

The Pirate Bay Making $9 Million Per Year - horatio05
http://rixstep.com/1/20060708,00.shtml

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mynameishere
_sold ads for The Pirate Bay for an average of EUR60,000 per month_

Let's see: We could advertise on google and target people specifically
searching for a product, and pay as little as 10 cents per click, or...

We could advertise on a criminal website marketed towards people who hate
spending money for products and pay 60K Euros a month.

Hmm, think, think...

~~~
omouse
> people who hate spending money for products

Correction: people who hate spending money for _shitty_ products. Or they hate
paying an inflated price. Piracy is competition and should be treated as such.

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mynameishere
_people who hate spending money for shitty products_

Uh, no. Unless you consider 95 percent (or whatever) of all the movies and
music and software ever made as consistently "shitty".

 _Or they hate paying an inflated price._

Look up "beethoven symphonies" on piratebay, and you'll see plenty of people
seeding and leeching. Then look up the same on amazon, and you'll see that all
9 are available together as low as 20 dollars. If 20 dollars is an "inflated
price" for that product, well, then there's no point in trying...

 _Piracy is competition and should be treated as such_

Compete with zero? Sigh. Blah-dee, blah-dee, blah.

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staunch
Al Capone is shouting from his grave at these guys.

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gustaf
If that's true it would be awesome, unfortunately it's not.

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daniel-cussen
9 million per year...with a possibility of going to Swedish jail. I bet those
are mighty fine jails, but I'm still not sure that's a gamble I would make.

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palish
Do the Swedish have.. I'm not sure what it's called.. "You can't make
something into a law and then convict everyone who used to be doing that"
provisions?

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patrickg-zill
I believe it is called "ex post facto".

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palish
Yes! Do they have ex post facto laws?

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rms
Good for them.

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palish
Why?

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rms
There is always an economic incentive for violating the law. It takes a
certain amount of bravery or lack of risk aversion to skirt the edge of
legality. Someone has to push the political agenda of the Pirate Party and the
more money they have, the more they can change the world.

This artificial scarcity of media doesn't make any sense. Why should something
that I can get for free cost money?

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palish
Listen, I agree with you in spirit, but it's not practical. Here's what I have
no problem with:

Let's say foo is 15 and he wants to download Super Expensive Program 9000. He
spends all day looking for a torrent. Then, once he's downloaded it, the next
day it takes him another full day to figure out how to install it and get the
various cracks working and everything configured.

Right, that's fine. Here's the problem:

Time passes, foo's grown up. He's 25, and a software engineer, making $75k a
year. He goes to thepiratebay.org and finds Super Expensive Program 9000
immediately. He downloads it in about an hour. It installs immediately with no
requirement to apply a crack or any other technical detail. It just installs
and works.

Okay, I have a problem with the second one, because once piracy becomes a one-
click solution it starts to hurt those that make the program. The first isn't
a problem because 15 year olds don't buy programs anyway, but they might buy
it when they grow up (Like I did with Visual Assist).

If there's a way to make it artificially hard to get something for free, I say
let them get it, because only the committed will be able to. If it's easy
(Napster, ThePirateBay, etc) it needs to be made harder.

Also, making money by giving away people's work for free in a one-click
solution is just evil. If you're going to give it away for free, make it hard,
and don't make any money from it.

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rms
Piracy HAS become one-click easy because information is not scarce anymore.
The fifteen your old of today that you think should be able to pirate software
has no choice but to download it in a ridiculously easy manner.

There's no turning back now, unless there's an international movement to start
policing the internet which involves cutting off countries that have been
declared piracy havens from the rest of the internet. This, of course,
contradicts the principles of the internet.

I'm too much of a moral relativist to think the Pirate Bay is evil. Stalin was
evil. George W. Bush is evil. Making something people want (one click access
to free information) is not evil. Laws are not inherently good and violating
laws is not inherently evil.

I'll admit that it's not practical for all information to suddenly be free,
but in the long run, information will be free. In the meanwhile, people like
you and me get to argue about how free our information should be. This debate
is part of the process of freeing our information.

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palish
Okay. So for someone like me, in a position where I have very little money and
I want to get out of that situation, to hear "Whatever people make should be
free" is just silly. Yes, open source is wonderful, and I really want to
contribute to it. But needing to feed myself everyday and to pay for my car
and a place to live takes precedence.

Would you tell PG that Viaweb should've been free? Why? Because it's a
service? There's no fundamental difference between a service and a piece of
desktop software, except you can't steal it.

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randallsquared
It's not that "whatever people make should be free". It's that buying
something should not automatically restrict your rights to what you already
own. If you can figure out how to make a non-easily-copied copy, then you
won't need to forcefully (with law) restrict people from using their own
computers after purchasing your copy. But the ease of copying (and thus
competition) doesn't justify using force.

Web applications are one way to solve the problem of "how do I sell use of
software without making the copy they're using easily copied". Other ways
include, for example, DRM, but web applications are a far more robust solution
than DRM, for the class of applications they can provide solutions for.

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palish
How would you write a web application to deliver some music without being able
to steal it? You can't. It's not a panacea. People have to be moral. If you're
15, fine, steal it, because you can't buy it anyway, and it's not hurting
anyone. If you're 25 and you have money, don't be selfish. It _is_ stealing.
And if it's stealing, then laws apply. They protect ownership rights.

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randallsquared
"How would you write a web application to deliver some music without being
able to steal it? You can't."

No, web applications are not a panacea. But _some_ business model will work,
and finding that business model is far more profitable than attempting to
legislate a hold on digital copying. If there's some particular type of thing
for which there is no profitable method of distribution, then that thing won't
be produced for profit. Law can distort this to a degree, but such distortions
always produce more problems than they solve. The market always wins. :)

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palish
Well, okay, I totally agree with that. I just feel bad about it because there
_is_ intrinsic value in a piece of music, as there is in a book. It's
creative, and as such it's a thousand times more valuable than being able to
do backflips or other specialized skills.

..But because it's so easily copied, it's not really worth anything unless the
laws enforce it, which can be heavy-handed. So I don't know the right balance.

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randallsquared
I think the first copy of a book or other creative product (that will sell
well) is incredibly valuable, and I have some ideas for ways to get a large
chunk of that value for the author/artist, but they require micropayments to
be widespread, and that's what I'm working on right now. :)

~~~
palish
Cool. Good luck! :) I'd like to hear more about it.

