Pirate Bay founders jailed

[T-Bag]

To be honest this verdict is entierly expected. Not because they are criminals, but because if they were found innocent can you imagine the chaos it would cause. Bit Torrent traffic would go through the roof, and it's seen as a green light.
I don't think they've done anything jail worthy and the fine certainly doesn't fit the crime. I'm not sure they earned much money from it, if any. It's the typical, we'll make an example out of one group and ignore the rest as it's too much effort to worry about all of them.
You've got to think who they've hurt. They've taken a copy of something and shared it. They've not stolen it, they've not destroyed the original. Yes some people who downloaded it might have bought it if the download wasn't an option. Many would have borrowed it from a friend or simply gone without. Each download is not a lost sale.

Everyone I know that pirates stuff spends a huge amount of their disposable income on the same products they pirate. If all pirates stopped buying stuff for a single week the impact would be seen clearly.

[smilodon]

As said before, so does google. TPB doesn't have any illegal material stored on the servers. It is the users that upload the link and share it, both legal and illegal. TPB provides the link but not the product. You can find identical links with google and other standard search engines.

Now that is an interesting point.TPB was just a couple of guys. Google is a much loved multi billion dollar empire with armies of lawyers. I doubt anyone has the nerve to actually want to go head to head with them in court. Or would at least think much longer and harder about it than with TPB.

[Lexander]

As said before, so does google. TPB doesn't have any illegal material stored on the servers. It is the users that upload the link and share it, both legal and illegal. TPB provides the link but not the product. You can find identical links with google and other standard search engines.

I'm also interested in this case, because it will be an ground for many more lawsuits coming up. And not taking any sides, this is just how I see it. The case was bad I admit that, the prosecutor failed to prove the link between TPB and illegal things mostly.

But about that, that is a good example. But here comes the difference between them. Google was made for a search engine to everything, to make people lives easier and as it covers most of the WWW there is going to be some rotten apples in the basket. In the other hand TPB was made for to help  people download everything for free, and they pumped that image out of them. And we all know that they aren't innocent here, look at the IPREDtor service, a service that allows people to surf anonymous, now where would you need that if you got nothing to hide ?

If we say Google is the pharmacy selling legal medicine, that can be used both in good and bad. But TPB is the guy around the corner of pharmacy selling same drugs but cheaper and without any prescription. Who goes to jail ?

Interesting stuff, what do you think ?

[Bastet]

Tbh, i dont think just linking to it should be illegal. Morally incorrect maybe. But yes the points made above are true. You could charge google, or you-tube or possibly even dMw. Legal side of this case is very intresting.
 
Example is being made, but i am not sure this is the way to go about it.:g:

[delanvital]

Now that is an interesting point.TPB was just a couple of guys. Google is a much loved multi billion dollar empire with armies of lawyers. I doubt anyone has the nerve to actually want to go head to head with them in court. Or would at least think much longer and harder about it than with TPB.

Well, Youtube has been, and is, taking some heat for having copyrighted music (videos) stored - and that is owned by Google? That said, you are right, going after TPB is a comparatively easier win than dealing with a mastodont like google...

[Lexander]

Well, Youtube has been, and is, taking some heat for having copyrighted music (videos) stored - and that is owned by Google? That said, you are right, going after TPB is a comparatively easier win than dealing with a mastodont like google...

At least they are doing something to it http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/09/youtube-in-music-video-deal-with-universal/

[Dr Sadako]

Another point to take into account is that the links on TPB points at torrent files (.torrent) which could contain anything with any file name, if you want to go out on a limb. Do TPB need to download and check that the file linked actually is a legal/illegal file before allowing to posting the link? If so aren't they committing an illegal act by downloading pirated material to check the link? :g:

[Lexander]

This might go a bit off topic but who says piracy won't do any harm ?
http://2dboy.com/2008/11/13/90/
and
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2009/04/demigod-hit-by-massive-piracy-review-scores-take-beating.ars

[T-Bag]

So with a 90% piracy rate and a 1 in 1000 rate conversion to genuine sales. Thats around a 0.1% loss in overall sales.
The article about the servers being hammered is a little sad. It's a shame that a company trying to remove DRM would get hammered so much that it affects their online services.
However having had VERY bad experience with Stardock and their customer services I don't feel sorry for them. My brother bought a copy of Sins of a Solar Empire direct from them. The game was full price with an extra $12 international shipping and then when it arrived there were unpaid taxes. Despite the game being full price (no tax reduction on the online price). All together I think the game cost best part of $70, and an email to them to check if they'd double charged the tax or not sent it as tax paid etc got a response basically saying it's your problem. Getting rid of DRM in a game doesn't in my mind take back treating customers in this way.

[Bob]

You just can't compete with free and those are people who want it free.

Yes, you can - and that is exactly what the music and movie industry industry haven't figured out. They stick to their old and outdated business models with more complex/difficult solutions, less freedom and poorer quality than what you can get if you download from for instance TPB. You CAN compete with free if you manage to offer a better product.

Perhaps this will see a movement across the globe to shut down the p2p sites and make it less and less popular to download warez illegally..

I highly doubt it. With the amount of free PR TPB has botten during this trial (and will continue to get as the case moves higher up in the court system), TPB is probably more popular than ever.

You've got to think who they've hurt. They've taken a copy of something and shared it. They've not stolen it, they've not destroyed the original. Yes some people who downloaded it might have bought it if the download wasn't an option. Many would have borrowed it from a friend or simply gone without. Each download is not a lost sale.

Everyone I know that pirates stuff spends a huge amount of their disposable income on the same products they pirate. If all pirates stopped buying stuff for a single week the impact would be seen clearly.

It is very hard to mage guesses about this, but I do think you - at least to some extent - are correct. It would be very interesting to see an experiment as you described, where every pirates stoped buying stuff for some time...

And we all know that they aren't innocent here, look at the IPREDtor service, a service that allows people to surf anonymous, now where would you need that if you got nothing to hide ?

The whole concept of the Internet is freedom - freedom of speach, sharing of knowledge etc etc. There are many places in the world where this is not an option, where people don't get to speak out their mind, and where vicious regimes hides to the rest of the world what is really going on within their borders. The Internet has given these people the ability to tell the rest of the world - and for this, services that for instance let you surf anonymous is extremely important.

[Lexander]

The whole concept of the Internet is freedom - freedom of speach, sharing of knowledge etc etc. There are many places in the world where this is not an option, where people don't get to speak out their mind, and where vicious regimes hides to the rest of the world what is really going on within their borders. The Internet has given these people the ability to tell the rest of the world - and for this, services that for instance let you surf anonymous is extremely important.

That is 100% true but we are talking about Sweden not China

[Bob]

I came over what I think is a very good article by Øyvind Solstad about this whole case. It was posted on NRK Beta (The Norwegian national broadcast company's "sandbox for technology and new media". The have for instance experimented with publishing many of NRK's TV series using torrents, and are in general way ahead on new technology). I found it so good that I wanted to share it with you guys, so with good help from Google Translate, I here give you the English version

It is a bit of a long read, but I think you will find it worth your time. And at least, if nothing else, check out this 4 year old comic about "How Bob the Millionaire became a pirate". (And no, that Bob is not me - it is another Bob (as if I were a millionaire :narnar:))

Congratulations with wet pants
By Øyvind Solstad - April 17th, 2009

Fail - by Nima Badiey with a Creative Commons 2.0 license.

Everyone knows the expression "to pee in the pants to keep warm". Today, film and music industry won some really wet pants.

Stockholm court announced today the verdict against those who are behind the Pirate Bay and sentenced them to pay a compensation of 30 million Swedish kronor (around 24 million Norwegian kroner), and 1 year imprisonment. Read the full ruling here (pdf document) or see the whole coverage of the Pirate Bay on nrk.nos summary page, as well as here on NRKbeta.

The film and music rights organizations is obviously satisfied, and in various media one can read that Norwegian artists will celebrate tonight. I feel they have no reason to. Here's why:

1) They get no money
Although the Pirate Bay lost, money will never be paid. There are no values of any size at the Pirate Bay they can get hold of, and the convicted says straight out that they would rather burn the money than pay. So the artists and the organizations behind them will not get the money they were granted in the verdict.

2) Giant Advertising for the Pirate Bay
Through continuous coverage in the media in recent months, the Pirate Bay has gotten a PR they only could dream about. Even your grandmother knows how file sharing works. It would be interesting to see how traffic has increased in recent months... The music and film industry have given their "worst enemy" the centre of attention, while they themselves are left outside. For what will happen after the verdict?

3) Users get even more angry
At forums, Twitter, Facebook, online newspapers and blogs people are writing straight out that they are never going to buy a single CD or DVD any more. The music and film industry have managed to make their best customers even more angry, and are risking boycotts and even worse loss in sales. A particularly poor strategy, and I wonder who it is sitting and making these strategies for them. "What if we ****ed of many of our customers? Especially those who are trend setters and help bring forward new artists?". Go for it.

4) Technically impossible
A verdict in Sweden will have no practical significance for the technical operation of the Pirate Bay. Their servers are scattered all over the world, and they say that even they do not know where they are. So even if the Pirate Bay will be sentenced in Sweden, the operation can continue just as before.

What should they do?

I've worked in marketing for many years, and in that field one often do what is called a SWOT analysis. It stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats - explained here on Wikipedia.

What is then that is the strength of the Pirate Bay? It's free and easy.
What is the weakness? It is illegal with pirating. And file sharing is not so easy for those who doesn't know this already.
What are the possibilities here? You can get "customers" starting to use other solutions.
What are the threats? Many, but a threat is that many record companies go bankrupt, nobody will pay for anything, that you never manage to stop file sharing, etc.

Unfortunately, it seems to me that the music and film industry have ignored the second term in the analysis of why the Pirate Bay is a success: They have only focused on the word free, and not on the word simple.

The music and film industry must ensure that their solutions are simpler than the Pirate Bay's. It is not quite so easy to download music from the Pirate Bay. You must...

- Write the name of a song in a field
- Click on the file
- Download
- Play

This can be done easier and better.

1) One CAN compete with free
Spotify is an excellent example. There are only two steps:

- Write the name of the song in the field
- Press play

iTunes on the iPhone is another. I sit in a cafe and hear a song. I hold the phone up in the air and start Shazam. It finds the song, I click on it and voila, I'm in iTunes Store, click on the purchase and enter my password. Two minutes later, I have the song with me - legally purchased on the phone.

So it is possible to make things easier than illegal downloading. Instead of making silly campaigns where you try to get young people to see the relationship between cemeteries and illegal downloading, use the time and effort to explain that there are alternatives that are easier.

Sit down with Telenor and Netcom and make mobile subscriptions where legally downloading of music is free/included - so that the kids do not have to pay in large amounts to download songs via 3G when they are on the move.

Sit down with top designers and create templates for how music stores should be. Why is it easier for me to buy plane tickets with Norwegian (a Norwegian air line company) than buying music on the web? Because Norwegian have put the customer first, and given me every opportunity to find the cheapest possible tickets at the time that suits me - they are on my side.

2) One world - not 200 countries
The music and film industry still believes that one sail across the Atlantic in steam boats. That one don't pick up things happening in the U.S. because we are in Norway. Therefore, they operate with licenses and agreements that total ignores that young people do not think of borders and where things come from. A cool song from Brazil? An exciting website in Australia? A designer from Canada? A shoe I can order from Iceland?

People do not realize why they cannot listen to certain songs in Spotify in Norway, but if you drive your car over the border and enter a web cafe in Sweden you can. They do not understand why they cannot see the U.S. music videos on YouTube or series on Hulu.com. They do not accept that lame executives in the music and film industry have not yet managed to create systems in which an artist can be released worldwide at the moment the person is signed up to a record label.

I think it is terrible that this is not resolves yet! It is 2009. We have had Internet for over 20 years. And still then, we have this artificial division of the world?

What is it young people spend most time on when they are online? Social networking. Across the world. Nobody cares about which country a person is in, what kind of network she has or where she was born.

3) Now. Not in a while but NOW.
Imagine that I am a fan of Lost (I am not - but let's pretend) and then the latest episode airs right now in the USA. Why can't I buy it and watch it here in Norway now? Not tomorrow, but now? My collegue Eirik Solheim made the comic "How Bob the Millionaire became a pirate" in 2005. As it is just as relevant today - four years later!!



I still cannot buy U.S. shows even how much I pay here in Norway. I still cannot stream U.S. movies on boxes from for instance Get or Apple before several weeks after the movie has come in USA. I still have to wait until the movies are done in the cinema before I can see them at home. What kind of strange way of thinking is that? Why is it OK that I pay 100 kroner to see a premiere of a film in a theater, where it is several more links between those who create the film and me, while it is not possible to pay 100 kroner to see the same film legally at home? It doesn't make sense at all.  (It is also environmentally bad, as I have to go to the theater and also buy unnecessary chocolate and popcorn and gets unhealthy.)

While I was writing this article, Frode Svendsen commented the following in our article about the Pirate Bay verdict:

I heard a speech given by Cory Doctorow, a recognized author and blog journalist, where he tells a little story about a software company you many have heard about (Valve) who said that the way they had reduced the highest number of stolen games from countries like Russia is zero-day release. In other words, earlier they chose to wait 1-3 months to launch new games in Russia, after they were launched in for example USA. The idea was that thus they could limit the amount of stolen copies... The truth was that when they stopped with this artificial pause between launches, the number of stolen copies plunged.

Exactly! Because it is now, not next week. It is exactly the same with all other media. Britney Spears' new album arrived in stores in Norway later than in the United States. In the meantime, lots of people had downloaded it.

We live in an age where people expect "instant gratification" - immediate satisfaction of needs - and then the music and film industry cannot work with "next week" or "this summer".

It is only NOW! that works.

Congratulations!

So congratulations to the music and film industry today. Together with your strategists and lawyers you have properly peed in your pants. It is hot and well now, but in a while it is even colder than it was before you started the lawsuit against the world's largest website for file sharing.

At the end I would like to add: I do not support illegal downloading of music: I buy music I like with iTunes, amiestreet and 7digital, I use Spotify when it is a party and I buy tons of DVDs that I rip and put on my home computer (with a heavy heard - crappy plastic - I would prefer to buy the movies DRM-free and download them).

I have friends that are musicians and are running record companies - and sees people helping themselves to their music without paying.

But I get annoyed by, in my opinion, the headless strategy behind this trial. And I don't get what the music and film industry are doing. They have content that everyone wants, but they do not manage to sell it to us in a proper manner? Fascinating and sad.

[T-Bag]

Bob summed it up very well. The movie companies are about 10 years behind. They still insist that everyone owns the disk, they have no internet standard. No "Steam" for movies. Where you can keep a collection online download them anywhere.
Series, movies, music, games online only, minimal DRM like steam. ISPs with unlimited traffic meaning you have access anywhere. Ability to make backups etc. This is the future.

With Sky+ I can keep a series on a harddrive legally. With Virgin on demand I can access stuff any time I want for free or a small fee. Why not use the internet to provide the same service.

It's not the price that makes piracy so desirable, it's the simplicity.

(I use Spotify more and more for my music, I use Steam exclusively for my games, but for TV series I'm left either waiting long after the series is over for it to eventually come out on disk, Sky+ it and watch it on TV...or download to day it comes out if for £1* an episode I could get them legally I'd be happy to carry on.

* For instance Lost season 3 = 22 episodes box set is £27 so the £1 an episode mark is about right when you cut out the cost of the disks and the profits for amazon and the shipping costs they've factored in. That should be about right for a 45min episode. 20min programs would have to have a lower price tag. This is just a ballpark figure to show that the prices are realistic.

With a service like steam where you can log in anywhere on a pc or a set-top box (say eventually around £50 mark when the catch on) you can hook up to your TV to watch these things on a big screen. This would instantly become a HUGE hit overnight if they could agree the royalties and the technical details. No limited downloads, no over the top DRM.

[Lexander]

I have mixed feelings about that article, it is true that the big record companies should find a way to make it easier and better. But as spotify is an brilliant example you can't use it here. YOU CAN NOT GET ANYTHING FOR FREE, and spotify goes around that problem by streaming the music. You don't get anything to your HDD and you need an internet connection for it to work. And there is lots and lots of easy to use and cheap music services like the mentioned iTunes, but why don't people use them ? I will give an example, my friends: I have been trying to bump spotify for all to use but all I get is "Why should I use that because I can download the whole discography for free in few minutes?". Same with movies, there are many shops alone in Finland that rent movies by streaming them but the same quote stays here aswell.

The defence is always "make it better and we will use it" when they make something no-one uses them so why is that?
Funny how people demand lower prices and use that as an explanation, but the the next day they demand more salary at work.

[Luminance]

also read about that "preventing 1000 piracy attempts results in only a single additional sale"

Well I can honestly say that I bought more then 1 real product for every 1000 I downloaded (way way way more, and I doubt I'll reach my first 1000 any time soon). As I've said before I'm under the impression that a lot of users like me used the piracy attempts more like sampling, and by doing so I came in contact with a lot more programs, games, movies or bands etc. I like and bought, then that I would have by going to the store alone. So I've bought more stuff extra then that I pirated, and I believe that goes for a lot of people.


But of course those big multy bilionair companies don't want to see that, they just see the downloaded figures and think: OMG I could have made a bilion more on that product, no fair no fair, I fairly stole it from an Indian dude who came up witht he idea in the first place....


Edit:

Hmm 1 pound per episode T-Bag.
They should do that with Anime too, I mean, 20 euros for 5 episodes (only 20 mins per ep) on disc version (of a 20-600 episode series) can make me poor really really fast. They should make it 20-50 cents per episode view (not own it but view) or something, that way the whole world can watch a serie without having to wait for the shipment to reach (if they ever) to hit your country (sure you can get naruto, deathnote and bleach here, but there are a lot more out there). That way the companies get extra funding, without the costs of discs or shipment...

Edit:

Interesting read Bob, great article that pretty much covered the whole Piracy issue. Only now it is missing one thing, imagine that a new AC/DC cd costed 11 dollars in the U.S. at launch day and that the same excact cd costs 22 euros in Holland, whats wrong??
Its not even twice as much, since 1 euro is 1.30 dollars.