equation significantly. Yes, paying users is potentially one way to make something more attractive than free, but it's hardly the only way, nor is it always the best way.
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Filed Under: business models, file sharing
Companies: ggf, global gaming factory x, the pirate bay
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How does this pay for content creation?
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It's time...
Quickly, someone get started on this.
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Payment does change the equation
Indeed. This brings to mind an probably apocryphal anecdote from a professor I had. It goes like this:
Note to the literal minded: this probably never happened; it's just told to illustrate the point that money changes perception, and perception changes behavior.
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Re: Payment does change the equation
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show me the money
also his statement: "Let's say a popular song comes out. Rather than a million downloads from a site - which would cause a considerable strain on that ISP..." doesn't make sense to me. where in the real world is this happening? apple's itunes servers are more than capable, as are their external service providers. there aren't any backbone problems anywhere. there aren't any big content players serving up files anywhere. wth does he mean? who's going to pay him to solve this "problem"?
sounds to me like smoke and mirrors to hide the simple fact that he's buying a data transfer technology and infrastructure to help his internet cafe business.
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Re: show me the money
It's like paying someone to mow my lawn. Sure, I could do it, but I gotta buy gas, and it's 100 degrees out. Plus, I could sell my lawnmower, and get some cash. I'm offloading my problem onto someone else, and paying them for the service.
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Re: Re: show me the money
Bandwidth is cheap; while it may be that a million simultaneous downloads of a song from one server is a problem, any reasonable CDN can handle it, and the costs are fairly low.
I'm skeptical that the cost savings of P2P outweigh the added complexity, security issues, and, heck, the *name* TPB.
But I have to thing the GGX folks aren't total morons, so they must have a model in mind that either removes unauthorized copyrighted material sharing, or monetizes it. My guess is that they figured the purchase price was so low that the PR alone ma be worth it. Heck, if the TPB had announced they were for sale *I* could have wrangled $8M to buy 'em.
Heck, you could probably turn around and sell TPB to the RIAA/MPAA for $15M, at least.
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What?
Pay hackers to put up copyrighted content, and have users freely download that content, while paying the legitamate owners of that copyright the fees their legal team requests.
Step 2:
???
Step 3:
Profit.
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Re: What?
???
"
Step 2:
Sell the website to a public company and run away with the money, thumbing your nose at all the people who though you were in it for the cause, not for the cash.
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Re: What?
Pay hackers to put up copyrighted content, and have users freely download that content, while paying the legitamate owners of that copyright the fees their legal team requests."
Haha, hackers. If Zero Cool and Acid Burn are uploading copyright content, they have dropped off in my eyes in terms of stature.
"Step 2:
???"
This is why you aren't a business owner and/or entrepreneur for the internet era. Btw, I'm not either, but that doesn't mean that type of business genius doesn't exist.
"Step 3:
Profit."
Indeed.
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Exciting & brave but I'm sceptic
1) Transaction: Free and easy is better than making a buck on something complicated
2) The industry: TPB trial shows what mindset the entertainment industry have, music is one thing but movie and TV?!?! Hulu is not open for outside US, Spotify has had to fight hard on a very simple model, this is far more complex. Jerry Maguire says "show me the money" so does hollywood...
3) The Brand of TPB: Making TPB ligit is like teenagers' parents comming to rock conserts, it hurts the experience more than it makes daddy cool.
Sooo, all in all - exciting, brave but I'm a sceptic...
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Superdistribution-Fail unless its a streaming ad supported model(see adware) ...but look at Joost (although that was bad management)
Distributed Caching -Some success but not a great business model just have a look at Bittorent and Cachelogic .
AdwareSpyware -this is where you might make some money
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Re:
So far this is reading like a bad remake of Dumb and Dumber. Wanna bet that BrokeP and his friends will be dumping their shares very soon? Take the money and run, laughing at all of you.
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Doesn't seem so unfeasible to me...
Tag torrents by the original producer of the content, or their representatives. Maintain strict upload/download ratios, but sell blocks of download credit. Credit sales go into a pool, which gets divided among content producers, in proportion to download volume per payment cycle.
Micropayments go away, artists get paid, seeders get compensated for buying high-tier Internet service for their uploads, hosting costs and marketing effort shift to users, "criminals" are re-named "crowdsourced volunteers". Lawyers get to stop suing five-year-olds and the dead for more than their lifetime net worth, and can move on to something more profitable instead of trying to "make examples" of people for no significant return on investment except bad press.
If my logic's correct, everyone can profit - artists, *IAAs, ISPs, even dedicated users-formerly-known-as-criminals - except for producers of poor-quality content, whom no marketing blitz will be able to save.
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Re: Doesn't seem so unfeasible to me...
Okay, that doesn't quite make sense. Yes, dollars are potentially more attractive than megabyte-credits, but it seems to double the number of user-side cash transactions required. Why so much banking overhead? Unless the "cash being paid to seeders" can be kept on file and immediately applied to a download being requested... Marketing jibba-jabba may trump economic efficiency yet.
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Bogus
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Re: Bogus
Uh, yes, it was actually.
It was twofold: to facilitate piracy and to take server bandwidth from ISPs without paying for it.
Neither of these are true -- and you should at least admit your own bias: that you own an ISP.
BitTorrent has actually always been a rather bad solution for "piracy" because it's so easy to trace users. In fact, Bram made that point quite clear when he first launched it. It really is a rather inelegant solution for piracy. I'm still surprised it became used so much for it.
As for "taking server bandwidth from ISPs" that's pure bull and you know it. The mistake was THE ISPS for offering unlimited bandwidth and then freaking out that people actually used it. Bittorrent merely recognized that people weren't actually using their bandwidth so it looked to make that bandwidth useful.
To then BLAME them for doing exactly what ISPs SPECIFICALLY ALLOWED is the height of ridiculousness.
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ISP traffic reduction savings
Convincing content providers to pay would probably be quite difficult, so I think it might be easier to get ISPs to pay for the service of minimizing their traffic with external networks. However it's hard to see how that alone would make the torrent database and bittorrent tracker service any more legitimate from a legal point of view.
Btw. on of the main IP-critical intellectuals has written a blog post about what GGF really bought: The schizo-politics of The Pirate Bay, Inc.
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The film industry will insist that everything will have some kind of DRM on it and who will want to download that?
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oh for unlimited bandwidth
Being able to download a portion of a file from anywhere meant you could also pick a file up at your connection's full speed, theoretically faster than the hosting server could provide it on its own.
It was never intended for piracy, but neither were telephones lines, or the postal service. Things get used to do what they're good at doing. Bit torrent is good at distributing and that's something piracy needs, is a good method of distribution.
As for ISPs offering unlimited bandwidth, well you reap what you sow. If you offer to bend over for customers, expect some of them to get the lubricant out. Where I live, 25Gb's a fairly large limit. The 53Gb I'd get if ADSL2 was available (same $) would be nice but alas I can't at this address for some reason. I'm not in the US.
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licensing
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BitTorrent rips off both copyright owners and ISPs
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Reverse merger
http://www.cultureghost.org/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=2699
Fausty
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