Sweet Justice

Today the guys who run The Pirate Bay were found guilty of promoting copyright infringement. Wikinews, Wikipedia.

How do you like them apples, now. Does this mean their site is going to be shut down?

Aww, phooey. I wasn't ready yet.

No the site's not going down, they're just spending a year jail time and getting slapped with a 3.5 million apiece fine.

they are appealing the verdict

Meh.

But you know? Sooner or later in court (if they ever get to court) someone would demand that site to be brought down.

....that somebody, could be YOU

I was never really certain why they would choose a site name that reflected their procurement policies.

It's like running a site named "howtocounterfeitmoney.com"
You're basicly inviting them to come after you at their leisure.

It's trickier than that though - the site doesn't host anything but torrents, which is not illegal, and not all the torrents are for files which would be illegal to share. I mean, the site's been around since 2003 and it took this long to go after them. I think the name, more than inviting a lawsuit, is a way to a say "haha you can't touch us". Of course we've seen how long that lasted.

Thing is though, think about how long it took them to even get TPB fined, how much they wanted as opposed to how much they got, and all the other file-sharing sites out there. This is a tiny victory, and it just proves that industry aren't going to get their way. They've got to adapt, and use file-sharing to their advantage instead of claiming them as their enemies.

Copyright and all these licences etc. aren't actually helping anyone. Take a look at [url=]Zen Habits[/url], for example. The guy who wrote that actually got more views and sales of his E-Book when he waived his copyright. Copyright is holding us in the past. TPB falling wasn't necessarily a good or bad thing, but things like that won't keep on happening if industries want to stay afloat.

On the flipside, Stardock released their latest video game title - "Demigod" - without any type of protection or serial numbers and when the game went live, scores of thousands of pirated copies hit their servers, slowing it down to a crawl. A number of prominent game review sites lowered their final scores/recommendations for the game based on that, because they assumed Stardock just created a sub-standard online gaming system which strongly reduced the appeal of the game (which pretty much requires online play).

Of course, GameStop played a major role in getting the game into pirate's hands, thanks to deciding to break the street date and releasing paid digital downloads a day early which allowed the pirate sites to seed it.

I also noted today that the United Kingdom was ranked as having the worst copyright laws by a pair of consumer groups (both in the UK).

One year in prison is still chump change.

Kiskaloo wrote:On the flipside, Stardock released their latest video game title - "Demigod" - without any type of protection or serial numbers and when the game went live, scores of thousands of pirated copies hit their servers, slowing it down to a crawl. A number of prominent game review sites lowered their final scores/recommendations for the game based on that, because they assumed Stardock just created a sub-standard online gaming system which strongly reduced the appeal of the game (which pretty much requires online play).

Of course, GameStop played a major role in getting the game into pirate's hands, thanks to deciding to break the street date and releasing paid digital downloads a day early which allowed the pirate sites to seed it.

I also noted today that the United Kingdom was ranked as having the worst copyright laws by a pair of consumer groups (both in the UK).

I would say that that is more due to the fact that everyone else still bothers with protecting themselves etc. I doubt there would have been as much of a problem if no-one else bothered to protect their stuff, though I don't know much about that case so I can't judge very well...

TTIO wrote:I would say that that is more due to the fact that everyone else still bothers with protecting themselves etc. I doubt there would have been as much of a problem if no-one else bothered to protect their stuff, though I don't know much about that case so I can't judge very well...

Well I imagine that Stardock would have spent significant more sums building their infrastructure to support the free-loaders, as will any other company that follows this track. How that will effect funds available for game development...

In the end, the attacker always has the advantage over the defender. Stardock have stated that they realize that they cannot stop piracy even with the most onerous of DRM and all that DRM just honks off the tens of thousands of people who are willing to buy the product. So they prefer to not have it and hope more people will pay for a game you can just install and play as opposed to researching cracks for a game with DRM up the wazoo.

The latest iTunes experiment shows that people are willing to pay a little for ownable content. The big problem is that price is indeed a "little" - $1 USD. When the labels raised that 30% (to $1.30USD), sales dropped like a rock as people moved to buy other $1 titles, instead.

So the most logical course of action is very cheap direct digital downloads of ownable content - be it music, movies or games. The advantage is the distribution costs to the content provider are cheap as dirt, but it can get very expensive for the content consumer with onerous bandwidth caps and overage fees (especially ones like Time Warner had been testing that effectively limited you to what a person with dial-up could reasonably expect to download in a month).

1$ is 100 cents and that is even number i am willing to pay

One thing I noticed from looking over the information left me a bit confused...

Copyright is one to start with... All the copyrights that are on digital materials and what not do not apply in Sweden. So while internationally they are doing something Illegal, locally, international authorities wont be able to lay a hand on them unless they want to piss off Sweden.

Also, In Swedish court, they cant sue you for that. mostly because International issues aren't allowed in Court, and cases that stem from political origins aren't aloud there either.

However, on TPB website, they state that the guy being Trialed said to have asked it this was a Politically connected Trial, but they wouldn't answer him.

Don't really know, Tommy - I've never paid any attention to international laws in my life.

TTIO wrote:This is a tiny victory [...] TPB falling wasn't necessarily a good or bad thing

The reason I called this "sweet justice" though is the Trellis Incident we had a while back which involved TPB. I'm saying this is a little bit of return for the insult sent at us.

Please tell about the Trellis Incident - because personally, I don't see this at all as a good thing.

Sevis wrote:Please tell about the Trellis Incident - because personally, I don't see this at all as a good thing.

We has a member named Trellis who took all of the Gunslinger Girl scanlation work done by members on this site and posted it to The Pirate Bay along with some insulting comments.

Kiskaloo wrote:

Sevis wrote:Please tell about the Trellis Incident - because personally, I don't see this at all as a good thing.

We has a member named Trellis who took all of the Gunslinger Girl scanlation work done by members on this site and posted it to The Pirate Bay along with some insulting comments.

Hating TPB because of this doesn't seem quite reasonable. In fact, apart from the fact of the insults, I don't see how he was wrong to do what he did (although telling about these forums would have been nice).

Yeah, I'm an open source/copyright-free fan.

KodokuRyuu wrote:The reason I called this "sweet justice" though is the Trellis Incident we had a while back which involved TPB. I'm saying this is a little bit of return for the insult sent at us.

Ah, agreed as far as that goes

Sevis wrote:Hating TPB because of this doesn't seem quite reasonable. In fact, apart from the fact of the insults, I don't see how he was wrong to do what he did (although telling about these forums would have been nice).

Yeah, I'm an open source/copyright-free fan.

That's not quite the whole story, but I'd rather not go into it myself. I think perhaps Tommygunner would be the best person to explain...

Sevis wrote:

Kiskaloo wrote:

Sevis wrote:Please tell about the Trellis Incident - because personally, I don't see this at all as a good thing.

We had a member named Trellis who took all of the Gunslinger Girl scanlation work done by members on this site and posted it to The Pirate Bay along with some insulting comments.

Hating TPB because of this doesn't seem quite reasonable. In fact, apart from the fact of the insults, I don't see how he was wrong to do what he did (although telling about these forums would have been nice).

Yeah, I'm an open source/copyright-free fan.

I too am a fan of open source and copyright-free stuff, but in this case the guy was being a real jerk about things and we of course couldn't get TPB to remove the files, so it was a rotten deal all around. As a result we stopped doing public releases for a few months, and now I personally release our work to the public so there is an easy to access venue for non forum members. Hopefully this will prevent similar issues from cropping up in the future. Of course, just because something is on TPB doesn't make it copyright-free, so I'm not really a fan of such sites - I prefer urging companies to release things for free themselves.

Trellis registered several accounts on this forum for the sole purpose of insulting the scanlation team and threatening to de-face the forum.

He also made some very personal insults directed at Tommy.