6 ms·

Have you noticed something? They removed the torrent, but they refuse to do so under legal pressure from huge corporate empires. I think that this is an elegan

Have you noticed something? They removed the torrent, but they refuse to do so under legal pressure from huge corporate empires. I think that this is an elegant proof that being genuinely nice to people works. Pirate bay is a site run by an organization for a political reason, but we tend to forget that it's made up of people too.

jrockway 16y ago
The message said they did a bad job cracking the software. Maybe they took it down, are doing a good job, and then they're going to put it back up. I feel that ego is a primary motivator for the piracy community. This does not feed it.
- todayiamme 16y ago
  Look, the "piracy community" is made up of people with different motivations for why they do what they do. For some of them it's an ego satisfying game. For others, it's something else. So, I would rather look at them as decent human beings making a mistake. It just makes it so much easier to deal with anyone. Sometimes, being nice to people and holding them to a higher standard works. Irrespective of who they are, because genuine respect and decency combined with good humor is something so rare that it's a prized commodity.
  - kiba 16y ago
    They did not make an ethical mistake. Instead, they merely show what is inevitable. There are holes in the maps of hollywood that people ignored to their own perils. They could have launch business model experiment that doesn't risk much of anything. They could have adapted. They could find the truth as to what allow them to thrive. Even as a libertarian, I saw no wrong-doing in what pirates did. They copied, but did not steal. Even if they deprived somebody of their income, it is not sufficient to be a ethical violation of some sort. If it was, than whole disruptive business would be unethical. Chinese workers would be condemned for taking somebody's job.
    - jules 16y ago
      That's a ridiculous comparison. If the pirates were building the software instead of cracking it and selling it for cheaper that would be comparable. Pirates depend on a honest person doing the hard work for them. Chinese workers do not.
      - indrax 16y ago
        Just because work you do benefits another does not entitle you to that value. Yes pirates cannot pirate what does not exist. That just means the market needs to find a way to pay content creation, instead of content copying.
        jules 16y ago
        If I create software I am entitled to sell it. People are not entitled to get it for free if I want them to pay me for it. Yes, it costs me nothing if they pirate it. But can I steal a car from a factory if I pay them the marginal cost of producing it? Of course not. Paying for content creation is a fantasy in software. Name any big consumer application that could have been developed that way with developers getting paid about the same as they would by selling it (i.e. about the same as the value they provide).
        _delirium 16y ago
        > But can I steal a car from a factory if I pay them the marginal cost of producing it? If you can find a way to do so without entering the factory, or removing any of the factory's contents, then sure. The traditional law of theft is a purely negative right to not have your property removed from your possession, not any sort of positive right.
        jules 16y ago
        There are two issues here: 1. The law-technical issue. I suppose we agree that piracy is illegal. That there are different laws for the two things is not very interesting in my opinion. 2. The ethical issue. Do you agree that the end results for the factory and for the developer, namely reduced income, are the same?
- mambodog 16y ago
  I think you're making the mistake of thinking that the people who crack software for fun/kudos also want it widely distributed. The warez scene and the people who share its output online are two different groups (with a slight overlap).
- w1ntermute 16y ago
  > Maybe they took it down, are doing a good job, and then they're going to put it back up. The people that cracked it are from the scene, and have nothing to do with The Pirate Bay. In fact, sceners despise all forms of P2P, including BitTorrent.
  - yalurker 16y ago
    There was an article posted here a while ago that talked about this "scene vs p2p" dynamic, but presupposed the audience knew what "the scene" was. I'm still confused as to what it refers, is "the scene" just private file sharing / piracy? Also, wintermute - great username. Had a momentary "that's familiar..." before it clicked.
    - steveklabnik 16y ago
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_scene http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_scene
    - w1ntermute 16y ago
      > There was an article posted here a while ago that talked about this "scene vs p2p" dynamic, but presupposed the audience knew what "the scene" was. I'm still confused as to what it refers, is "the scene" just private file sharing / piracy? No, the scene refers to a specific group of individuals who are the source of almost all pirated material on the internet. There's some info on Wikipedia[0], but the article's not very good (some on the talk page say that's because of deliberate vandalism on the part of sceners to prevent knowledge about it from spreading). The way I see it, the defining principles of the scene are: 1. Very strict rules in terms of quality and release format/naming. Scene councils made up of members from the biggest groups in each release category convene on a regular basis (once a year, I believe) to decide on whether standards for different release categories (MP3, DVDRIP, APPS) need to be updated/modified and then release the new rules in the form of a scene notice. 2. Extreme paranoia. It's extremely difficult for someone to get into the scene if they don't know someone IRL who's already in it, particularly if they don't have something to offer, whether it be source material, servers/hardware for storing/spreading the material, or technical skills (most important for cracking software). 3. Lack of any websites. I think some scene groups had websites back in the day, but for security reasons they now operate solely on private IRC channels (I think mostly on EFnet and LinkNet these days, but I'm not sure. The groups that have enough hardware probably run their own IRC servers for added security). All file transfers are done via FTP. 4. The scene is highly decentralized, and the closest you get to any leadership are the scene councils mentioned above. 5. Data spreads very quickly (literally in seconds) because of the high speed servers that they have (these can be either legally owned or hacked servers - higher up in the scene, they tend to have legally owned servers to ensure reliability). They have "autotrading scripts" that automatically "race" releases from one server to another. The data moves down into lower tiers very quickly through the work of "couriers", whose incentive to do this is that they get credit for uploading data to a server, which they then use to download stuff from that server themselves. Much like on private torrent sites, they're expected to keep their "ratio" of uploaded data to downloaded data above a certain value. They use a protocol called FXP, which basically allows them to connect to 2 FTP servers and negotiate a transfer of files from one server to the other. 6. There can only be one release of a particular copyrighted work (whether it be an music album, movie, TV episode, etc.). In some cases there are multiple releases in different formats (like standard def and high def for movies and TV shows), but in other cases there aren't (music is only released in MP3, no OGG or FLAC or anything). Whichever scene group releases first wins the race, so there is a lot of competition for speed. However, loss of quality from trying to be the first to release is mitigated by the fact that if a release is bad it can be "nuked", meaning the scene group loses credit for the release and another group has a chance to release a "proper", which is essentially the same release, except done correctly. 7. Virtually everyone does it for fun (for the thrill), not for money. There's some more stuff in these[1,4] Wired articles, and they're moderately accurate. There have been two video productions[2,3] on this topic as well, but they're both rather inaccurate and cheesy in my opinion. In fact, a parody of the first aforementioned video production was also created[13-20]. For a more individual perspective, there are these[5,6,7] Reddit threads. You can also watch scene releases as they're released in real time at any of these[8,9,10,11] sites. The traditional method of viewing scene releases is via a "pre channel", an IRC channel that has a bot that announces the releases in real time and has a database of old releases that can be searched (a "pre db"), but most pre channels are invite only and the web format is more accessible anyway. This[12] article mentions a pre channel run by a private torrent tracker that's open to the public, but the article's kind of old, so I don't know if it's still available. Hope that answers your question ;) > Also, wintermute - great username. Had a momentary "that's familiar..." before it clicked. Haha, thanks. Neuromancer's one of my favorite books. Links: 0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_scene http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_scene 1: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.01/topsite_pr.html http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.01/topsite_pr.html 2: http://www.welcometothescene.com/download.php http://www.welcometothescene.com/download.php 3: http://vimeo.com/2561685 http://vimeo.com/2561685 4: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.04/ff_warez_pr.html http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.04/ff_warez_pr.html 5: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/ctil4/hey_reddit_who_are_these_saints_that_rip_tv_shows/ http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/ctil4/hey_reddit_... 6: http://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/ctkae/i_was_a_pioneer_of_the_tv_rip_scene_ama/ http://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/ctkae/i_was_a_pioneer_o... 7: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ctmpj/iama_former_scene_member_who_then_uploaded_tv/ http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ctmpj/iama_former_scen... 8: http://pre.scenedb.org/ http://pre.scenedb.org/ 9: http://predb.in/ http://predb.in/ 10: http://www.vcdq.com/ http://www.vcdq.com/ 11: http://www.orlydb.com/ http://www.orlydb.com/ 12: http://filenetworks.blogspot.com/2009/08/new-public-irc-pre-channel-everyone-can.html http://filenetworks.blogspot.com/2009/08/new-public-irc-pre-... 13: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8136171800707655105# http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8136171800707655105# 14: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7123184812720063468# http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7123184812720063468# 15: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2273515260483979086# http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2273515260483979086# 16: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7663511882469796626# http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7663511882469796626# 17: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2238685629943246399# http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2238685629943246399... 18: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1331694120891185632# http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1331694120891185632... 19: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5641163267370703912# http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5641163267370703912# 20: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6867553833982382452# http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6867553833982382452...
acabal 16y ago
Well he wasn't exactly being "nice" to them, just mocking the skills of the crackers (which my mom wouldn't think is so nice). So maybe it's more of a testament to reverse psychology or the huge egos of the crackers than being nice.
tzs 16y ago
However, when they were asked politely by a family to remove a torrent of autopsy photos of the family's murdered children (just the photos--the family had no problem with the reports and other documentation on the murder case), TBP told the family, "That is one helluva gripe. No, No and again no." > Pirate bay is a site run by an organization for a political reason I was not aware that making money is a political reason. TBP is commercial. They are in it for cash and nothing else.

jrockway 16y ago

The message said they did a bad job cracking the software. Maybe they took it down, are doing a good job, and then they're going to put it back up. I feel that ego is a primary motivator for the piracy community. This does not feed it.

todayiamme 16y ago
Look, the "piracy community" is made up of people with different motivations for why they do what they do. For some of them it's an ego satisfying game. For others, it's something else. So, I would rather look at them as decent human beings making a mistake. It just makes it so much easier to deal with anyone. Sometimes, being nice to people and holding them to a higher standard works. Irrespective of who they are, because genuine respect and decency combined with good humor is something so rare that it's a prized commodity.
- kiba 16y ago
  They did not make an ethical mistake. Instead, they merely show what is inevitable. There are holes in the maps of hollywood that people ignored to their own perils. They could have launch business model experiment that doesn't risk much of anything. They could have adapted. They could find the truth as to what allow them to thrive. Even as a libertarian, I saw no wrong-doing in what pirates did. They copied, but did not steal. Even if they deprived somebody of their income, it is not sufficient to be a ethical violation of some sort. If it was, than whole disruptive business would be unethical. Chinese workers would be condemned for taking somebody's job.
  - jules 16y ago
    That's a ridiculous comparison. If the pirates were building the software instead of cracking it and selling it for cheaper that would be comparable. Pirates depend on a honest person doing the hard work for them. Chinese workers do not.
    - indrax 16y ago
      Just because work you do benefits another does not entitle you to that value. Yes pirates cannot pirate what does not exist. That just means the market needs to find a way to pay content creation, instead of content copying.
      - jules 16y ago
        If I create software I am entitled to sell it. People are not entitled to get it for free if I want them to pay me for it. Yes, it costs me nothing if they pirate it. But can I steal a car from a factory if I pay them the marginal cost of producing it? Of course not. Paying for content creation is a fantasy in software. Name any big consumer application that could have been developed that way with developers getting paid about the same as they would by selling it (i.e. about the same as the value they provide).
        _delirium 16y ago
        > But can I steal a car from a factory if I pay them the marginal cost of producing it? If you can find a way to do so without entering the factory, or removing any of the factory's contents, then sure. The traditional law of theft is a purely negative right to not have your property removed from your possession, not any sort of positive right.
        jules 16y ago
        There are two issues here: 1. The law-technical issue. I suppose we agree that piracy is illegal. That there are different laws for the two things is not very interesting in my opinion. 2. The ethical issue. Do you agree that the end results for the factory and for the developer, namely reduced income, are the same?
mambodog 16y ago
I think you're making the mistake of thinking that the people who crack software for fun/kudos also want it widely distributed. The warez scene and the people who share its output online are two different groups (with a slight overlap).
w1ntermute 16y ago
> Maybe they took it down, are doing a good job, and then they're going to put it back up. The people that cracked it are from the scene, and have nothing to do with The Pirate Bay. In fact, sceners despise all forms of P2P, including BitTorrent.
- yalurker 16y ago
  There was an article posted here a while ago that talked about this "scene vs p2p" dynamic, but presupposed the audience knew what "the scene" was. I'm still confused as to what it refers, is "the scene" just private file sharing / piracy? Also, wintermute - great username. Had a momentary "that's familiar..." before it clicked.
  - steveklabnik 16y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_scene http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_scene
  - w1ntermute 16y ago
    > There was an article posted here a while ago that talked about this "scene vs p2p" dynamic, but presupposed the audience knew what "the scene" was. I'm still confused as to what it refers, is "the scene" just private file sharing / piracy? No, the scene refers to a specific group of individuals who are the source of almost all pirated material on the internet. There's some info on Wikipedia[0], but the article's not very good (some on the talk page say that's because of deliberate vandalism on the part of sceners to prevent knowledge about it from spreading). The way I see it, the defining principles of the scene are: 1. Very strict rules in terms of quality and release format/naming. Scene councils made up of members from the biggest groups in each release category convene on a regular basis (once a year, I believe) to decide on whether standards for different release categories (MP3, DVDRIP, APPS) need to be updated/modified and then release the new rules in the form of a scene notice. 2. Extreme paranoia. It's extremely difficult for someone to get into the scene if they don't know someone IRL who's already in it, particularly if they don't have something to offer, whether it be source material, servers/hardware for storing/spreading the material, or technical skills (most important for cracking software). 3. Lack of any websites. I think some scene groups had websites back in the day, but for security reasons they now operate solely on private IRC channels (I think mostly on EFnet and LinkNet these days, but I'm not sure. The groups that have enough hardware probably run their own IRC servers for added security). All file transfers are done via FTP. 4. The scene is highly decentralized, and the closest you get to any leadership are the scene councils mentioned above. 5. Data spreads very quickly (literally in seconds) because of the high speed servers that they have (these can be either legally owned or hacked servers - higher up in the scene, they tend to have legally owned servers to ensure reliability). They have "autotrading scripts" that automatically "race" releases from one server to another. The data moves down into lower tiers very quickly through the work of "couriers", whose incentive to do this is that they get credit for uploading data to a server, which they then use to download stuff from that server themselves. Much like on private torrent sites, they're expected to keep their "ratio" of uploaded data to downloaded data above a certain value. They use a protocol called FXP, which basically allows them to connect to 2 FTP servers and negotiate a transfer of files from one server to the other. 6. There can only be one release of a particular copyrighted work (whether it be an music album, movie, TV episode, etc.). In some cases there are multiple releases in different formats (like standard def and high def for movies and TV shows), but in other cases there aren't (music is only released in MP3, no OGG or FLAC or anything). Whichever scene group releases first wins the race, so there is a lot of competition for speed. However, loss of quality from trying to be the first to release is mitigated by the fact that if a release is bad it can be "nuked", meaning the scene group loses credit for the release and another group has a chance to release a "proper", which is essentially the same release, except done correctly. 7. Virtually everyone does it for fun (for the thrill), not for money. There's some more stuff in these[1,4] Wired articles, and they're moderately accurate. There have been two video productions[2,3] on this topic as well, but they're both rather inaccurate and cheesy in my opinion. In fact, a parody of the first aforementioned video production was also created[13-20]. For a more individual perspective, there are these[5,6,7] Reddit threads. You can also watch scene releases as they're released in real time at any of these[8,9,10,11] sites. The traditional method of viewing scene releases is via a "pre channel", an IRC channel that has a bot that announces the releases in real time and has a database of old releases that can be searched (a "pre db"), but most pre channels are invite only and the web format is more accessible anyway. This[12] article mentions a pre channel run by a private torrent tracker that's open to the public, but the article's kind of old, so I don't know if it's still available. Hope that answers your question ;) > Also, wintermute - great username. Had a momentary "that's familiar..." before it clicked. Haha, thanks. Neuromancer's one of my favorite books. Links: 0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_scene http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_scene 1: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.01/topsite_pr.html http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.01/topsite_pr.html 2: http://www.welcometothescene.com/download.php http://www.welcometothescene.com/download.php 3: http://vimeo.com/2561685 http://vimeo.com/2561685 4: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.04/ff_warez_pr.html http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.04/ff_warez_pr.html 5: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/ctil4/hey_reddit_who_are_these_saints_that_rip_tv_shows/ http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/ctil4/hey_reddit_... 6: http://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/ctkae/i_was_a_pioneer_of_the_tv_rip_scene_ama/ http://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/ctkae/i_was_a_pioneer_o... 7: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ctmpj/iama_former_scene_member_who_then_uploaded_tv/ http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ctmpj/iama_former_scen... 8: http://pre.scenedb.org/ http://pre.scenedb.org/ 9: http://predb.in/ http://predb.in/ 10: http://www.vcdq.com/ http://www.vcdq.com/ 11: http://www.orlydb.com/ http://www.orlydb.com/ 12: http://filenetworks.blogspot.com/2009/08/new-public-irc-pre-channel-everyone-can.html http://filenetworks.blogspot.com/2009/08/new-public-irc-pre-... 13: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8136171800707655105# http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8136171800707655105# 14: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7123184812720063468# http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7123184812720063468# 15: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2273515260483979086# http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2273515260483979086# 16: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7663511882469796626# http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7663511882469796626# 17: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2238685629943246399# http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2238685629943246399... 18: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1331694120891185632# http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1331694120891185632... 19: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5641163267370703912# http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5641163267370703912# 20: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6867553833982382452# http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6867553833982382452...

acabal 16y ago

Well he wasn't exactly being "nice" to them, just mocking the skills of the crackers (which my mom wouldn't think is so nice). So maybe it's more of a testament to reverse psychology or the huge egos of the crackers than being nice.

tzs 16y ago

However, when they were asked politely by a family to remove a torrent of autopsy photos of the family's murdered children (just the photos--the family had no problem with the reports and other documentation on the murder case), TBP told the family, "That is one helluva gripe. No, No and again no." > Pirate bay is a site run by an organization for a political reason I was not aware that making money is a political reason. TBP is commercial. They are in it for cash and nothing else.