Pirate Bay founders jailed

Penfold · April 17, 2009, 11:46:43 AM

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8003799.stm

TeaLeaf · April 17, 2009, 11:50:44 AM

They'd have never have got it off the ground without being able to piggy-back on Sadako's 1 trillion gigabit connection. Honest. :whistle:

BrotherTobious · April 17, 2009, 11:51:40 AM

Lmao

FrEnZy · April 17, 2009, 01:09:23 PM

I don't understand where that damages figure comes from!

Surely without some form of research into how many downloads could really be considered lost sales then Â£2.1m is a number pulled out of thin air?

Tutonic · April 17, 2009, 01:16:01 PM

'P2P is a demand signal from the market' - Cory Doctorow.

These guys dont get it, do they. P2P is how people want to obtain their music/video/whatever, so why not sit down with the 'pirates' (and I use that term incredibly loosely) and thrash out some sort of royalties deal?

Bombarding P2P sites with takedown notices and legal threats just pushes the whole thing even further underground, making it harder to police and shut them down.

Dr Sadako · April 17, 2009, 01:30:53 PM

This is a very interesting verdict. Now we just need to see when they start jailing people from Google and Youtube that actually have the illegal stuff on their own hard drives ...

Lexander · April 17, 2009, 03:05:32 PM

There is nothing to be talked about, this case is going to higher court at least and maybe even more higher so the law suit will take years to actually mean something.
And to the other comments about a "deal" with record companies and organizations like pirate bay, when it is free it is free. You just can't compete with free and those are people who want it free. BUT there are amazing things like spotify that needs the support of people to keep up.

smilodon · April 17, 2009, 07:30:05 PM

P2P is a fantastic resource for sharing all kinds of information and allowing people to share data that would be too large for everyone to drag from a single site (the Blizzard downloader). It is somewhere I can find all kinds of interesting copyright free or expired stuff. The Pirate Bay have nothing to do with the effective use of P2P as a sharing medium. They are all about being anti copyright. As a result they are part of the problem that is ruining the image of P2P and the legal sharing of resources.

I love their store of cease and desist notices and replies but won't miss their passing if they do actually get banged up for a few years. They were part of the process of ripping off peoples works. Not just big greedy movie and music execs but everyone who tried to create and sell anything on the Internet. The start up software house that went broke when it's first software release got ripped off before they even had a chance to market it. The game developer that gave up on PC games and began writing exclusively for consoles. Independent film makers and musicians, new authors the list goes on.

Sadly a conviction that sticks will give the big publishers the idea that they can still protect their profits by bullying the little guy through the courts. Nor will it stop anyone stealing stuff if they want to. Win or loose it will not be a good result for anyone

Bastet · April 17, 2009, 07:32:28 PM

Quote from: Lexander;273013There is nothing to be talked about, this case is going to higher court at least and maybe even more higher so the law suit will take years to actually mean something.
And to the other comments about a "deal" with record companies and organizations like pirate bay, when it is free it is free. You just can't compete with free and those are people who want it free. BUT there are amazing things like spotify that needs the support of people to keep up.

This point is very valid, the major movie producers count every copy downloaded as 10 quid loss, or however much the dvd/mp3/game sells for. Now a LOT of the downloads are done to save having to pay for it. The reviews might not have been so good, or your just not intrested.
its just how it works. If the choise is between forking over money or not seeing/playing most of the time the choise for the ilegal downloads would go to not at all.

Gone_Away · April 17, 2009, 07:53:51 PM

I've been watching this in earnest to be honest. It's truely a landmark case.

I couldn't believe how cocky these guys were acting even boasting that they felt that they were going to get off and then the next day citing that just like movies the news of their verdict was out before the release date..

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..

Lexander · April 17, 2009, 08:14:23 PM

Quote from: smilodon;273049P2P is a fantastic resource for sharing all kinds of information and allowing people to share data that would be too large for everyone to drag from a single site (the Blizzard downloader).

Blizzard downloader is P2P or did you mean that ?
And yeah like inventions as P2P and torrents are fantastic but they are used to wrong purpose. I read somewhere that the inventor of torrent sharing is really angry about how it is used now, he said that it denigrates the technology and gives it an illegal "stamp". And they have lost many good opportunities to use it for cheap and legal sharing of music and etc.
And what goes to this case, TPB was somehow right BUT they did nothing to prevent the illegal downloading, rather they bumped it and got money from it.

Rabbi Bob · April 17, 2009, 11:48:30 PM

Quote from: Lexander;273055Blizzard downloader is P2P or did you mean that?

Blizzard Downloader uses BitTorrent.

Also, of interest, Valve hired Brahm Cohen, creator of BitTorrent before HL2 was released.

smilodon · April 17, 2009, 11:58:02 PM

Sorry that's what I meant. I used the Blizz downloader as an example of a good use for P2P. The way I wrote was crap and could have been taken either way. Sorry

Remember the bad old days when every patch was a complete nightmare and you could write off playing any WOW for at least 48 hours, which was as long as it took to drag the file from Blizzards understandably limited resources.

Rabbi Bob · April 18, 2009, 12:21:30 AM

Ah! No worries

Dr Sadako · April 18, 2009, 12:53:20 AM

Quote from: Lexander;273055TPB was somehow right BUT they did nothing to prevent the illegal downloading, rather they bumped it and got money from it.

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.

What is boils down to: is it illegal to link to illegal products even though you don't provide the product yourself? Do TPB have an obligation to remove links that link to illegal products? Morally, without a doubt. Legally, possibly.

If dMw would have a post that links to TPB or any other site that provide links to illegal downloads (for example www.google.com) does that mean that dMw could be trialed as well? Where should the "link line" be drawn?

Don't get me wrong. I do not defend TPB or piracy. I am just curious about the legal stuff vs. how the internet works. The owners of search engines and Youtube should be quite scared imho aswell as the server providers.