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The Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde: It's evolution, stupid

wired.co.uk

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Re: The Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde: It's evolution, stupid

#51

Post by jiggy2011 »

cobrausn wrote: post #44
jiggy2011 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think these demands are reasonable, especially the geographical one since you can't buy something if it's not available for you to buy. The issue is that sometimes when you pay for something you end up with an inferior product, for example being required to install additional software that you either don't like or may not even be available for your platform. I think you can mitigate piracy a lot by simply providing…

I can always add one more reasonable demand to my previous list of reasonable demands to hide behind. The final one will be 'accept bitcoin payment' and then I'll never need to pay for anything again! Let's face it, they could charge 0.01 USD over the face of the globe and the only requirement would be paypal or credit card, and that would be too much for some people. Piracy would still run rampant, because piracy is…

Sure, there will always be people with unreasonable expectations but I think that the more of peoples requirements you can satisfy the less appealing piracy becomes.

There are also network effects at work, I remember when Napster first became popular (I was quite young at the time) and literally overnight everyone at school had gone from owning a handful of CDs and cassettes to having huge music collections.

People spent a lot of their time discussing the various artists they had discovered through Napster and you would have been considered pretty odd if you didn't have at least a couple of gigabytes of music. Not to mention that everybody suddenly had more disposable income to spend on other things. So whilst you could take a moral stance on it, you would most likely become an outcast to a certain extent. Besides, people tend to decide their morals based on what they see others do.

This can also work the other way though, as with my Steam example. As well as selling games in a convenient way they also provide tools you can use to find out what your friends are playing and join games with them. This means that adoption can spread around a peer group pretty quickly.

Re: The Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde: It's evolution, stupid

#52

Post by gareim »

CodeMage wrote: post #30
paulhauggis wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Why do people always resort to the same argument ("stop buying") as if it were a solution? Isn't it obvious by now that it's not a solution and it's not going to happen?" Whenever we have discussions about companies violating the GNU and people say "just don't use GNU software", I say the same thing. But the funny thing is, the same people that are fine with pirating are against essentially the same thing with the G…

You don't need music or movies to live. If they all decide to do it, just stop buying all together. Correction: you don't need them to survive . They are, however, a part of everyone's lives nowadays. We all grew up listening to music and watching movies. It would require tremendous external pressure (such as war or plague) to change that. Maslow's Pyramid and all that jazz. Music is so cheap. All of the original dem…

Amazon answered your demands already. You can buy music via a browser, there's a large selection, it's DRM-free, you can stream or download as many times as you'd like, and you can play it while offline.

Amazon also offers a pretty fair price. $0.99 isn't a lot (and it's even cheaper per song if you buy the album). If $0.99 is too much, then I suggest the person go get a better job rather than pirating songs and feeling an entitlement to someone else's work.

Re: The Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde: It's evolution, stupid

#53

Post by dekz »

cynicalkane wrote: post #49

A while ago I realized something about piracy that disturbed me, and the more I think about it, the more disturbed I get. Lots of money now days is going into things like webapps, app stores, Steam, DRM-encumbered streaming, enterprise software, other categories of stuff that can't reasonably be stolen. But this presents an encumbrance over information for which society would be better off if it were free in the info…

Are trying to imply that deep down everyone inherently would choose theft over remuneration? Or that we all would prefer a world where everything is free?

Piracy exists sorely due to bad business models, where it is distribution of expected value of a product; Teens aren't going to pay $300 for Microsoft Office to use for 3 hours the night before a paper is due, I don't want to have DRM on my music.

If your opinion was the case we'd see businesses burning to the ground, which we aren't. We're seeing business like Spotify, BandCamp, Steam, Kickstarter, HumbleIndieBundle all flourishing.

Re: The Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde: It's evolution, stupid

#54

Post by chimeracoder »

cynicalkane wrote: post #49

A while ago I realized something about piracy that disturbed me, and the more I think about it, the more disturbed I get. Lots of money now days is going into things like webapps, app stores, Steam, DRM-encumbered streaming, enterprise software, other categories of stuff that can't reasonably be stolen. But this presents an encumbrance over information for which society would be better off if it were free in the info…

> A perfect content lockdown is theroetically possible and people are getting better at it all the time.

Maybe I'm misinterpreting what you mean by a 'content lockdown', but as I read it, I couldn't disagree more with this statement - how could we ever have a perfect content lockdown?

Re: The Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde: It's evolution, stupid

#55

Post by chimeracoder »

Gotttzsche wrote: post #47
tweak2live wrote: post #21

The question of intellectual property is moot. It is impossible to adequately police teh intertubes without outlawing encryption. Why do the media companies insist on continuing to attempt the impossible, instead of cutting their losses and investing in distribution infrastructure? By pursuing the kind of ham-fisted, extra-legal "piracy fighting" that the article describes, they are doing themselves a huge disservice…

i may be out of the loop, but... none of the popular ways of piracy are generally encrypted are they? if all the unencrypted ones were to be shut down, would it be possible to replace them with safe ones? i mean with public p2p filesharing, you can always "spy" on the sharers. i mean it has the be decryptable for you to download it, right? and youll know who sent it. and with stuff that hosted somewhere, whether it's…

Just because it's not the dominant means of exchange today doesn't mean it couldn't be.

Ten years ago, the analogous reasoning would have been 'Well, we can just shut down the Napster server', or shortly after 'Well, we can just shutdown the Gnutella superpeers'.

Re: The Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde: It's evolution, stupid

#56

Post by peterhunt »

dekz wrote: post #53
cynicalkane wrote: post #49

A while ago I realized something about piracy that disturbed me, and the more I think about it, the more disturbed I get. Lots of money now days is going into things like webapps, app stores, Steam, DRM-encumbered streaming, enterprise software, other categories of stuff that can't reasonably be stolen. But this presents an encumbrance over information for which society would be better off if it were free in the info…

Are trying to imply that deep down everyone inherently would choose theft over remuneration? Or that we all would prefer a world where everything is free? Piracy exists sorely due to bad business models, where it is distribution of expected value of a product; Teens aren't going to pay $300 for Microsoft Office to use for 3 hours the night before a paper is due, I don't want to have DRM on my music. If your opinion w…

No, piracy exists because it's cheaper than buying a product.

Re: The Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde: It's evolution, stupid

#57

Post by polymatter »

eurleif wrote: post #43
kbolino wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's vacuous reasoning. I know the situations are different; I'm asking why one is ethically intolerable and the other is ethically acceptable to the point of making civil disobedience unethical (in freehunter's opinion, anyway). To put it another way, what about that difference justifies the discrimination?

IP rights to the same work in different countries are sold separately, and can end up being owned by different companies. Also, different countries have different economies, which means it makes sense to manage distribution in separate countries separately.

> IP rights to the same work in different countries are sold separately, and can end up being owned by different companies

My understanding is that most licences grant permission to consume the content (listen to music, watch the film ...) irrespective of the country of your physical location (as long as its not public broadcast or rented out). Otherwise I would need to repurchase all my ipod songs and reading books when I go on holiday.

> Also, different countries have different economies, which means it makes sense to manage distribution in separate countries separately.

In physical distribution this makes sense. Each country has a different import/customs bureaucracy which must be followed which takes time and money. Then you need agreements with shipping, wholesalers, etc. But over the web, serving separate countries is trivial. In fact, the web server doesn't know where your customer is until you geolocate their IP address.

Besides, I'm sure there were reasonable business reasons to exclude blacks from certain businesses too. Perhaps allowing blacks into a pub would irrevocably damage its brand with its standard clientele; perhaps allowing blacks to sit on a bus would mean the business would need more buses to ensure that all whites could have a seat; perhaps allowing blacks to rent a room in a hotel would mean it would be more expensive to keep track of whether the bed sheets have been used by a black couple or not.

Legitimate business concerns may explain discrimination but not justify it.

Re: The Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde: It's evolution, stupid

#58

Post by spindritf »

peterhunt wrote: post #56
dekz wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are trying to imply that deep down everyone inherently would choose theft over remuneration? Or that we all would prefer a world where everything is free? Piracy exists sorely due to bad business models, where it is distribution of expected value of a product; Teens aren't going to pay $300 for Microsoft Office to use for 3 hours the night before a paper is due, I don't want to have DRM on my music. If your opinion w…

No, piracy exists because it's cheaper than buying a product.

Piracy exists because easily replicable goods are not available to some people, price is just one of many possible reasons for this unavailability -- look at tv, shows from free-to-air channels are being pirated in millions(!) of copies every week.

Re: The Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde: It's evolution, stupid

#59

Post by res0nat0r »

efnx wrote: post #9
thomholwerda wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While your assertion may very well be true, the link you provided is not, in any way, any kind of proof. There's nothing in there - at all - to support your claim that "app store piracy is a huge problem". Do we have any actual figures to support this claim? I highly doubt its validity, you see.

I would also like to see some proof that piracy is a huge problem. Files being available and free for download on the 'black market' does not mean that people who would pirate said files would otherwise pay for those files. It would be nice if someone did a scientific study...

Does it matter if it is a problem or not, really? As long as it is against the law, well then it can be considered a problem.

Until the law is changed that the music you demand should be free to everyone, anywhere, anytime, it is still a 'problem'. So you shouldn't be upset when websites that are profiting off of activities which are illegal get shutdown.

Re: The Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde: It's evolution, stupid

#60

Post by galadriel »

majani wrote: post #7
codex wrote: post #3

It is often claimed that piracy is the entertainment industry's own fault--that they need to evolve to embrace digital media, and because they haven't, people are forced to turn to piracy. There may be a bit of truth to that argument, but if you look at the Apple App Store, you'll find a damning rebuttal. The App Store has embraced digital distribution. Purchasing and downloading apps could not be easier. It's certai…

I've found that in the recent piracy debates, there has been a high level of dishonesty, where people don't want to admit that the absolute number one reason people resort to piracy is because that shit is free. I'd like to challenge the founders of TPB to charge for their superior distribution system and report the traffic numbers before and after.

Quite a large number of people pay to pirate, like those who paid for Megaupload, and those who pay for Usenet access. The charge is almost what Netflix charges (~10$ a month), but the selection and quality is much better (for pirated content), and catalog is also better. And better yet you don't loose the stuff that can be watched because some licensing agreement failed.

I think even if Piratebay starts charging what Netflix charges, it will remain a huge website.

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