The Promo Bay Asks Artists: Would You Rather Fight Piracy... Or Have A Billion People Know You Exist

from the questions-questions dept

Tim O'Reilly coined the famous saying that obscurity is a much bigger problem than piracy -- and it seems that the folks over at The Pirate Bay have constructed a simple experiment to test this aphorism out. It's called The Promo Bay, and it's a system for letting content creators promote their works on the front page of The Pirate Bay in up to three countries of their choosing (for free, of course). Remember, The Pirate Bay gets a tone of traffic -- over 1.8 billion pageviews per month, apparently. If you're an up-and-coming artist who no one's heard of, at some point it has to be pretty tempting to turn that firehose in your direction... even if it means having works distributed for free. In fact, it seems like artists should be lining up for such a program just to get that kind of traffic. Of course, we've seen some artists do deals with The Pirate Bay before -- to great success. The new program just seems like a way of making that easier for artists... and doing it more often. But it really does seem to be a quick way of asking the obscurity vs. piracy question in a much more direct and very, very real manner.

Filed Under: obscurity, piracy, promo bay, promotion
Companies: the pirate bay

The Pirate Bay Press Release On SOPA: We Are The New Hollywood

from the history-repeating-itself dept

Given its general contempt for the repeated attempts to close it down, you wouldn't expect The Pirate Bay to be particularly worried by SOPA. But in its very own press release on the subject, it goes much further: it flings the ultimate insult at Hollywood by claiming that not only are the two of them spiritual kin, but that The Pirate Bay is the New Hollywood.

Here's why The Pirate Bay thinks Hollywood is exactly like itself:

Because of Edisons patents for the motion pictures it was close to financially impossible to create motion pictures in the North american east coast. The movie studios therefor relocated to California, and founded what we today call Hollywood. The reason was mostly because there was no patent.

There was also no copyright to speak of, so the studios could copy old stories and make movies out of them – like Fantasia, one of Disneys biggest hits ever.

So, the whole basis of this industry, that today is screaming about losing control over immaterial rights, is that they circumvented immaterial rights. They copied (or put in their terminology: "stole") other peoples creative works, without paying for it.

And here's why Pirate Bay thinks it's the New Hollywood:

The reason they are always complainting about "pirates" today is simple. We've done what they did. We circumvented the rules they created and created our own. We crushed their monopoly by giving people something more efficient.

At the end of its release, The Pirate Bay admits rather drolly:

Some facts (years, dates) are probably wrong in this press release. The reason is that we can't access this information when Wikipedia is blacked out. Because of pressure from our failing competitors. We're sorry for that.

In fact its potted history of Hollywood is not so far off the mark. Here's a rather more rigorously-researched description of the battle between Thomas Edison, along with his Motion Picture Patents Company (MPCC) – basically a group of suppliers that tried to enforce a monopoly over cinema equipment – and Carl Laemmle's Universal Pictures that refused to knuckle under:

what ultimately did the Edison monopoly in was the assumption that its legal/technological dominance over the trade, and its moral stance, would trump the public’s demand for ever more creative motion pictures. Unlike the independents, the MPCC system did not invest in its network. Consumers would simply have to watch Edison Trust fare, the monopoly’s principals figured.

They didn’t. Instead, they flocked to Laemmle and his fellow independents' "illegal" movies, which were longer and of better quality. Even the Trust's inner circle knew this. "We… pass on pictures we know will get us nothing but unfavorable comments and cancellations," one confided. "We haven’t the power to throw out the distinctly bad pictures, nor the courage, because as poor as they are, they represent a certain sum of money invested in negative production."

Edison and his cohorts never understood that they were involved "in much more than an economic battle to determine who would control the profits of the nascent film industry," Neal Gabler writes. This was a conflict between an older generation of Anglo-Saxon Protestant inventors and a new generation of immigrants.

The parallels with today's battle between the MPAA (complete with its "moral stance") and Net-based "independents" like The Pirate Bay (with its DRM-free content), are clear. Once again, this is not just about who gets the money, it's a conflict between the "older generation" of movie companies with their "legal dominance", and the "new generation" of digital immigrants like The Pirate Bay that give the public what they want.

Call it Hollywood 2: The Sequel.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

Filed Under: disruption, history, hollywood, innovation, monopolies
Companies: mpaa, the pirate bay

Dutch ISPs Told To Block The Pirate Bay

from the fat-lot-of-good-that-will-do dept

For a few years now, some Dutch ISPs have been fighting a court order that demanded they block the Pirate Bay, trying to appeal to basic common sense of not making a third party liable:

"The basic principle of the Internet is that ISPs pass on traffic to their customers unfiltered, they are merely a gateway," says Niels Huijbregts, spokesman for XS4ALL. "The Pirate Bay website is not hosted on a Ziggo server, so Ziggo can't be held responsible for restricting access to the website. BREIN is targeting the wrong people."

Unfortunately, it appears the Dutch courts have no time for common sense, as they've rejected this argument (in Dutch) and given ISPs 10 days to figure out how to block sites or face huge fines (10,000 euros per day, and potentially a total of 250,000 euros).

Of course, we've seen this game before. Multiple times. Some technologically clueless court orders a block... and within a very short period of time (sometimes before the blocking even begins) services start springing up to get around the block. This leads to some free advertising for the site, but no apparent decrease in infringement.

Filed Under: blocking, isps, netherlands
Companies: the pirate bay, xs4all

If SOPA's Main Target Is The Pirate Bay, It's Worth Pointing Out That ThePirateBay.org Is Immune From SOPA

from the just-saying... dept

In looking over Eric Goldman's excellent "linkwrap" of a bunch of recent SOPA/PIPA stories, it pointed me to a News.com article from last month, about how SOPA was really about going after one single site: The Pirate Bay. I've actually heard this repeatedly -- and from folks heavily involved with the bill itself. The whole point of the bill is to try to take down The Pirate Bay. Now, we can argue back and forth about how pointless that is... but there's something else that seems important:

As written, nothing in SOPA can touch ThePirateBay's main website, ThePirateBay.org

That's because the current version of the bill excludes any .com or .org. from being a target (though, they can be required to take action against other sites). This has caused some confusion, mainly because of the changes between the original version of SOPA and the "manager's amendment," which is the current version of the bill. The manager's amendment makes you jump through some hoops to understand this, but the key point is that a "U.S.-directed site" is defined to be a "foreign internet site" in the bill (in the original SOPA, a U.S.-directed site could be any site). Then, a foreign domain name is listed as not a "domestic domain" (keep hopping!), which itself is defined as "a domain name that is registered or assigned by a domain name registrar, domain name registry or other domain name registration authority that is located within a judicial district of the United States."

This means that all .com or .org domains are domestic, since they're assigned by a registry that is located within the US (for those confused, a domain registry is a company like VeriSign that runs the master database of all domains under a single top level domain). The thinking here is that (as ICE and the Justice Department have claimed) any website that has a TLD that is controlled by an American company can be dealt with via existing laws, such as the one that ICE uses to seize websites. .com is run by VeriSign, which is based in the US. And .org is run by the Public Interest Registry, which is also based in the US (Virginia, specifically).

That means that thepiratebay.org -- the main website for The Pirate Bay... is actually immune from the two key parts of SOPA (sections 102 and 103, since both clearly state that they only cover "U.S.-directed sites").

So, based on the law as written... The Pirate Bay is immune from SOPA (though, potentially not from ICE just seizing the domain). It's worth noting the same is true of both RapidShare and Megaupload -- two other sites frequently cited by the MPAA and the US Chamber of Commerce as the types of awful, evil sites that these bills are targeted to take down. In fact, remember that "53 billion visits to rogue websites" claim that the US Chamber of Commerce loves to repeat? Nearly half of that is from RapidShare and Megavideo/Megaupload. And yet, those sites are clearly excluded from SOPA based on the definitions. So why would they still be trotting them out as examples?

Filed Under: domains, domestic sites, rogue sites, sweden
Companies: the pirate bay

Finnish ISP Ordered To Block Access To Finnish EFF Site As Part Of Pirate Bay Censorship Campaign

from the well-look-at-that dept

Rick Falkvinge points us to the news that as part of a court ruling forcing Finnish ISP Elisa to try to block access to a bunch of "pirate" websites, it also ordered the company to block access to a website run by Electronic Frontier Finland. The site, piraattilahti.fi, has all sorts of EFF-style info about Finliand. I believe that EFFinland is entirely separate from the American EFF, but is basically a local version of it, that covers the same types of issues in Finland. This raises all sorts of questions -- many of which are pretty troubling. In an effort to stop access to The Pirate Bay, the fact that a court would also order access blocked to an advocacy website talking about digital freedoms is pretty troubling, and highlights how "blocking over copyright" can very easily lapse into "blocking over speech."

Filed Under: censorship, finland
Companies: eff, elisa, the pirate bay

Belgian Anti-Piracy Group Threatens To Take ISPs To Court If They Don't Block The Pirate Bay; Pirate Bay Traffic From Belgium Increases

from the the-way-of-the-world dept

It really was just a couple weeks ago that the European Court of Justice ruled that requiring ISPs to filter the internet was not reasonable. That ruling was on a specific case coming out of Belgium, but it's apparently not stopping a Belgian anti-piracy group (not a party to that original case), called BAF, the Belgian Anti-Piracy Federation, from sending letters to every ISP in Belgium, threatening to take them to court if they don't block access to The Pirate Bay.

This is because a court did rule that two Belgian ISPs had to block access to 11 of TPB's domains. BAF is now warning other ISPs that if they don't do the same, it'll take them to court over the same issue, and some are already complying. Of course, as with pretty much any other block, this effort appears to be having the opposite effect. TorrentFreak asked someone from TPB about all of this:

“This will just give us more traffic, as always. Thanks for the free advertising,” we were told.

And he appears to be right.

A few days after the verdict was announced The Pirate Bay registered depiraatbaai.be, a new domain not covered by the court order. Today, just a few weeks later, this domain is already the 124th most-visited in Belgium, on its way to enter the top 100.

Indeed, the years of legal procedures and subsequent blackmailing are easily circumvented by registering a $15 domain.

It's kind of amazing that the "anti-piracy" folks still haven't figured this out yet.

Filed Under: belgium, copyright, isps
Companies: the pirate bay

Data Shows: Removing 'Rogue Sites' From Search Won't Make Much Of A Difference

from the stop-blaming-google dept

The legacy entertainment industry absolutely loves to blame Google for its problems. As I've noted in the past, it's mostly a correlation-not-causation error. That is, they see their own difficulty in adapting and sinking revenues (mainly at the record labels) and they see Google making a ton of money -- and they conclude that the two things are related, and that Google must be to blame. That's why they keep demanding that Google "take action" against the so-called "rogue sites." It seemed like a reasonable question, then, to see just how much traffic Google actually sends to these sites. Thankfully Compete tracks a lot of this kind of data... and the MPAA recently handed us a list of "rogue sites" to look at.

Pulling up the data on traffic sources for every site listed there shows that taking the big search engines out of the equation would barely matter. Across all 19 sites listed, 85% DOES NOT come from search (Google, Yahoo and Bing). Specifically, across all of those sites, the big three search engines deliver a whopping 15.2% of the traffic to those sites. Google sends about 11.5% of the traffic. Remove search links... and those sites will see a slight dip -- at best.

Of course, not all of these sites are equal, so we decided to look more closely at the favorite bogeyman of the legacy entertainment industry: The Pirate Bay. To hear the industry tell the story, if Google just blocked The Pirate Bay from its results, traffic would dry up. The evidence there suggests that the entertainment industry doesn't have the facts on their side (do they ever?). Google search drives slightly less than 22% of The Pirate Bay's traffic. Considering how many sites rely on Google for traffic, this is well below average. Add in Yahoo Search and Bing, and we're still talking about less than 28% of TPB's traffic actually coming from search.

And of that search traffic, what are people searching for? Well, most are searching for some variation on "the pirate bay." We looked at all of the search traffic to TPB for the past three months. The top 16 search terms that send traffic to TPB are some variation on the site's name. These are the top eight search terms, for example:

1. pirate bay
2. the pirate bay
3. piratebay
4. thepiratebay
5. tpb
6. piratebay.org
7. pirates bay
8. thepiratebay.org

In other words, people getting to TPB from Google already know exactly what they're looking for. It's actually pretty rare for people to just randomly search on an artist's name, and have Google send them off to The Pirate Bay. In fact, going through the top 100 search terms that take people to The Pirate Bay, less than 30% appear to be direct searches for infringing material -- and only two of those don't involve the material in question and a word that shows the person is clearly looking for infringing material (mostly "torrent", but sometimes "serial number" or something like that). Meaning that only 2 of the top 100 searches that drive people to The Pirate Bay actually involve people just searching for content without making it clear that they're looking for either TPB or a torrent file specifically. Those two searches? "Drake take care download" and "r kelly sex tape."

Take Care, of course, is Drake's high profile new album -- the same one that Drake made clear he didn't mind if people listened to the leaked versions online -- effectively sanctioning people to search for the downloads. It's also been a highly successful album on the sales front, anyway -- selling over 600,000 copies in its debut week. Doesn't sound like Drake is really suffering because of this search. As for the R. Kelly tape... well... let's just not go there.

Still, the point is pretty clear: Google and the other search engines don't really drive that much traffic to TPB (or other so-called "rogue sites"), and an awful lot of the traffic they do drive... is people searching for TPB itself (meaning they're just using Google as a shortcut, rather than to "discover" infringing works). And, when Google does drive people to specific content, it's usually because the person is already looking for what's almost certain to be an unauthorized version. Thus, the picture the industry paints of people doing innocent searches for authorized content, and somehow being waylaid by Google pointing them to TPB just isn't seen in the data. At all.

Force Google, Yahoo and Bing to "block" links to TPB and it will have almost no impact on traffic to TPB. It may annoy some people who use Google for navigation (rather than discovery), but it won't stop them from going to TPB, since that's clearly what they want. The drive to force Google to either block or "warn" people about these links seems entirely pointless based on the data. So, once again, the data suggests that the industry is in hysterics based on reasons not supported by the data. The effort to make search engines block links would be a total and complete waste of time.

Filed Under: hype, rogue sites, search, traffic
Companies: google, microsoft, the pirate bay, yahoo

Roger Ebert Points People To The 'Ebert-Edit' Of Psycho On The Pirate Bay

from the celeb-endorsements dept

Ever thought you'd see Roger Ebert endorsing a "pirated" movie found on The Pirate Bay? Keith alerts us to an Ebert tweet, in which he states, that he's "opposed to piracy," but still links to a fan edit of Psycho, noting that it "proves a point." You see, Ebert has said for a while that he thinks Hitchcock screwed up the ending of Psycho:

For thoughtful viewers, however, an equal surprise is still waiting. That is the mystery of why Hitchcock marred the ending of a masterpiece with a sequence that is grotesquely out of place. After the murders have been solved, there is an inexplicable scene during which a long-winded psychiatrist (Simon Oakland) lectures the assembled survivors on the causes of Norman's psychopathic behavior. This is an anticlimax taken almost to the point of parody.

If I were bold enough to reedit Hitchcock's film, I would include only the doctor's first explanation of Norman's dual personality: "Norman Bates no longer exists. He only half existed to begin with. And now, the other half has taken over, probably for all time." Then I would cut out everything else the psychiatrist says, and cut to the shots of Norman wrapped in the blanket while his mother's voice speaks ("It's sad when a mother has to speak the words that condemn her own son..."). Those edits, I submit, would have made "Psycho" very nearly perfect. I have never encountered a single convincing defense of the psychiatric blather; Truffaut tactfully avoids it in his famous interview.

While Ebert wasn't actually so bold, in this day and age, anyone can edit a movie (not necessarily legally), and someone took up Ebert's challenge, and made exactly that fan edit and put it up on The Pirate Bay, leading to Ebert's tweet.

Of course, in this day and age, with Twitter potentially suspending accounts of users who link to websites that link to content that might sorta kinda be deemed infringing, he should be careful. And, of course, let's not forget that the Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division these days seems to believe that a mere link to infringing content could be enough to file criminal charges.

And yet... most of us with any sense of perspective knows that this is crazy. No one is "harmed" by allowing someone to take Ebert's suggestion and create a fan edit of the movie. It's not likely that anyone is going to download and watch that and decide they don't need to watch the real version. If anything, it may make people interested in comparing. And, realistically speaking, the only people likely to watch the fan edit are those who were already fans of the original. So what harm has it done?

Filed Under: fan edit, psycho, roger ebert
Companies: the pirate bay

Belgian Court Orders Blocking Of The Wrong PirateBay Domain

from the the-trials-and-tribulations-of-the-technologically-clueless dept

This is fairly amusing. In the wake of a (not very amusing) ruling in Belgium that ISPs had to implement a DNS blockade of various domains associated with The Pirate Bay, some have realized that the court order failed to actually list The Pirate Bay's main site: thepiratebay.org. Instead, if you look at the details of the order, it lists out www.thepiratebay.org and a variety of other domains, but which all use www at the begining. However, TPB doesn't use www:

So obviously in defiance of that, people testing their dns servers go to the domain www.thepiratebay.org, except, thepiratebay doesn't have the www domain turned on. At one point it redirected to the main page at the url thepiratebay.org, now it doesn't probably because of negligence from the admins. What's interesting is that the court only ordered the block of the www subdomains so if an isp wants to make a fuss they should be able to avoid the penalties until a later ruling.

Of course, further showing the pointlessness of all of this is that TPB already set up an alternate domain, similar to when its faced challenges like this in the past. None of it seems to do anything to slow down TPB (in fact, it seems to help advertise it). Either way, it's yet another reminder of what happens when you have technologically illiterate judges making these kinds of decisions.

Filed Under: belgium, blocking, dns, technical illiteracy
Companies: the pirate bay