23 ms·

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

139 points by joeyespo 15y ago

paulhauggis 15y ago
I can't really get behind someone that: 1) makes money on advertising on top of other people's copyrighted material 2) starts a service for donating money and then charges a 10% transaction fee. Even Paypal isn't that bad.
- supercanuck 15y ago
  Revolutions aren't cheap!
  - paulhauggis 15y ago
    yeah, well, neither are their paychecks.
NIL8 15y ago
Not much of a Wired fan, but here's the video to that article: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-10/14/peter-sunde-wired-11-flattr-pirate-bay http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-10/14/peter-sunde-w... Edit: forgot to add the link
codex 15y ago
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 certainly easier than pirating them. And yet app store piracy is a huGe problem [1]. Why? Because if you pirate, you have money left over for other things. It's that simple. So even though you could afford $2 for an app, you'd rather pirate the app and spend the $2 on something else. It's human nature. This is one reason societies make laws and enforce them with police. If we'd let natural evolution dictate the run our societies, then the alpha males would each have fifty wives and most males would be mateless or dead. [1] http://www.everythingicafe.com/apple-cracking-down-on-app-store-piracy/2012/01/04/ http://www.everythingicafe.com/apple-cracking-down-on-app-st...
- thomholwerda 15y ago
  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.
  - jobu 15y ago
    There was a blog post linked here on Hacker News that talked about it from the perspective of an iOS game developer. Unfortunately I can't seem to find it right now, but the synopsis was the overwhelming majority of their users had not paid for the game (in iTunes). While this is purely anecdotal, one could argue it's probably representative of the market. For apps and music, I think Apple does a good job of making the process cheap and easy, but there will always be people with more time than money.
    - bediger 15y ago
      "There will always be people with more time than money" - doesn't that mean "so-called pirates will always exist"? If that's the case, why should the rest of us pay money for enforcement actions (in the form of taxes) and why should the rest of us allow a few Giant Immoral Corporations to distort our society and culture? Shouldn't our elected representatives patiently explain the economics to the crybaby corporations, and then politely tell them to go pound sand? This is a control issue, plain and simple. The market for "content" is changing from a very cozy oligopoly to a one where no single firm or cartel has very much monopoly power. It's our sacred duty as Americans and Free Market Advocates to cause a transition to a market that can better serve the needs of consumers. Mercantilism in the form of "DRM" or "Intellectual Property" must not stand!
      - paulhauggis 15y ago
        It's pretty easy: stop buying DRM/protected products (and stop pirating them too). If there was no piracy and you just stopped buying, big companies would lower the price/do something different. But, now that they don't really know why, they will continue to add more protections. But, most people don't have that kind of commitment or discipline and the rest are just part of the movement because they want free stuff.
fady 15y ago
wish i could see the slides :\ edit: ok, the video does show some of them..
tweak2live 15y ago
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. Strong-arming internet users, interfering with judicial processes, and pushing unpopular bills doesn't do a whole lot to stop piracy, but it does promote the view of the media industry as a mafia. "The minister (illegally) told the prosecutor what had happened which forced him to raid TPB -- only a few weeks after sending out that memo about how legal it was." [Article] Every time something like this happens, more people who in-principle support the idea of intellectual property become hostile towards media lobbies and companies they represent. Instead of trying to win the "hearts and minds" of internet users, they are turning "convenience pirates" ideological and legitimizing the very fears that push internet rights-activists in the same camp as the "ideological pirates".
- kiba 15y ago
  They seeks to maximize profit, not become the best distributor on the planet.
- kiba 15y ago
  They seeks to maximize profit, not become the best distributor on the planet.
- Gotttzsche 15y ago
  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 some usenet provider or megaupload, you can always shut down the hoster. people could still pirate by directly sending each other encrypted files, but you'd always have to know someone personally who has what you want. which would make piracy much harder. why am i wrong? ;)
jiggy2011 15y ago
OK , the argument is more or less that the technology to mass distribute content online for free has made the content industries as they stand today obsolete despite the piracy being illegal. As a thought experiment let's assume that technology appeared to develop a perfect cloaking device and a teleporter and these things could be made cheap enough to be affordable to 99% of the population. This would allow anyone to effectively teleport into any house/shop or workplace, take what they wanted and leave with an extremely low chance of being caught (yes, I know piracy isn't theft etc etc, that's not my point here). Would this then make the entire concept of owning anything that could be easily carried by a person obsolete?
- onli 15y ago
  Your analogy is like almost all of them flawed, in that it is missing to contain the specific characteristics of the thing in question. You yourself state that, so what is the point? That not all possible things should be done and that's why the industry shouldn't have to change? Please. But more importantly: that is not the main argument. The article, as i read it, is about the corruptness created by the refusal of industry to change. If the industry controls the US, and the US dares to control Sweden, and the justice-system is not working because of that control, than it is not longer about entertainment. It is about force and control. It's about If you don't give up before you're sued, they corrupt the legal system.
- tikhonj 15y ago
  It's a weird hypothetical, but I think it would: if you need something, just teleport and grab it. With the exception of personalized items (basically just my computer these days), I don't care much if somebody takes something I own given that I could get something equivalent easily. As long as the technology was symmetric (that is, everybody had equal access to it), I think it would just make allocation of most items more efficient. Why should I own a hammer that I use once a year if I can just grab it from somebody who isn't using it at the moment? And then they could grab one from somebody else when the time came. The issue with personalization actually has a parallel in the IP--there is copyright and then there is privacy; the two are different and it is eminently reasonable to support one but not the other. Now, there would be some issues with your hypothetical world (e.g. who would produce stuff in the first place?) but I do not think they would be insurmountable. So yes, I think that would make owning small impersonal items obsolete.
cynicalkane 15y ago
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 informational sense, only free is hard to monetize in a world of Pirate Bay self-righteousness, where mass piracy is accepted and even praised. I'm told that Sirius XM already has a mathematical key revocation technique that's uncrackable, though I'm also told they haven't used it because a general crack to their radios isn't around yet. We're approaching the world of Richard Stallman's "The Right to Read"[1]. A world in which piracy is acceptable isn't a world of free stuff for everyone--it's a world where content is locked down, or never made at all. A perfect content lockdown is theroetically possible and people are getting better at it all the time. Then it will be so long to fair use, to reasonable sharing, to grey-market cultural exports. This world will happen because people want to buy the best, latest, greatest, biggest budget music, movies, apps, and so on. Confronted with this, piracy advocates theorize a Marxian post-scarcity paradise where all content creators do it for the love of content creation, where people have woken up and thrown off the shackles of capitalist big content. I'm not keeping my fingers crossed. [1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
- dekz 15y ago
  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.
  - peterhunt 15y ago
    No, piracy exists because it's cheaper than buying a product.

139 points by joeyespo 15y ago

I can't really get behind someone that: 1) makes money on advertising on top of other people's copyrighted material 2) starts a service for donating money and then charges a 10% transaction fee. Even Paypal isn't that bad.

supercanuck 15y ago
Revolutions aren't cheap!
- paulhauggis 15y ago
  yeah, well, neither are their paychecks.

NIL8 15y ago

Not much of a Wired fan, but here's the video to that article: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-10/14/peter-sunde-wired-11-flattr-pirate-bay http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-10/14/peter-sunde-w... Edit: forgot to add the link

codex 15y ago

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 certainly easier than pirating them. And yet app store piracy is a huGe problem [1]. Why? Because if you pirate, you have money left over for other things. It's that simple. So even though you could afford $2 for an app, you'd rather pirate the app and spend the $2 on something else. It's human nature. This is one reason societies make laws and enforce them with police. If we'd let natural evolution dictate the run our societies, then the alpha males would each have fifty wives and most males would be mateless or dead. [1] http://www.everythingicafe.com/apple-cracking-down-on-app-store-piracy/2012/01/04/ http://www.everythingicafe.com/apple-cracking-down-on-app-st...

thomholwerda 15y ago
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.
- jobu 15y ago
  There was a blog post linked here on Hacker News that talked about it from the perspective of an iOS game developer. Unfortunately I can't seem to find it right now, but the synopsis was the overwhelming majority of their users had not paid for the game (in iTunes). While this is purely anecdotal, one could argue it's probably representative of the market. For apps and music, I think Apple does a good job of making the process cheap and easy, but there will always be people with more time than money.
  - bediger 15y ago
    "There will always be people with more time than money" - doesn't that mean "so-called pirates will always exist"? If that's the case, why should the rest of us pay money for enforcement actions (in the form of taxes) and why should the rest of us allow a few Giant Immoral Corporations to distort our society and culture? Shouldn't our elected representatives patiently explain the economics to the crybaby corporations, and then politely tell them to go pound sand? This is a control issue, plain and simple. The market for "content" is changing from a very cozy oligopoly to a one where no single firm or cartel has very much monopoly power. It's our sacred duty as Americans and Free Market Advocates to cause a transition to a market that can better serve the needs of consumers. Mercantilism in the form of "DRM" or "Intellectual Property" must not stand!
    - paulhauggis 15y ago
      It's pretty easy: stop buying DRM/protected products (and stop pirating them too). If there was no piracy and you just stopped buying, big companies would lower the price/do something different. But, now that they don't really know why, they will continue to add more protections. But, most people don't have that kind of commitment or discipline and the rest are just part of the movement because they want free stuff.

fady 15y ago

wish i could see the slides :\ edit: ok, the video does show some of them..

tweak2live 15y ago

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. Strong-arming internet users, interfering with judicial processes, and pushing unpopular bills doesn't do a whole lot to stop piracy, but it does promote the view of the media industry as a mafia. "The minister (illegally) told the prosecutor what had happened which forced him to raid TPB -- only a few weeks after sending out that memo about how legal it was." [Article] Every time something like this happens, more people who in-principle support the idea of intellectual property become hostile towards media lobbies and companies they represent. Instead of trying to win the "hearts and minds" of internet users, they are turning "convenience pirates" ideological and legitimizing the very fears that push internet rights-activists in the same camp as the "ideological pirates".

kiba 15y ago
They seeks to maximize profit, not become the best distributor on the planet.
kiba 15y ago
They seeks to maximize profit, not become the best distributor on the planet.
Gotttzsche 15y ago
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 some usenet provider or megaupload, you can always shut down the hoster. people could still pirate by directly sending each other encrypted files, but you'd always have to know someone personally who has what you want. which would make piracy much harder. why am i wrong? ;)

jiggy2011 15y ago

OK , the argument is more or less that the technology to mass distribute content online for free has made the content industries as they stand today obsolete despite the piracy being illegal. As a thought experiment let's assume that technology appeared to develop a perfect cloaking device and a teleporter and these things could be made cheap enough to be affordable to 99% of the population. This would allow anyone to effectively teleport into any house/shop or workplace, take what they wanted and leave with an extremely low chance of being caught (yes, I know piracy isn't theft etc etc, that's not my point here). Would this then make the entire concept of owning anything that could be easily carried by a person obsolete?

onli 15y ago
Your analogy is like almost all of them flawed, in that it is missing to contain the specific characteristics of the thing in question. You yourself state that, so what is the point? That not all possible things should be done and that's why the industry shouldn't have to change? Please. But more importantly: that is not the main argument. The article, as i read it, is about the corruptness created by the refusal of industry to change. If the industry controls the US, and the US dares to control Sweden, and the justice-system is not working because of that control, than it is not longer about entertainment. It is about force and control. It's about If you don't give up before you're sued, they corrupt the legal system.
tikhonj 15y ago
It's a weird hypothetical, but I think it would: if you need something, just teleport and grab it. With the exception of personalized items (basically just my computer these days), I don't care much if somebody takes something I own given that I could get something equivalent easily. As long as the technology was symmetric (that is, everybody had equal access to it), I think it would just make allocation of most items more efficient. Why should I own a hammer that I use once a year if I can just grab it from somebody who isn't using it at the moment? And then they could grab one from somebody else when the time came. The issue with personalization actually has a parallel in the IP--there is copyright and then there is privacy; the two are different and it is eminently reasonable to support one but not the other. Now, there would be some issues with your hypothetical world (e.g. who would produce stuff in the first place?) but I do not think they would be insurmountable. So yes, I think that would make owning small impersonal items obsolete.

cynicalkane 15y ago

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 informational sense, only free is hard to monetize in a world of Pirate Bay self-righteousness, where mass piracy is accepted and even praised. I'm told that Sirius XM already has a mathematical key revocation technique that's uncrackable, though I'm also told they haven't used it because a general crack to their radios isn't around yet. We're approaching the world of Richard Stallman's "The Right to Read"[1]. A world in which piracy is acceptable isn't a world of free stuff for everyone--it's a world where content is locked down, or never made at all. A perfect content lockdown is theroetically possible and people are getting better at it all the time. Then it will be so long to fair use, to reasonable sharing, to grey-market cultural exports. This world will happen because people want to buy the best, latest, greatest, biggest budget music, movies, apps, and so on. Confronted with this, piracy advocates theorize a Marxian post-scarcity paradise where all content creators do it for the love of content creation, where people have woken up and thrown off the shackles of capitalist big content. I'm not keeping my fingers crossed. [1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

dekz 15y ago
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.
- peterhunt 15y ago
  No, piracy exists because it's cheaper than buying a product.