

The Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde: It's evolution, stupid - joeyespo
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-02/13/peter-sunde-evolution

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codex
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-
st...](http://www.everythingicafe.com/apple-cracking-down-on-app-store-
piracy/2012/01/04/)

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majani
I've found that in the recent piracy debates, there has been a high level of
dishonesty, where people don't want to admit that the absolute number one
reason people resort to piracy is because that shit is free.

I'd like to challenge the founders of TPB to charge for their superior
distribution system and report the traffic numbers before and after.

~~~
pyre

      > I'd like to challenge the founders of TPB to
      > charge for their superior distribution system
    

1) The logistics wouldn't be there. Not necessarily because people won't pay,
but because paying is a barrier to entry. Even paying a penny would filter out
a number of users. Would you really believe that the reason those people
wouldn't pay a penny is because they are cheap? Or is it more likely that the
paywall is a barrier that they are too lazy to overcome?

2) Charging out-right for the service vs. making money on advertisements would
also be a shift in their image. This may cause a number of people to jump ship
out of principle. I.e. a 'hipster filter' if you will ("they're too big and
corporate now", "they've sold out", etc).

~~~
majani
Your argument beats around the bush. You and I both know that if TPB were to
charge, their traffic would drop by several orders of magnitude. This is not
because of logistics, not because of image, not because of inefficient
distribution and not because of DRM. The simple reason for the huge drop off
would be that most pirates want that sh't free. Why oh why do people insist on
sugar coating this blatant reality?

~~~
summerdown2
Because this heads towards the concept of thought crime. Who cares what the
motive of a pirate is? Do we only want pure virgins who can lie in a unicorn's
lap downloading stuff? Or can we get beyond criticising people for not being
pure of heart.

The only issue with piracy isn't the motive of the pirate - it's whether it
damages the industry, and studies regularly show it doesn't. In fact a) the
biggest pirates tend to spend more, and b) isn't it about time we found ways
of rewarding creators that didn't involve artificial scarcity?

We're heading for a time when we can deliver all of human culture to everyone
and the only thing stopping us is that some people want to rent-seek.

On your other point, I wouldn't advise anyone to pay for the Pirate Bay
because payment identifies the payee. There's a significant chance it would be
considered illegal and records seized by the US, leading to huge fines,
extradition and prison. That alone would deter me.

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cynicalkane
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>

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dekz
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
No, piracy exists because it's cheaper than buying a product.

~~~
spindritf
Piracy exists because easily replicable goods are not available to some
people, price is just one of many possible reasons for this unavailability --
look at tv, shows from free-to-air channels are being pirated in millions(!)
of copies every week.

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tweak2live
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".

~~~
Gotttzsche
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? ;)

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chimeracoder
Just because it's not the dominant means of exchange today doesn't mean it
couldn't be.

Ten years ago, the analogous reasoning would have been 'Well, we can just shut
down the Napster server', or shortly after 'Well, we can just shutdown the
Gnutella superpeers'.

~~~
Gotttzsche
you ignored the problem i saw with it. if there's no public component to it
and people would only share with their friends, the availability of piracy
would be severely limited.

and if there is, the content industry could still get their "spies" in.

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jiggy2011
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?

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tikhonj
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.

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NIL8
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-w...](http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-10/14/peter-sunde-
wired-11-flattr-pirate-bay)

Edit: forgot to add the link

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paulhauggis
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.

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supercanuck
Revolutions aren't cheap!

~~~
paulhauggis
yeah, well, neither are their paychecks.

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fady
wish i could see the slides :\

edit: ok, the video does show some of them..

