6 ms·

Technicalities aside. They're still making money by helping people "pirate" stuff. Assuming ads on their site do actually generate revenue, and that revenue get

by hasenj 12y ago

Technicalities aside. They're still making money by helping people "pirate" stuff. Assuming ads on their site do actually generate revenue, and that revenue gets forwarded to them. Though I kinda expect the average piratebay user to have adblock installed.

LLWM 12y ago
Whether they are making money doesn't matter. Crimes aren't suddenly legal just because you do them for reasons besides profit. Otherwise the only murderers in jail would be professional assassins.
- baddox 12y ago
  > Crimes aren't suddenly legal just because you do them for reasons besides profit. I don't think anyone is suggesting that. But, at least in US law, there is a major distinction between commercial and non-commercial copyright infringement. Both are illegal, of course, but they are treated very differently.
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  Are you not familiar with the distinction between manslaughter and the varying degrees of murder? Intent plays a huge part in the legal system.
- hasenj 12y ago
  > Crimes aren't suddenly legal just because you do them for reasons besides profit. That's decidedly not true. Per your example: > Otherwise the only murderers in jail would be professional assassins. The people responsible for dropping the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima were not considered criminals and did not go to jail or get punished at all. War acts are always rationalized by their consequences and the intent behind them. But this is way off-topic. Someone already mentioned that copyright laws do indeed distinguish between "commercial and non-commercial copyright infringement". Actually, I'd argue that even ethically they are treated differently. If I bought a movie then shared it with my friends, no one would think I'm doing something that's unethical. If I started selling or renting that movie to my classmates, it's more controversial.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > Crimes aren't suddenly legal just because you do them for reasons besides profit. Plenty of specific crimes, do, in fact, have seeking a material reward/exchange as a required element of the offense, and the act that is criminal when done for profit is legal (or, if still illegal, illegal under a different provision which often has a lesser punishment) when done without that exchange.
- thaumasiotes 12y ago
  > Crimes aren't suddenly legal just because you do them for reasons besides profit. Man, wouldn't that be a better world? But in the world we live in right now, lots and lots of actions are illegal for profit and legal otherwise.
api 12y ago
Exactly. They may or may not have actually broken the law, but they are certainly in spirit a service that makes money through the unauthorized monetization of other peoples' works against the wishes of those works' creators. Even if it doesn't make them criminals, it certainly makes them assholes. It's already hard enough to make a living as an artist, musician, etc. without being kneecapped by opportunists. We've gone from the old pre-Internet system, which screwed artists most of the time, to a new system that screws artists all the time. I don't understand why there's so much sympathy for industrial-scale piracy -- especially for-profit industrial-scale piracy -- among people who make a living from creative work (programmers, entrepreneurs, engineers). I guess only certain castes of people and professions deserve compensation and respect, and everyone else can suck it...?
- gargantian 12y ago
  Times change, and technology changes value. Scored music "screwed" street performers, then recordings "screwed" concert performers, then the internet "screwed" recording artists. Plenty of artists have successfully adapted and are doing great. Others have sheltered behind curators and promoters like labels. Others have failed to deliver what people want and they are screwed. That's capitalism at work. I don't understand why we should hold back progress so that existing artists can be sheltered from needing to adapt and provide a product people want to pay for. I say this as a former small-time producer of club tracks and a current software developer. Additionally, you should ask artists who's screwing them before you start pointing fingers. Many artists would kill to have their music downloaded. Much of the screwing comes from the big labels that reap almost all of the profits.
  - api 12y ago
    "I don't understand why we should hold back progress"... I don't think we should hold back progress. I'm not arguing for legislated compulsory DRM or shutting down the Internet. I'm just saying I don't have a lot of love or sympathy for people who build businesses on the appropriation of peoples' hard work against their will. I feel the same way about jerks who take OSS software closed without authorization or credit, or who scrape peoples' blog posts and use them for their own click bait sites without even linking to the original author. TPB is in that sort of category. "Additionally, you should ask artists who's screwing them"... I have, and trust me... nobody has any love for record labels except maybe some of the indies. The trouble is that the new model -- the promised land -- is not appearing. There is no new model. The new model is you give your work away for free and starve. Like I've said, we've gone from a system where there was some opportunity -- albeit in a shitty model with shitty record labels -- to a system with no opportunity outside touring and merchandise sales. You can squeeze by on that, but you can't build a career on it. Great art requires years of dedication. That means making it a sustainable career, a vocation. Squeezing out a few tunes in between your two day jobs just won't lead to great art. It also means you're basically a consultant -- a glorified service sector employee. Why is it that programmers are allowed to build equity in startups, but artists are forbidden from building equity in a portfolio of copyrighted works? It's the only vehicle for equity building they ever had. Without some opportunity to build on your work in a non-linear fashion, you are just a wage slave forever. I guess we're going to reward all those artists and musicians who enriched our lives by making them eat dog food when they're old...? Sonny Bono always gets bashed for saying copyright should be "forever and a day." I still don't agree with him-- I think that position is too extreme. But I understand where he's coming from now. He understands economics and business. To build an industry that can pay actual wages, benefits, and invest in new things, you need to build capital. You need some way of building a portfolio of enduring value that can produce recurrent revenue over a long period of time to fund new things and to support the vast overhead that a real profession demands. Nobody should understand this more than the HN crowd, which is why I have such an uncharitable interpretation of the down votes I always get for pointing these things out.
tomp 12y ago
You mean, like Google? Of course, they remove the results that are DMCA-d, but in the mean time, 10 new links appear.
- hasenj 12y ago
  Huge difference man. Google's business is not centered around providing pirated material. The fact that it happens is accidental. The pirate bay, on the other hand, (as clearly suggested by its name), does infact center around providing access to pirated material.
  - tomp 12y ago
    Not really; it centers on providing access to material that it's users want (except certain categories, e.g. child pornography). The fact that it's mostly pirated content stems mostly from the fact that it's prohibited almost everywhere else on the internet. But, your point is very important in a legal sense - a simple, but effective way to build a better TPB would be to center it around some other cause, and have it accidentally be used for piracy.
    - hasenj 12y ago
      Like bittorrent :)
soci 12y ago
ExoClickπ[1] was one of the ad networks (if not the only one) used by The Pirate Bay to monetize. [1] https://www.exoclick.com https://www.exoclick.com
- click170 12y ago
  So that's who is responsible for those horrible popup ads that TPB has been using. I fear for anyone browsing pirate bay without noscript and adblock. Edit: typo

by hasenj 12y ago

LLWM 12y ago

Whether they are making money doesn't matter. Crimes aren't suddenly legal just because you do them for reasons besides profit. Otherwise the only murderers in jail would be professional assassins.

baddox 12y ago
> Crimes aren't suddenly legal just because you do them for reasons besides profit. I don't think anyone is suggesting that. But, at least in US law, there is a major distinction between commercial and non-commercial copyright infringement. Both are illegal, of course, but they are treated very differently.
toomuchtodo 12y ago
Are you not familiar with the distinction between manslaughter and the varying degrees of murder? Intent plays a huge part in the legal system.
hasenj 12y ago
> Crimes aren't suddenly legal just because you do them for reasons besides profit. That's decidedly not true. Per your example: > Otherwise the only murderers in jail would be professional assassins. The people responsible for dropping the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima were not considered criminals and did not go to jail or get punished at all. War acts are always rationalized by their consequences and the intent behind them. But this is way off-topic. Someone already mentioned that copyright laws do indeed distinguish between "commercial and non-commercial copyright infringement". Actually, I'd argue that even ethically they are treated differently. If I bought a movie then shared it with my friends, no one would think I'm doing something that's unethical. If I started selling or renting that movie to my classmates, it's more controversial.
dragonwriter 12y ago
> Crimes aren't suddenly legal just because you do them for reasons besides profit. Plenty of specific crimes, do, in fact, have seeking a material reward/exchange as a required element of the offense, and the act that is criminal when done for profit is legal (or, if still illegal, illegal under a different provision which often has a lesser punishment) when done without that exchange.
thaumasiotes 12y ago
> Crimes aren't suddenly legal just because you do them for reasons besides profit. Man, wouldn't that be a better world? But in the world we live in right now, lots and lots of actions are illegal for profit and legal otherwise.

api 12y ago

Exactly. They may or may not have actually broken the law, but they are certainly in spirit a service that makes money through the unauthorized monetization of other peoples' works against the wishes of those works' creators. Even if it doesn't make them criminals, it certainly makes them assholes. It's already hard enough to make a living as an artist, musician, etc. without being kneecapped by opportunists. We've gone from the old pre-Internet system, which screwed artists most of the time, to a new system that screws artists all the time. I don't understand why there's so much sympathy for industrial-scale piracy -- especially for-profit industrial-scale piracy -- among people who make a living from creative work (programmers, entrepreneurs, engineers). I guess only certain castes of people and professions deserve compensation and respect, and everyone else can suck it...?

gargantian 12y ago
Times change, and technology changes value. Scored music "screwed" street performers, then recordings "screwed" concert performers, then the internet "screwed" recording artists. Plenty of artists have successfully adapted and are doing great. Others have sheltered behind curators and promoters like labels. Others have failed to deliver what people want and they are screwed. That's capitalism at work. I don't understand why we should hold back progress so that existing artists can be sheltered from needing to adapt and provide a product people want to pay for. I say this as a former small-time producer of club tracks and a current software developer. Additionally, you should ask artists who's screwing them before you start pointing fingers. Many artists would kill to have their music downloaded. Much of the screwing comes from the big labels that reap almost all of the profits.
- api 12y ago
  "I don't understand why we should hold back progress"... I don't think we should hold back progress. I'm not arguing for legislated compulsory DRM or shutting down the Internet. I'm just saying I don't have a lot of love or sympathy for people who build businesses on the appropriation of peoples' hard work against their will. I feel the same way about jerks who take OSS software closed without authorization or credit, or who scrape peoples' blog posts and use them for their own click bait sites without even linking to the original author. TPB is in that sort of category. "Additionally, you should ask artists who's screwing them"... I have, and trust me... nobody has any love for record labels except maybe some of the indies. The trouble is that the new model -- the promised land -- is not appearing. There is no new model. The new model is you give your work away for free and starve. Like I've said, we've gone from a system where there was some opportunity -- albeit in a shitty model with shitty record labels -- to a system with no opportunity outside touring and merchandise sales. You can squeeze by on that, but you can't build a career on it. Great art requires years of dedication. That means making it a sustainable career, a vocation. Squeezing out a few tunes in between your two day jobs just won't lead to great art. It also means you're basically a consultant -- a glorified service sector employee. Why is it that programmers are allowed to build equity in startups, but artists are forbidden from building equity in a portfolio of copyrighted works? It's the only vehicle for equity building they ever had. Without some opportunity to build on your work in a non-linear fashion, you are just a wage slave forever. I guess we're going to reward all those artists and musicians who enriched our lives by making them eat dog food when they're old...? Sonny Bono always gets bashed for saying copyright should be "forever and a day." I still don't agree with him-- I think that position is too extreme. But I understand where he's coming from now. He understands economics and business. To build an industry that can pay actual wages, benefits, and invest in new things, you need to build capital. You need some way of building a portfolio of enduring value that can produce recurrent revenue over a long period of time to fund new things and to support the vast overhead that a real profession demands. Nobody should understand this more than the HN crowd, which is why I have such an uncharitable interpretation of the down votes I always get for pointing these things out.

tomp 12y ago

You mean, like Google? Of course, they remove the results that are DMCA-d, but in the mean time, 10 new links appear.

hasenj 12y ago
Huge difference man. Google's business is not centered around providing pirated material. The fact that it happens is accidental. The pirate bay, on the other hand, (as clearly suggested by its name), does infact center around providing access to pirated material.
- tomp 12y ago
  Not really; it centers on providing access to material that it's users want (except certain categories, e.g. child pornography). The fact that it's mostly pirated content stems mostly from the fact that it's prohibited almost everywhere else on the internet. But, your point is very important in a legal sense - a simple, but effective way to build a better TPB would be to center it around some other cause, and have it accidentally be used for piracy.
  - hasenj 12y ago
    Like bittorrent :)

soci 12y ago

ExoClickπ[1] was one of the ad networks (if not the only one) used by The Pirate Bay to monetize. [1] https://www.exoclick.com https://www.exoclick.com

click170 12y ago
So that's who is responsible for those horrible popup ads that TPB has been using. I fear for anyone browsing pirate bay without noscript and adblock. Edit: typo