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> Although Sunde did not provide Ars with specific financial details regarding The Pirate Bay's operational expenses, he did argue that the site's high bandwidt

• zak_mc_kracken 12y ago
  Not making money doing something illegal doesn't make it any more legal.
  • Nyr 12y ago
    Not making money makes it legal in Spain and Hungary for example. US law doesn't rule the world.
  • deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  • MacsHeadroom 12y ago
    Something being illegal doesn't make it unethical or morally wrong.
• PhasmaFelis 12y ago
  I'm generally in favor of TPB, but "may be operating at a loss"? How the hell do you not know if your bottom line is going up or down? This sounds fishy to me.
  • film42 12y ago
    I think when you're in that line of business, your entire infrastructure could be taken from you at any moment. That could make knowing your financials kind of difficult. Edit: Why the downvotes?
    • biot 12y ago
      At a first approximation, your hosting costs are very obvious: you get a monthly invoice from your hosting provider. If you use multiple providers, add them up. If you use a CDN, add that in too. Very simple. Whether or not your infrastructure will be seized changes nothing about the fact that they are receiving regular invoices for the services they consume. Revenues are similarly easy to calculate: add up all the payments received by whatever ad networks, affiliate programs, partnerships, and so on they use. Some may pay weekly, some monthly, some quarterly... whatever. But it should be trivial to add these up over the course of a 3 month, 6 month, or 1 year period. Any competent 10 year old should be able to take the revenue and expense information and calculate a net profit or loss. Barring that, anybody in the same position should at the very least be able to consider whether the statement "I regularly dip into my personal savings to pay for the site's operations" rings true for them or if they never had to do that. If the revenue and expenses were co-mingled with their personal bank accounts, it should be easy to separate out other sources of revenue and look at income vs. expense from site operations.
      • pluma 12y ago
        True, but you're assuming they were even remotely systematic about their book keeping. Depending on how much their income did fluctuate and how irregular their expenses might have been (especially if you consider "one time" expenses like hardware with an indeterminate life expectancy) and if you then consider that they likely had their hand in the cookie jar while also throwing "their own" money back in when they needed to, it can be a huge ball of mud. You could determine the total loss/gain by adding up the business-related expenses and income, but that assumes they were interested in doing so. I'm sure they had at least a general idea of how well they were doing "right now" (i.e. assuming no catastrophic hardware failures or drastic changes in revenue, etc), but unless they were certain they weren't making much money (or even operating at a loss), they had no incentive to put their exact net profit/loss into clear terms. Considering how easy it is to burn large sums of money without really being aware of where it all went, I'd give them the benefit of the doubt that they actually didn't know if they made a ton of money. But I'm fairly certain they knew the general direction they had been heading well enough not to be honest about the specifics.
  • psykovsky 12y ago
    Because he was mostly a mouthpiece for the site and not privy to financial details?
• danielki 12y ago
  To be fair, if his answer was "yeah, we made millions", there would be more than a small handful of entities trying to seize those assets.
• baby 12y ago
  I don't believe any of this, they have a very optimized website that only serves text and ads. Even one small server could handle the traffic.
  • fredsted 12y ago
    Don't forget it has a comments system and tracks the peers of 6 million torrents.
    • deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]