Will anything substantial happen to TPB and its ilk?

[Erik Mesoy]

Let's sum up the recent events:

TPB guys are accused of various crimes. Media guys drop half the charges in the first few days of the trial, making one wonder if they had been watching this youtube when they first filed. Trial goes on for a year. TPB guys found guilty, sentenced to jail and fines. TPB guys appeal, legal system will take a few more years. (Wikipedia suggests "in excess of six".) Judge is then accused of conflict of interest due to being part of copyright lobby group. TPB goes on, seemingly unaffected, having servers in Belgium and Russia, among other things.

Apart from a lot of headlines, did diddly-squat really happen to TPB? Will diddly-squat happen to TPB as a result of this? If it does, will diddly-squat happen to all the substitute sites that are getting no media time?

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/1...-other-torrent-sites-are-ready-to-replace-it/

In the meantime, people will continue to download or stream free music wherever they can. Even if the Pirate Bay is ultimately shut down, there are already plenty of other torrent tracking sites ready to take its place. One of them, Mininova tracks nearly as many torrent files (1.13 million versus 1.7 million for The Pirate Bay) and already has more Web visitors. According to comScore, Mininova had 26.2 million unique visitors worldwide in February, versus 14.6 million for the Pirate Bay and even old-school torrent-tracker Torrentz had 13.7 million and has been running neck-and-neck with the Pirate Bay in terms of visitors. Other estimates put the Pirate Bay users at 20 million.

Regardless of what happens to the Pirate Bay, torrent freaks have plenty of other options and always will. If the music industry really wants to fight illegal file-sharing, it needs to work on planting more carrots.

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/isohunt.com+mininova.org+thepiratebay.org/



Let me list some of the suggestions I've seen to put an end to internet piracy, rated from 1 to 5 for perceived hilariousness in my completely subjective, non-legally educated opinion. (But I stayed in a Holiday Inn at some point! )


- Nuke planet, killing everyone. Not funny, but effective.
- Have ISPs watch for piracy, depriving them of common carrier status. Might work if implemented. Will probably not be implemented as the value of common carrier status to ISPs is of magnitudinal order of size with value of internet and thus greater than value of music/film industry. (Note: US apparently special case here re: common carriers.)
- Enduringly if not permanently take down sites where illegal stuff is found, arrest owners. Cue instant collapse of file hosting sites, possibly also destruction of large segments of internet if links are included as people post links to illegal stuff on any forum they want to destroy. Notably, TPB carried only links, did not host any material themselves.
- Make it illegal for private citizens to have/run servers. This would probably either harm innumerable legitimate interests or else do nothing as every pirate became incorporated.
- Ban all torrenting and most other forms of P2P data transfer. About as effective as forbidding people to gossip.

Note: I am not denying that a) gummints can catch some specific major pirates, or b) that piracy is presently illegal in the US, by and large. Please do not strawman me on these counts.

What I am contending is that there is very little to be done about piracy short of draconian measures that would create a Big Brother society, destroy human life, or otherwise not leave us with the sort of society we have and enjoy today.

Any clever ideas? Thoughts?

 

[Masada]

- Nuke planet, killing everyone. Not funny, but effective.

It'll end crime and make the world a better place!

 

[Sharwood]

We could take the best pirates on a mission to start the planet's core spinning again.

 

[Dachs]

We could take the best pirates on a mission to start the planet's core spinning again.

Only if it's Mars' core.

No, I can't think of anything effective against internet piracy.

 

[Sharwood]

We could shut down the internet.

 

[Moggy]

There are a few things that they could do to cut down on piracy but nothing they do will ever end it. With the internet sharing music, movies, games, tv shows etc is just too easy and will never stop.

So I think the media companies need to look at what the pirates have done and beat them at their own game. Sites such as Lastfm have proved that it is possible to offer free music to people legally. Actually a better example would be radio stations! For decades now they have offered free music to everybody, paid for by adverts.

Surely its not too much of a stretch to have a lastfm type site that contains all types of media. People would have the following options:

A) A monthly fee for unlimited, advert free downloads/streaming of music/movies/etc

B) Free to stream music/movies/etc but with unskippable adverts

C) Buy the CD/DVD

Would I torrent music/movies if options A or B were available? No I wouldn’t, as there would be no point! A reasonable monthly fee (say £20ish a month) for reliable streams or time limited downloads, would be fine.

The above though does depend on the end of region restrictions. If a TV show I want to watch is only available in America, then I will download it from TPB rather than wait 6 months until it was available legally for the UK.

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

No solutions, but these might help:

1. Don't let people who buy a product jump through hoops because of anti-pirate software that only delays cracked products by an hour.
2. Have some proper after sales support.
3. Print manuals that are actually useful. And don't just plonk a pdf on a cd so it can be on the net for those who did pirate the software.
4. Extra's like maps and reference tables which you don't get with the pirated version.
5. Improve the quality of releases instead of always going the "we'll patch it eventually" route.

For starters.

 

[Masada]

There are a few things that they could do to cut down on piracy but nothing they do will ever end it.

Sharwood and I have suggested two solutions, shutting down the internet or nuking the planet. Both will stop piracy. Defeatist.

 

[Erik Mesoy]

No solutions, but these might help:

1. Don't let people who buy a product jump through hoops because of anti-pirate software that only delays cracked products by an hour.
2. Have some proper after sales support.
3. Print manuals that are actually useful. And don't just plonk a pdf on a cd so it can be on the net for those who did pirate the software.
4. Extra's like maps and reference tables which you don't get with the pirated version.
5. Improve the quality of releases instead of always going the "we'll patch it eventually" route.

For starters.

Good stuff. I meant this more as a thread about dealing with TPB piracy methods rather than convincing people not to pirate, but I agree that these would help with the latter.

Incidentally, Dominions 3 from Illwinter Games hits most of those points. There are a bunch of patches, the patches keep adding new content, the game ships with a big fat reference manual, the game also comes with something like a 25-digit CD-key, only a checking algorithm and not the generation algorithm for the CD keys comes with the game, and the checking algorithm is updated to be stricter and closer to the generation algorithm with some of the patches. People playing with pirated CD-keys are given confusing errors that eventually make the game unplayable, rather than just tipping them off to the fact that they need to crack it better, and they're usually left out of all the new stuff with the patches.

[shameless plug] Oh, and the game is awesome deep strategy. Buy it. [/shameless plug]

 

[Volum]

1. Accept that some people will pirate no matter what.
2. Stop with DRM and copyprotection softwares that harm computers, in the end pissing of your customers.
3. For games, maybe stop with copy protection and instead have internet activated serial keys.
4. Availability, this is the key. Like suggested above the possibility of streaming videos/music/Tv shows over the internet, either paid for by ads or you pay a fee for not having ads. Then have extra features on the hard copy that you can pay extra for.

And finally, dont give private Law firms for instance permission to hunt down pirates.

 

[GoodGame]

I think if TPB is shut down, it'll send a message to some of the torrentz sites. It might not improve things over all, but if more countries become online against copyright piracy then it encourages other countries to follow suit. A domino effect if you would. It'll probably be a far, far future day that asian piracy stops though.


@Volum, the thing is, if corps don't have the ridiculously innovative and obtusive DRM, then joe schmoe joins the category of the elite. If piracy were a very rare event, then less physical safeguards would be warranted as a customer service gesture. "To counterfeit is Death". #3 (internet activation) is just another form of DRM. To get rid of DRM you have to go back to unprotected, or paper-based anti-piracy measures (remember all the codewheel, code-lookup days?).

If putting Dog the Bounty Hunter on the job would make piratez and DRM go away, I say DO IT!

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

@Volum, the thing is, if corps don't have the ridiculously innovative and obtusive DRM, then joe schmoe joins the category of the elite.

Every game so far has been pirated. Joe Schmoe doesn't need to join the pirate elite when he knows the elite will crack it for them. That's the thing about free sharing. The ridiculously innovative and obtusive DRM goggles do nothing but delay the crack by one day.

 

[Volum]

@Volum, the thing is, if corps don't have the ridiculously innovative and obtusive DRM, then joe schmoe joins the category of the elite. If piracy were a very rare event, then less physical safeguards would be warranted as a customer service gesture. "To counterfeit is Death". #3 (internet activation) is just another form of DRM. To get rid of DRM you have to go back to unprotected, or paper-based anti-piracy measures (remember all the codewheel, code-lookup days?).

If putting Dog the Bounty Hunter on the job would make piratez and DRM go away, I say DO IT!

Yes i remember the good old paper-based ones "Row 14 16 word" and stuff like that. But they where also cracked. I believe that if you had for instance serial keys used to register the game online, and that was needed for downloading game updates and extra material it would give people a bigger reason for buying the game. Like the did with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_Civilizations_II:_Dread_Lords

I cant help but think back the first Championship Manager game, "Enter the score of the game pictured on page 16 in the manual", making me nostalgic

 

[PiMan]

I cant help but think back the first Championship Manager game, "Enter the score of the game pictured on page 16 in the manual", making me nostalgic

Even the first Civilization had that sort of copy protection (look in the manual type). It is only in the original versions, not later CD versions, there was also a crack to make any answer the correct answer.
None of that really mattered of course, because with a little thought, and the occasional guesswork, the questions could be answered without looking it up.

 

[holy king]

Every game so far has been pirated. Joe Schmoe doesn't need to join the pirate elite when he knows the elite will crack it for them. That's the thing about free sharing. The ridiculously innovative and obtusive DRM goggles do nothing but delay the crack by one day.

fifa manager 09 still has no working crack as far as i know...

 

[Erik Mesoy]

fifa manager 09 still has no working crack as far as i know...

Where have you checked? It's probably illegal to compare notes or anything, but as far as I know it has working cracks and had them months ago.

 

[Mise]

There are a few things that they could do to cut down on piracy but nothing they do will ever end it. With the internet sharing music, movies, games, tv shows etc is just too easy and will never stop.

So I think the media companies need to look at what the pirates have done and beat them at their own game. Sites such as Lastfm have proved that it is possible to offer free music to people legally. Actually a better example would be radio stations! For decades now they have offered free music to everybody, paid for by adverts.

Surely its not too much of a stretch to have a lastfm type site that contains all types of media. People would have the following options:

A) A monthly fee for unlimited, advert free downloads/streaming of music/movies/etc

B) Free to stream music/movies/etc but with unskippable adverts

C) Buy the CD/DVD

Would I torrent music/movies if options A or B were available? No I wouldn’t, as there would be no point! A reasonable monthly fee (say £20ish a month) for reliable streams or time limited downloads, would be fine.

The above though does depend on the end of region restrictions. If a TV show I want to watch is only available in America, then I will download it from TPB rather than wait 6 months until it was available legally for the UK.

Try http://www.spotify.com/en/ for music.

It doesn't have everything (notably it doesn't have much independent label stuff), but it has most things, and is free. FREE!

 

[Aramazd]

- Ban all torrenting and most other forms of P2P data transfer. About as effective as forbidding people to gossip.

You can actually do this, but it requires the cooperation of ISPs. It doesn't prevent regular(HTTP, FTP) downloads of pirated stuff. It's the only way to really stop torrents. Not that I think it's going to happen.

 

[Erik Mesoy]

You can actually do this, but it requires the cooperation of ISPs. It doesn't prevent regular(HTTP, FTP) downloads of pirated stuff. It's the only way to really stop torrents. Not that I think it's going to happen.

How is this different from option about ISPs and common carrier status?

 

[Aramazd]

How is this different from option about ISPs and common carrier status?

Because it would prevent piracy, just torrents (including legal ones)