Rather than supplying very specific URLs where infringing material could be located as is the norm with these type of requests, the BPI provided whole site URLs such as http://megaupload.com, http://sendspace.com and http://hotfile.com.
This seems absurd, however I do wonder what the percentage of files hosted on these sites are copyrighted.
I browsed the site instead of using the search just now. It's possible that many of the torrents I've never heard of are independent artists in the public domain (or released CC, whatever), but almost all files in all categories were illegally distributed content. The exception was the "Applications > Unix" category.
It's a site that calls itself "The Pirate Bay." They don't have much of a defense in the way of legitimate (legal) use cases, but I strongly disagree with legislating results out of a general-purpose search engine.
I honestly do not see this going anywhere. As much as I disagree with almost everything the DMCA stands for, safe harbor provisions were included for exactly this reason.
We exist solely for the purpose of changing UK government policy to something sensible. This means inter alia that some actions now called "piracy" would become legal.
a) Have you proven stealing my work isn't theft yet?
b) Regardless whether you personally define stealing my work as being theft or not, does that make it less wrong? Because I strongly suspect that's what you're implying.
You still haven't responded to how equating copyright reform with piracy helps copyright reform in any way.
This could turn out great. The music industry sues Google for linking to sites like The Pirate Bay, and Google with its deep pockets successfully defends linking in count. That might set precedence not only for general search engines like Google, but also torrent search engines like The Pirate Bay.
I think the point is that Google has deep enough pockets to defend against the also-deep pockets of the music distributors. Lawsuits aren't won by deep pockets, but it often takes deep pockets to defend, and lack of defense is the same as losing.
The music industry will never let it go so far as to a court case which will set that sort of precedence. They may be dumb, but they aren't that stupid.
Or Google could go the way they went with the Authors' Guild/Book-Scanning settlement: start by arguing the principle of indexing-for-fair-use, but then cave when a settlement is possible which grants them a unique leading position over all competitors.
That is, they'd grant that such linking is illegal for the industry -- setting the exact precedent the rightsholders want -- but then strike a license that lets them continue linking on terms few others could manage.
I thinks this is probably good. TPB always claimed that there is not principal difference between thepiratebay.org and google.com in terms of linking to filesharing content.
Google already de-list & pageRank for sites that disobey their terms (except if Jason Calacanis runs them).
If they include sites that exist expressly for illegal purposes as against their terms, a site whose name and purpose is based on piracy would be naturally de-indexed.
If you make software, or otherwise create stuff you'd like people to obey your terms for, this is a good thing.
If you:
* wouldn't like someone disobeying the GPL
* wouldn't like someone stealing your desktop app
* wouldn't like someone copying your web apps source to their own servers
* wouldn't like someone ripping off your CSS
then congratulations, you support IP. Having TPB de-indexed will help your fellow creatives.
When you're 15 and poor, stealing seems pretty reasonable. When you're 30 and make stuff, it isn't.
Again and Again it must be said that violating copyright is not stealing. Second, a lot of what your complaining about isn't even copyright violation it's plagiarism and fraud.
I think most people realize that copyright is prime example of regulatory capture, how else can obscene concepts like retroactive extension be endorsed and enacted with straight face. Second, look at how much leverage they have over industries that are significantly bigger than the entertainment industry.
Copyright is a flawed concept, as is much of intellectual property.
> Again and Again it must be said that violating copyright is not stealing.
That's a side argument, which is irrelevant. The point is it's wrong.
> a lot of what your complaining about isn't even copyright violation
Plagiarism is copyright violation.
> copyright is prime example of regulatory capture, how else can obscene concepts like retroactive extension be endorsed and enacted with straight face.
I think most people don't really care one way or the other. But how is market share of distribution networks relevant to ethics? Doing something wrong to someone else who did something wrong is still wrong.
First, copyright violation is not necessarily wrong, and saying that something is stealing when it is clearly not is wrong -- it confuses the issue.
Plagiarism can be a copyright problem, but in this case I took the more appropriate fraud angle since I'm arguing that copyright is invalid and hence the problem is a fraud problem not a copyright problem.
Well the entire purpose of copyright is to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts", when media industry is crippling science and technology it becomes important. And your last point doesn't follow, I'm specifically saying that violating copyright isn't wrong. Just as abolitionists who refused to follow the fugitive slave act, weren't doing something wrong by refusing to send slaves back to the south.
So violating copyright isn't wrong, and it sure isn't stealing. Now it may be illegal, but during prohibition alcohol was illegal and drinking it also wasn't wrong just because some people said it was, so it is with copyright.
We are going to see major changes as digital technology rips through the media industry. Just as the shipping industry faced when container shipping started. For instance longshoremen unpacking and repacking pallets (completely useless and unnecessary make-work) was eliminated as locked containers moved from boat to train/truck. So to will the media industry lose control over distribution.
I fundamentally object to the notion that the government gives you a right to a monopoly on an idea, for what looks like perpetuity -- nothing has gone out of copyright since 1923.
Second, you seem to confuse stealing with copying. Stealing means you've lost something i.e. no longer have it. This is clearly not the case with copying.
Third, the comparison to slavery was only to disprove your assertion "Doing something wrong to someone else who did something wrong is still wrong." It was in no attempting to compare the two, the injustice found in slavery is far more egregious than that of any IP case.
Do you think it's ok for a teacher to photocopy portions of a book or article to pass out to their students? This is allowed under the current system. Shouldn't each student be forced to buy the book or article? Are they stealing from the author? What about showing a clip from a movie? How does fair use apply to software? Why does fair use apply to other forms of creation but not software? Why don't mathematicians or physicist get to copyright their discoveries - i can't reuse the plot of a movie (hell, I can't even summarize it: http://bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/c/F2/996/996.F2d.1366.92...), but I can reuse someone else's discoveries? This is not an easy issue. Do you think wikileaks should be shutdown since it posts material it shouldn't have? Why is it ok in some cases and not ok in others? How are the lines drawn?
Do I think that people should be compensated for their work? Of course I do; however, I do not think that copyright is the correct mechanism. Injustice is injustice and should not be left in place just because it's convenient. I think a better way would be to have those purchasing your software sign an agreement that if they distribute it without your permission they must pay X amount of dollars, for they are the only ones you have any legal claim on. I'm not trying to encourage piracy, but I am taking the position that copyright is not legitimate.
I think your stuck in a mindset in which people can be compensated only by through copyright, and I don't think that's the case. I can't predict what the business model that would eventually arise is going to look like. But I am certain one would emerge. Additionally, I think that majority of software developers are actually employed on applications that are not sold to the public commercially so perhaps large portions of the software industry would not even be effected (banking, aerospace, hr, etc).
As for the personal references, yes i create things and understand the effort and all that jazz. But once again, I think that the current system in unethical and will eventually be replaced, perhaps by thinking through it now we can hope to improve the situation and not re-architect the internet and destroy many civil liberties to try and keep an outdated business model going.
> I fundamentally object to the notion that the government gives you a right to a monopoly on an idea, for what looks like perpetuity -- nothing has gone out of copyright since 1923.
Copyright reform has nothing to do with advocating piracy. By advocating piracy, you are harming copyright reform.
TPB steal from:
* OReilly
* Red Hat
* Novell
* IBM
* The World of Goo people
* Trent Reznor
and other artists most people on HN agree are doing interesting things with copyright. Red Hat maintain a fucking list of patents they use to defend OSS against proprietary patent trolls! Yet TPB steals from them. You have no reason to buy an OReilly book if you can get it on TPB.
> Stealing means you've lost something i.e. no longer have it.
The common definition of stealing means you're taking something that isn't yours. I understand you disagree, but I don't care.
> Third, the comparison to slavery was only to disprove your assertion "Doing something wrong to someone else who did something wrong is still wrong."
Do you think you disproved that assertion?
> I'm not trying to encourage piracy
But you are encouraging piracy. You're defending The Pirate Bay. Which is a pirate site. Hence the name 'The Pirate Bay, the pictures of pirates, the jolly roger, and the stealing.
TPB, and TPP harm copyright reform. People who make stuff, and people who don't like stealing
I have written software and released it under the GPL, and I am likely to do so in the future. If someone violated the GPL on my software, I wouldn't be happy.
But what Google is doing isn't like that. They aren't infringing copyright, instead they:
1. have a front page (which doesn't contain any copyright-infringing material) allowing people to type in search terms, upon which ...
2. Google display a page (which doesn't contain any copyright-infringing material) with links to others pages (which may include pages from TPB)
3. if you follow a link to one of those pages (which doesn't contain any copyright-infringing material) ...
4. and then from that page download a .torrent file (again, which doesn't contain any copyright-infringing material) ...
5. and feed the .torrent file into a BitTorrent client ...
6. then the BitTorrent client may copy some data across the internet in a way that breaches copyright.
Google are at least 6 steps away from breaching copyright. If what they are doing is deemed illegal, where will the music industry stop? At prosecuting miners for digging up ores using in making chips that make computers that might infringe copyright?
Do we really want to rewrite the fundamental architecture of the net, to take freedom away from the whole of humanity, just so the music industry can hang on to its obsolete business model for a few years longer?
Q1. Is Google doing something illegal by indexing the internet? No.
* Google doesn't exist solely for the purposes of facilitating piracy.
* The pirate bay does.
The law makes a distinction (ask a lawyer) so only TPB is doing something illegal.
Q2. Is Google not applying its Terms of Service consistently?
Most likely - sites that break it's ToS are still indexed with high PageRank. This could be worth taking them to court over. I hope this happens - TPB illegally distributes materials that a lot of my colleagues worked very hard on, in clear violation of the law and Google's ToS.
The 'obsolete business model' arguments are irrelevant to whether something is illegal or not and waste both our time. TPB illegally distributes across all industries, including independent artists and major contributors to open source.
TPB does not exist for only facilitating copyright violation (it's not piracy), it legitimately distributes torrents to files that are licensed to be freely distributed. Here's a tv show made for torrent based distribution, it's on the front page of the pirate bay: http://vodo.net/pioneerone
Let's do a thought experiment: assume all copyright laws were abandoned tomorrow.
In this instance, nothing TPB did would be copyright infringement or indudcement thereof. Now ask yourself the question: would the owners of TPB shut the site down, or keep it running.
If they would shut it down, then TPB exists for the purpose of copyright infringement.
If they would keep it up, then TPB exists for the purpose of facilitating transfer of content, and any copyuright infringement involved is a side-issue as far as the owners of TPB are concerned.
You still haven't answered my questions, but sure, I'll answer yours.
If copyright law stopped existing, and authors could no longer be compensated for what they'd made, TPB would stagnate:
* There would be no incentive to run servers in exotic locations (Sealand, Saudi Arabia, etc) that don't respect creators rights.
* Sites that own content would distribute their own data so it could be released and consumed quicker (it would probably be ad-supported since selling IP isn't possible anymore)
* There would be no need to pirate anything as nobody has to pay for anything anymore.
The domain would expire, or the servers have a prob, or the hosting bills come in, and not get fixed/paid as there'd be no point to stealing anything anymore.
If copyright law stopped existing, and authors could no longer be compensated for what they'd made
Haven't we already established that this is a red herring in light of all the content that people create for no money every day? I'd provide a list, but reminding people of this just gets exhausting. Just because some people wouldn't consider it worthwhile to create because they don't get paid doesn't mean that creation would stop, it just means that the stuff that gets created by people who don't see a need in getting paid would rise to increased prominence and be recognized as such.
> it just means that the stuff that gets created by people who don't see a need in getting paid would rise to increased prominence and be recognized as such.
Direct payment is still the best option to make money from creativity. Things made for free reward their authors in other ways;
* sponsorship payments
* promotion of the authors (common with short films)
* raising awareness of issues
* promoting subsequent paid sequels (eg, NIN)
As anyone who's run a website known, it's a lot harder to fund a business with these models than with direct payment.
If direct payment for works was no longer an option, the current non-direct providers would struggle with an influx of high quality, well funded competitors.
* Independent, low budget musicians would have to compete for sponsorship and venues with established acts suddenly doing gigs for free.
* Indie gamewriters would have to compete for cash against giant game companies with high-end 3D engines giving away the latest games with in-game ads.
* Authors that write books and companies that do training courses might just give up completely, and not write books, since ads don't work very well for OReilly.
* OSS companies that give away their source and sell a binary compilation and update services would have to find a business model.
TPB is already making these things happen today. That's why people who make things know they're bad.
When you're 15 and poor, stealing seems pretty reasonable. When you're 30 and make stuff, it isn't.
Emotive language aside, if kids can't sample your wares at 15 will they buy them at 30? Back in my teens I went through a phase of taping music off the radio, and many of the same concerns were expressed by the music industry about cassette tapes as about downloads today; the same applies to videotapes. As I got older and had a bit more money available I spent a decent amount of it on records and books; in my 20s I became a pretty heavy media consumer, and probably spent >$5000 on CDs. This declined substantially during my 30s, although I think this was just a factor of getting older and not being so focused on music and socializing (I don't download music).
As Dantheman points out, copyright has given rise to some astonishingly poor legislation. As someone working in the arts (and who has had my IP ripped off in a serious way in the past), I strongly support the basic concept of copyright: of course I want to derive some benefit from my creative output, if there is any money to be had from its distribution.
But copyright holders have substantially abused this. Although I don't see it as an example of regulatory capture (because I think there is a legitimate property right in authorship), things like retroactive extension of copyright and the extremely anti-competitive behavior of the publishing industry have substantially undermined public respect for the underlying concept. Artificial limitation on supply and consequent price maintenance have gradually increased people's awareness of IP as a commodity. As a teen in the 80s I was aware of copyright and the idea of royalties, but like many people bought into the idea that they represented only a small part of the cost to the consumer: if I purchased a 7" single with a new song by my favorite band, my belief was that the cost was broken out approximately evenly between the retailer, distributor, packager, pressing plant, publisher, recording studio and the artist, all of whom were being compensated in proportion to their economic contribution. In actual fact, the creative and mechanical contributors were generally getting paid the smallest share, and the bulk of profits went to the parties with the strongest contractual position. This had been a perennial grumble of authors vs. publishers for years, but publishers had always had the argument that without their financial advances and distribution mechanisms, creatives and consumers would be unable to produce or obtain quality work. Technologically, this seemed to make sense: nothing I could achieve playing around with my cassette recorder could compare to the quality of a record or CD, and when it came to writing, the content I created and sometimes sold looked like nothing special as it emerged from my typewriter or dot matrix printer: only a publisher, it seemed, wielded the awesome financial muscle to command the appearance of my words in an actual magazine or book, where people would pay money to read it.
The internet, though, changed things in a number of ways. Interesting content was to be found all over, and on a computer your output looks no better or worse than mine, so the magical link between form and content was broken. Further, since the normal hierarchy of communication ('want to join the XYZ fanclub? Send your check to Big Publisher, 123 Business Street, Capital city!') was drastically flattened, it became possible to converse with and later meet established artists who were previously socially remote - in my case that meant people like Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett, as well as various UK tech writers, for others the musical or visual artists they were fans of, and so on. And as the communication barriers melted away, it turned out that a majority of successful creative people didn't like their publishers very much and only received a pittance of what the fans were spending on their material. As time went by it became increasingly obvious that while technological change ...
> While I don't participate in media piracy nor endorse the concept, nor do I have a great deal of sympathy for the major economic stakeholders or the market distortions resulting from their attempts to extract endless rents.
I share both these opinions. But they're not in conflict with each other here - TPB doesn't discriminate between copyright holders that are good people and those that are bad.
I know - I'm really talking about the legal landscape rather than TPB. I just think the general anarchy of present-day digital distribution is the inevitable consequence of the 20th-century IP model, and a sustainable replacement has yet to establish itself. we can't rewind, so we need to Try Something Else.
Small nitpick: Your definition of "regulatory capture" is very wrong. Regulatory capture is when a regulated industry manages to gain control over those regulating it. The Mickey Mouse Protection Act is almost the canonical example.
You're quite right - my use was exactly backwards. Thanks for correcting me.
Bizarrely, I found myself defending the selfsame legislation 2 hours after my grumbles above, though for quite different reasons. If you are interested: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1453496
I doubt google will agree with their terms. Youtube is arguably as guilty as thepiratebay, megaupload, and etc for harboring illegal content...google is not going to set up a potential argument to delist youtube (themselves.)
Also if google does ban them, there will be other search engines that do index such sites; it really doesn't solve anything really.
43 comments
[ 5.6 ms ] story [ 114 ms ] threadThis seems absurd, however I do wonder what the percentage of files hosted on these sites are copyrighted.
It's a site that calls itself "The Pirate Bay." They don't have much of a defense in the way of legitimate (legal) use cases, but I strongly disagree with legislating results out of a general-purpose search engine.
I honestly do not see this going anywhere. As much as I disagree with almost everything the DMCA stands for, safe harbor provisions were included for exactly this reason.
So? I belong to a political party called "the Pirate Party", doesn't mean I'm breaking the law.
* I didn't give you permission to steal my work to advance any objective.
I think you've created a manifesto to justify stealing things, because you like stealing things.
b) Regardless whether you personally define stealing my work as being theft or not, does that make it less wrong? Because I strongly suspect that's what you're implying.
You still haven't responded to how equating copyright reform with piracy helps copyright reform in any way.
But even then, I doubt that 1% would be non-copyrighted.
That is, they'd grant that such linking is illegal for the industry -- setting the exact precedent the rightsholders want -- but then strike a license that lets them continue linking on terms few others could manage.
If they include sites that exist expressly for illegal purposes as against their terms, a site whose name and purpose is based on piracy would be naturally de-indexed.
If you make software, or otherwise create stuff you'd like people to obey your terms for, this is a good thing.
If you:
* wouldn't like someone disobeying the GPL
* wouldn't like someone stealing your desktop app
* wouldn't like someone copying your web apps source to their own servers
* wouldn't like someone ripping off your CSS
then congratulations, you support IP. Having TPB de-indexed will help your fellow creatives.
When you're 15 and poor, stealing seems pretty reasonable. When you're 30 and make stuff, it isn't.
I think most people realize that copyright is prime example of regulatory capture, how else can obscene concepts like retroactive extension be endorsed and enacted with straight face. Second, look at how much leverage they have over industries that are significantly bigger than the entertainment industry.
Copyright is a flawed concept, as is much of intellectual property.
That's a side argument, which is irrelevant. The point is it's wrong.
> a lot of what your complaining about isn't even copyright violation
Plagiarism is copyright violation.
> copyright is prime example of regulatory capture, how else can obscene concepts like retroactive extension be endorsed and enacted with straight face.
I think most people don't really care one way or the other. But how is market share of distribution networks relevant to ethics? Doing something wrong to someone else who did something wrong is still wrong.
Plagiarism can be a copyright problem, but in this case I took the more appropriate fraud angle since I'm arguing that copyright is invalid and hence the problem is a fraud problem not a copyright problem.
Well the entire purpose of copyright is to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts", when media industry is crippling science and technology it becomes important. And your last point doesn't follow, I'm specifically saying that violating copyright isn't wrong. Just as abolitionists who refused to follow the fugitive slave act, weren't doing something wrong by refusing to send slaves back to the south.
So violating copyright isn't wrong, and it sure isn't stealing. Now it may be illegal, but during prohibition alcohol was illegal and drinking it also wasn't wrong just because some people said it was, so it is with copyright.
We are going to see major changes as digital technology rips through the media industry. Just as the shipping industry faced when container shipping started. For instance longshoremen unpacking and repacking pallets (completely useless and unnecessary make-work) was eliminated as locked containers moved from boat to train/truck. So to will the media industry lose control over distribution.
You're right. It's illegal. But this isn't one of the cases where the law differentiates from what's right for most human beings.
> Just as abolitionists who refused to follow the fugitive slave act, weren't doing something wrong by refusing to send slaves back to the south.
I'm sorry to use this language...wait, I won't. I'll be polite.
Do you make something? I've made something, so have my colleagues.
TPB distribute it when they're not allowed. Stuff I spent all those late nights on, and my colleagues the same.
Do you make anything? Do you use it to make income? How would you feel if I steal it?
Would that be wrong, or right?
Do.
You.
Think.
Stealing.
My.
Work.
Is.
Like.
Conscientious.
Objection.
To.
Punishing.
Escaped.
Slaves?
Don't just read that and then start typing. Think about it. Really think about it.
Do you, Daniel Gagne, feel that way? In your heart, in your brain? Do you genuinely agree with this analogy? Are you sure?
Or would you like to change your mind?
Second, you seem to confuse stealing with copying. Stealing means you've lost something i.e. no longer have it. This is clearly not the case with copying.
Third, the comparison to slavery was only to disprove your assertion "Doing something wrong to someone else who did something wrong is still wrong." It was in no attempting to compare the two, the injustice found in slavery is far more egregious than that of any IP case.
Do you think it's ok for a teacher to photocopy portions of a book or article to pass out to their students? This is allowed under the current system. Shouldn't each student be forced to buy the book or article? Are they stealing from the author? What about showing a clip from a movie? How does fair use apply to software? Why does fair use apply to other forms of creation but not software? Why don't mathematicians or physicist get to copyright their discoveries - i can't reuse the plot of a movie (hell, I can't even summarize it: http://bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/c/F2/996/996.F2d.1366.92...), but I can reuse someone else's discoveries? This is not an easy issue. Do you think wikileaks should be shutdown since it posts material it shouldn't have? Why is it ok in some cases and not ok in others? How are the lines drawn?
Do I think that people should be compensated for their work? Of course I do; however, I do not think that copyright is the correct mechanism. Injustice is injustice and should not be left in place just because it's convenient. I think a better way would be to have those purchasing your software sign an agreement that if they distribute it without your permission they must pay X amount of dollars, for they are the only ones you have any legal claim on. I'm not trying to encourage piracy, but I am taking the position that copyright is not legitimate.
I think your stuck in a mindset in which people can be compensated only by through copyright, and I don't think that's the case. I can't predict what the business model that would eventually arise is going to look like. But I am certain one would emerge. Additionally, I think that majority of software developers are actually employed on applications that are not sold to the public commercially so perhaps large portions of the software industry would not even be effected (banking, aerospace, hr, etc).
As for the personal references, yes i create things and understand the effort and all that jazz. But once again, I think that the current system in unethical and will eventually be replaced, perhaps by thinking through it now we can hope to improve the situation and not re-architect the internet and destroy many civil liberties to try and keep an outdated business model going.
Copyright reform has nothing to do with advocating piracy. By advocating piracy, you are harming copyright reform.
TPB steal from:
* OReilly
* Red Hat
* Novell
* IBM
* The World of Goo people
* Trent Reznor
and other artists most people on HN agree are doing interesting things with copyright. Red Hat maintain a fucking list of patents they use to defend OSS against proprietary patent trolls! Yet TPB steals from them. You have no reason to buy an OReilly book if you can get it on TPB.
> Stealing means you've lost something i.e. no longer have it.
The common definition of stealing means you're taking something that isn't yours. I understand you disagree, but I don't care.
> Third, the comparison to slavery was only to disprove your assertion "Doing something wrong to someone else who did something wrong is still wrong."
Do you think you disproved that assertion?
> I'm not trying to encourage piracy
But you are encouraging piracy. You're defending The Pirate Bay. Which is a pirate site. Hence the name 'The Pirate Bay, the pictures of pirates, the jolly roger, and the stealing.
TPB, and TPP harm copyright reform. People who make stuff, and people who don't like stealing
But what Google is doing isn't like that. They aren't infringing copyright, instead they:
1. have a front page (which doesn't contain any copyright-infringing material) allowing people to type in search terms, upon which ...
2. Google display a page (which doesn't contain any copyright-infringing material) with links to others pages (which may include pages from TPB)
3. if you follow a link to one of those pages (which doesn't contain any copyright-infringing material) ...
4. and then from that page download a .torrent file (again, which doesn't contain any copyright-infringing material) ...
5. and feed the .torrent file into a BitTorrent client ...
6. then the BitTorrent client may copy some data across the internet in a way that breaches copyright.
Google are at least 6 steps away from breaching copyright. If what they are doing is deemed illegal, where will the music industry stop? At prosecuting miners for digging up ores using in making chips that make computers that might infringe copyright?
Do we really want to rewrite the fundamental architecture of the net, to take freedom away from the whole of humanity, just so the music industry can hang on to its obsolete business model for a few years longer?
* Google doesn't exist solely for the purposes of facilitating piracy.
* The pirate bay does.
The law makes a distinction (ask a lawyer) so only TPB is doing something illegal.
Q2. Is Google not applying its Terms of Service consistently?
Most likely - sites that break it's ToS are still indexed with high PageRank. This could be worth taking them to court over. I hope this happens - TPB illegally distributes materials that a lot of my colleagues worked very hard on, in clear violation of the law and Google's ToS.
The 'obsolete business model' arguments are irrelevant to whether something is illegal or not and waste both our time. TPB illegally distributes across all industries, including independent artists and major contributors to open source.
You shouldn't need me to explain why The Pirate Bay exists for piracy. If you do, I suggest we end this conversation.
In this instance, nothing TPB did would be copyright infringement or indudcement thereof. Now ask yourself the question: would the owners of TPB shut the site down, or keep it running.
If they would shut it down, then TPB exists for the purpose of copyright infringement.
If they would keep it up, then TPB exists for the purpose of facilitating transfer of content, and any copyuright infringement involved is a side-issue as far as the owners of TPB are concerned.
I think they would keep it up.
If copyright law stopped existing, and authors could no longer be compensated for what they'd made, TPB would stagnate:
* There would be no incentive to run servers in exotic locations (Sealand, Saudi Arabia, etc) that don't respect creators rights.
* Sites that own content would distribute their own data so it could be released and consumed quicker (it would probably be ad-supported since selling IP isn't possible anymore)
* There would be no need to pirate anything as nobody has to pay for anything anymore.
The domain would expire, or the servers have a prob, or the hosting bills come in, and not get fixed/paid as there'd be no point to stealing anything anymore.
Haven't we already established that this is a red herring in light of all the content that people create for no money every day? I'd provide a list, but reminding people of this just gets exhausting. Just because some people wouldn't consider it worthwhile to create because they don't get paid doesn't mean that creation would stop, it just means that the stuff that gets created by people who don't see a need in getting paid would rise to increased prominence and be recognized as such.
Direct payment is still the best option to make money from creativity. Things made for free reward their authors in other ways;
* sponsorship payments
* promotion of the authors (common with short films)
* raising awareness of issues
* promoting subsequent paid sequels (eg, NIN)
As anyone who's run a website known, it's a lot harder to fund a business with these models than with direct payment. If direct payment for works was no longer an option, the current non-direct providers would struggle with an influx of high quality, well funded competitors.
* Independent, low budget musicians would have to compete for sponsorship and venues with established acts suddenly doing gigs for free.
* Indie gamewriters would have to compete for cash against giant game companies with high-end 3D engines giving away the latest games with in-game ads.
* Authors that write books and companies that do training courses might just give up completely, and not write books, since ads don't work very well for OReilly.
* OSS companies that give away their source and sell a binary compilation and update services would have to find a business model.
TPB is already making these things happen today. That's why people who make things know they're bad.
Emotive language aside, if kids can't sample your wares at 15 will they buy them at 30? Back in my teens I went through a phase of taping music off the radio, and many of the same concerns were expressed by the music industry about cassette tapes as about downloads today; the same applies to videotapes. As I got older and had a bit more money available I spent a decent amount of it on records and books; in my 20s I became a pretty heavy media consumer, and probably spent >$5000 on CDs. This declined substantially during my 30s, although I think this was just a factor of getting older and not being so focused on music and socializing (I don't download music).
As Dantheman points out, copyright has given rise to some astonishingly poor legislation. As someone working in the arts (and who has had my IP ripped off in a serious way in the past), I strongly support the basic concept of copyright: of course I want to derive some benefit from my creative output, if there is any money to be had from its distribution.
But copyright holders have substantially abused this. Although I don't see it as an example of regulatory capture (because I think there is a legitimate property right in authorship), things like retroactive extension of copyright and the extremely anti-competitive behavior of the publishing industry have substantially undermined public respect for the underlying concept. Artificial limitation on supply and consequent price maintenance have gradually increased people's awareness of IP as a commodity. As a teen in the 80s I was aware of copyright and the idea of royalties, but like many people bought into the idea that they represented only a small part of the cost to the consumer: if I purchased a 7" single with a new song by my favorite band, my belief was that the cost was broken out approximately evenly between the retailer, distributor, packager, pressing plant, publisher, recording studio and the artist, all of whom were being compensated in proportion to their economic contribution. In actual fact, the creative and mechanical contributors were generally getting paid the smallest share, and the bulk of profits went to the parties with the strongest contractual position. This had been a perennial grumble of authors vs. publishers for years, but publishers had always had the argument that without their financial advances and distribution mechanisms, creatives and consumers would be unable to produce or obtain quality work. Technologically, this seemed to make sense: nothing I could achieve playing around with my cassette recorder could compare to the quality of a record or CD, and when it came to writing, the content I created and sometimes sold looked like nothing special as it emerged from my typewriter or dot matrix printer: only a publisher, it seemed, wielded the awesome financial muscle to command the appearance of my words in an actual magazine or book, where people would pay money to read it.
The internet, though, changed things in a number of ways. Interesting content was to be found all over, and on a computer your output looks no better or worse than mine, so the magical link between form and content was broken. Further, since the normal hierarchy of communication ('want to join the XYZ fanclub? Send your check to Big Publisher, 123 Business Street, Capital city!') was drastically flattened, it became possible to converse with and later meet established artists who were previously socially remote - in my case that meant people like Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett, as well as various UK tech writers, for others the musical or visual artists they were fans of, and so on. And as the communication barriers melted away, it turned out that a majority of successful creative people didn't like their publishers very much and only received a pittance of what the fans were spending on their material. As time went by it became increasingly obvious that while technological change ...
I share both these opinions. But they're not in conflict with each other here - TPB doesn't discriminate between copyright holders that are good people and those that are bad.
Very well thought-out comment otherwise, though.
Bizarrely, I found myself defending the selfsame legislation 2 hours after my grumbles above, though for quite different reasons. If you are interested: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1453496
Also if google does ban them, there will be other search engines that do index such sites; it really doesn't solve anything really.