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Torrent Giant, The Pirate Bay sold, will go legal
Carol Haynes:
Hopefully Mininova, ISOHunt etc. will write scripts to grab the tracker details before it dies and carry on the fight.
Innuendo:
My first thought is this is a total waste of money on the buyers' parts. This business venture is going to be just as successful as when Napster first went from a software piracy model to a pay-to-play model. 99% of the people that visited TPB have no interest in paying for that stuff & that's not going to change. Those people will just go away and find other ways to get what they want.
Torrents are tolerable when you are getting something for nothing. Whether that be something that has a price attached to it or something that is so large (like a 5 DVD Linux distro) that's impractical for most people to host on their own sites, but who is going to pay for the 'privilege' to use torrents when a very large portion of ISPs throttle torrent traffic. Who in the right mind is going to buy a DVD (that's 4-9 GB) or a Blu-Ray (Up to 25+ GB) and download it at 10-20 KB/sec speeds? I'll leave the math to you to figure out how many weeks you'll need to let your PC run 24/7 to get that Blu-Ray image of the new Transformers movie.
For those of you using torrents for less-than-respectable purposes torrents are awful for that. They are insecure and it's very easy for The Man to identify you & what you're doing. My advice is if you really want that content then find a way to get it that is far less likely to get you a cease & desist letter from your ISP.
wraith808:
Standing up for what you believe in is a wonderful thing, but it needs to stop when it starts to ruin your life. Good on them for quitting while they were ahead.
-Ehtyar (July 01, 2009, 01:48 AM)
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Thereby invalidating the whole point of their original arguments and making fools of the people that supported them and spoke out on their behalf? I don't think so.
-40hz (July 01, 2009, 06:02 AM)
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So if you were making a point, and it started to impact your personal life, to the tune of millions of dollars, you'd keep on in the same direction? People supported and spoke out, but weren't on the front lines putting their lives on the line. It's easy to support, a lot harder to spearhead...
40hz:
I still stand by what I said though, I'm not sure how else this could have gone down in the end.
Ehtyar.
-Ehtyar (July 01, 2009, 07:08 AM)
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Oh, I couldn't agree with you more Mr. E. I personally don't think something like what they were doing was worth going to jail for. (Then again, I didn't set up a torrent, shoot my mouth off, thumb my nose at the courts, and generally act like the back end of a pony during my 15 minutes of fame - but that's just me.)
Still, to hear all their hype and pseudo-socialist posturing, I would have given them credit for a little more grit and backbone than they showed when it started getting real. By now, I think it's fairly obvious Pirate Bay was little more than children playing at 'dress-up' games rather than a movement by people who truly believed in what they were doing.
And that saddens me. Because every protest, or other act of civil disobedience, has a window in which to effect real change. Pirate Bay had that window. They had support. They had sympathetic press coverage. They had the public and the politico's attention. Serious questions were being raised. Even the courts were uncomfortable issuing a decision that the current laws virtually compelled them to make. And everybody (including the music industry) was waiting for the next round of the battle to begin.
And then Pirate Bay walked away...
Even worse, when they took an industry offered "out" these Pirates became Janissaries.
The real problem is that Pirate Bay left their supporters holding the bag. Now it will be ten times harder to get people to back the next person who decides to lock horns with the media giants - even if that person is willing to take it all the way. And it will also embolden the media monopoly to push harder since I'm sure they are now convinced that they can intimidate anybody in the end. And so far, the media monopoly is absolutely correct in thinking that way. And they'll remain correct until someone shows them otherwise.
Make no mistake, this will hurt the anti-DRM/anti-monopoly cause.
It's easy to support, a lot harder to spearhead...
-wraith808 (July 01, 2009, 10:44 AM)
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I agree with that comment 100%.
And from the looks of it, so does Pirate Bay. :P
Gothi[c]:
From TPB blog:
Idealism is not dead: The profits from the sale will go into a foundation that is going to help with projects about freedom of speech, freedom of information and the openess of the nets. I hope everybody will help out in that and realize that this is the best option for all. Don't worry - be happy!
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