Excellent point. Things have needed to change, I don’t think anyone will disagree there, but the point seems to have been completely missed by many, particularly those in stark opposition to the freedom of information. I believe it is the media corporations who must make changes to affect this outcome and it should not be handled in a legal manner but instead by methods such as the gaming industry have adopted. “Increase the value and incentives to be a legal, paying user”. There are so many other options available to them besides bringing lawsuits against end-users or providers such as the TPB website, yet they seem to only have that one card to play no matter what the situation.

There are also some important legal implications which support the need for open availability of free content such as the Fair Use Provisions Act of US Copyright law. The many other arguments for the need for availability of copyrighted content also include, but are not by any means, limited to:

1) Users who live in a country with no supporting copyright laws. For these users, outright piracy for private use and even in some cases, profit, is legal.

2) Users outside the intended areas of legal distribution. Though legally questionable and still subject to local copyright laws, it is undoubted that a majority of people support that this also should be considered legal. Making purchase impossible leaves a user who is being denied access to content based of geographic location and leaves piracy their only alternative.

3) Anyone who has taken an activist-like stance against the content providers and would use the materials as part of their campaign against them as part of a boycott or other such action.

For US citizens wishing to use the material for: “purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.” The download and exclusive possession of copyrighted materials for any of these easily provable motives is 100% legal. It is not theft by any means, and any assertion that it is, provided it is under these provisions, should be considered a case of libel and direct defamation of the target’s character. Legally speaking, all one must do is publicly comment on the content for any act of piracy to be protected under Fair Use.

While not openly supporting piracy for the sole ideal of “collecting it all for personal use”, I do believe that even without torrents, the media must still otherwise be made available to the public domain for any of the above purposes. Torrents are the current user-provided outlet for this media, and so long as the individual user in possession of the copyrighted material can justifiably support the possession for any these purposes, it it legal, is not theft, and anyone asserting otherwise should be considered an uneducated fool who is not in full possession of the facts.

The RIAA nor MPAA have publicly responded to this. The process by which they are willing make available any requested content has been made so difficult and time-intensive as to render it almost completely useless as a source for most if not all of the above cases for the free distribution of said content. It should logically be assumed that they are willing to strip the right of users to use their copyrighted content for any of these purposes, as they have made no attempts to provide an outlet for such materials to be made readily available to any and all individuals or groups seeking said materials for such purposes. The act of denying the materials to users for these purposes is just as illegal as downloading the content illegally for piracy is.

okay MR. LITERAL, i will revise the original statement to accommodate your annoying circumvention of the actual point: if an increasingly large portion of people continue to pirate the work of your employers eventually a tipping point will be reached and you will either be faced with having to accept less money for the same amount of work or having to find another career altogether.

obviously, it does not take “everyone” pirating to have an effect on the marketplace. if your margins are thin and your audience is niche, it might not take very much at all to put a serious dent into your business. a lot of independent labels have been finding that out recently. google “world of goo” and see what happened to them.

hopefully there wasn’t a stray figure of speech in there for you to take advantage of and interpret literally like some little autistic drone…

as for the pirate bay demographic not being your company’s target demographic WELL WOOPTIE-DO!GOOD FOR YOU! keep on selling your how-to-insert-a-tampon tutorials but really, what’s your point? the pirate bay demographic is a HUGE demographic for film and music industry and it’s one that is increasingly not willing to “share” in the cost of development.

that is a problem.

I want to make money and be able to live, but I don’t necessarily want to it at the expense of someone who’s much worse off than I am.

but pirates aren’t necessarily worse off then you! that’s the biggest lie in this entire talkback. a lot of pirates i’ve known are not poor at all! they have expensive computers, expensive speakers, expensive televisions, expensive IPODS, expensive internet subscriptions and go to expensive schools and routinely eat out at expensive restaurants. the money they save on buying entertainment they spend on everything else and then go online and whine about how poor they are…LOL

and that is why there is no such as thing as “non-profit piracy”. if you’re saving money on things you would have otherwise bought, that is most definitely “for profit”. and don’t give me the BS about “well, i wouldn’t have bought anything if i couldn’t pirate, i’d just do without”. anyone who says that, i’d ask them how many CDs and DVDs they USED to buy when they were younger and which movie rental places they USED to be a member of…

but let me just put aside reason for a moment and assume that your assumption of pirates being dirt poor is true…so what? there are cheap second run theaters, there is hulu, there are libraries. there is more entertainment available to HOMELESS PEOPLE right now then there has ever been before. the newest movies and albums are not a bodily need. no one is dying for lack of the newest “culture”. they are luxuries. just luxuries. and just because you (claim) you can’t afford luxuries does not mean you should just take them and then have the gall to call it “fair”.

P.S. Likening Hitler and the Nazis to just about anything makes you look like a douche supreme in pretty much all cases.

agree with you here but i don’t recall you ever making the same point when it’s one of your pirate brethren that’s making the comparison (on a pretty much daily basis)

if you have, please feel free to correct me with the appropriate sources. ;-)

I don’t get this “TPB needs to change or it will die”. It has survived unchanged for years, so it’s clearly a lie and I am glad many people are seeing through the ‘official’ explanation of the sale.

The media industry has obviously taken over TPB after its founders ran into a dead end legally. I don’t blame them personally. They have finally understood they cannot keep up the defiant fasade and that’s the real reason why TPB came to an end.

“Any ideas or thoughts to contribute to this are appreciated.”

Sounds like an overly convoluted plan and if there is still a ‘gateway website’ that everyone needs to contact, how does this even constitute a decentralized service? Unless you meant there are a number of these, but your description reads like there is a central gateway website! Epic Fail.

“i hope he gets hit by a bus”

LOL. Let’s not be mean. Of course they pretended to be more than they were. And people bought it. But now we see the TPB founders are no dataheroes in shining bit armor!

“I really want to see a video of the trial.”

Well, I listened to the audio feed and read some transcripts and yes, the defendants were just as arrogant in court and it did not work for them.

“Though nameless and faceless you are heroes in our time.”

Thank you! I shall remember this whenever I upload. Knowing that it goes to benefit others, always makes it worth me ‘donating’ my personal time to edit video, the CPU time to render it and bandwidth to seed.

Smooth analogy. Because sharing content over a P2P network is so remarkably similar to the attempted genocide of an entire race of human beings. That would make sense if only it weren’t so completely asinine. +1 for the pirates. Jesus.

[quote]1. Greed
2. Arrogance
3. Freeloading
4. Laziness
5. Self satisfaction
6. Pretending you are special and you dont have to follow rules[/quote]

At least three of those are things I’d say both sides are guilty of. A good bit of the sharing going on is genuinely out of spite because of a blatent display of 1 and 2 by the industries. “We’re big and rich and powerful and we can charge whatever we want and give us your money!” “No.”

[quote]Ive never seen such elaborate commemoration for theft.[/quote]

Where you see theft, I see duplication. Theft would require that the content be missing from somewhere… But I digress. Don’t get me wrong though either. The funniest thing about me even being here is that it’s been years since I’ve actually downloaded or uploaded anything. I don’t even have a torrent client installed and probablly never will again. Hopefully, I never need to again. I still lurk through the indexes now and then, laughing when I see something I worked on with 50+ seeds, because what else can I do. I want to make money and be able to live, but I don’t necessarily want to it at the expense of someone who’s much worse off than I am.

Once I became successful enough to afford the things I wanted, I had no qualms about buying them legitimately. I own more games on Steam now than I ever downloaded from torrents. But I do remember when times were tough and I was struggling to make ends meet. The Bay was there for me then, and RIP or whatever, I’ll never forget that. My whole point was that is isn’t the four guys that even matter. They’re just figureheads for the cause of an entire caste of people(certainly not everyone, but a healthy number) that truly cannot afford to pay for the rising costs of entertainment. It’s amazing how little people care about corporations and their profit margins when all they want to do is watch a damn movie to help them forget what a mess their life is.

Yarr! and P.S. Likening Hitler and the Nazis to just about anything makes you look like a douche supreme in pretty much all cases.

Surely, you don’t really expect to convince anybody that “everyone” is a pirate. Perhaps “everyone” uses Windows Vista and is wearing a blue Oxi-Clean shirt today too. 306 million Americans vs. 20 million TPB users worldwide. Hrmmm… Everyone, you say? Riveting tale, chap. It all hinges on a rediculously implausible if though.

Not that you really cared beyond making your point, but my firm has doubled it’s quarterly profits from 2007 to present day. Rest assured that my lack of fear regarding the pirate community is well justified. I never expected, nor would I ever count on, making money off of the BitTorrent community. I knew they were here and knew exactly what they were capable of. I am a t-shirt wearing member. =/

This fact would be responsible for why they aren’t the target market of any project I’ve put my time into either, not by a longshot. If they download 1 copy or 100,000 copies, it doesn’t matter to us because we understand that piracy of software is just like shrinkage in a retail business… it happens, and we planned on it. The BT community are a miserable target market for anyone who wants to make money and I still have no clue why the industries seem to think they can ever change that to their benefit by pissing them all off with such regularity.

Next rediculous assertion? Maybe piracy is starving my children, beating up my wife in the night, and generally ruining the world for decent people, am I correct?

Hey “Terrance”… am wondering why your post is exact, word for word, to a post from NEOSTYLES in another thread recently – especially the “swipe with the long arm of the law” bit… Pussy.

Actually, it’s not. Second of all, way to dodge people’s actual post.

TPB was more than “four thieves that run TPB”. It was an idea. An idea supported by millions upon millions of people without whom(and their bandwidth) the TPB would just be another useless, unvisited index and tracker. We, the users, have undoubtedly helped make TPB what it was. We seed the goodies. We bought the shirts in the name of supporting end-user freedom. We do it because it must be done. We vote with our wallets that we don’t support the entertainment conglomerates, but also aren’t really willing to miss out on the content either.

Millions of people also supported hitler.

OK, sure, TPB was an idea. One that was based on :
1. Greed
2. Arrogance
3. Freeloading
4. Laziness
5. Self satisfaction
6. Pretending you are special and you dont have to follow rules

RIP the parasite bay

To the uploaders, the crackers, the scene groups, the workprint leakers, and our beloved screenrippers: You guys are the unseen magic behind the curtains of TPB

LOL
Ive never seen such elaborate commemoration for theft.

All the while they were cashing in with subscriptions, and software and merchendise, and porn adverts, not to mention that they’re probably selling all your personal TPB user data to the RIAA or other highest bidder. good job!$$$$

Did you hear their “foundation” is fortunately based in the $unny carribean!

They should all be on the front cover of busine$$week. respect.

just as an aside…if everyone pirated your programming, there would be NO ONE to pay you initially, during, after, or otherwise because your employer paying you is predicated on the assumption that they will see a return on their investment. if they start seeing less of a return guess who isn’t going to get paid as much next time? guess who might not even be hired next time? guess who might have to consider another career whose products and services aren’t so easily stolen?

YOU!