Technicalities aside. They're still making money by helping people "pirate" stuff. Assuming ads on their site do actually generate revenue, and that revenue gets forwarded to them.
Though I kinda expect the average piratebay user to have adblock installed.
Exactly. They may or may not have actually broken the law, but they are certainly in spirit a service that makes money through the unauthorized monetization of other peoples' works against the wishes of those works' creators. Even if it doesn't make them criminals, it certainly makes them assholes.
It's already hard enough to make a living as an artist, musician, etc. without being kneecapped by opportunists. We've gone from the old pre-Internet system, which screwed artists most of the time, to a new system that screws artists all the time.
I don't understand why there's so much sympathy for industrial-scale piracy -- especially for-profit industrial-scale piracy -- among people who make a living from creative work (programmers, entrepreneurs, engineers). I guess only certain castes of people and professions deserve compensation and respect, and everyone else can suck it...?
Times change, and technology changes value. Scored music "screwed" street performers, then recordings "screwed" concert performers, then the internet "screwed" recording artists.
Plenty of artists have successfully adapted and are doing great. Others have sheltered behind curators and promoters like labels. Others have failed to deliver what people want and they are screwed. That's capitalism at work.
I don't understand why we should hold back progress so that existing artists can be sheltered from needing to adapt and provide a product people want to pay for.
I say this as a former small-time producer of club tracks and a current software developer.
Additionally, you should ask artists who's screwing them before you start pointing fingers. Many artists would kill to have their music downloaded. Much of the screwing comes from the big labels that reap almost all of the profits.
> Plenty of artists have successfully adapted and are doing great.
Exactly. The artists that have adapted are the ones whose art is actually valuable, rather than artists who work with the people who control distribution channels. Distribution channels are a lot more prone to disruption than creators of art.
"I don't understand why we should hold back progress"...
I don't think we should hold back progress. I'm not arguing for legislated compulsory DRM or shutting down the Internet.
I'm just saying I don't have a lot of love or sympathy for people who build businesses on the appropriation of peoples' hard work against their will. I feel the same way about jerks who take OSS software closed without authorization or credit, or who scrape peoples' blog posts and use them for their own click bait sites without even linking to the original author. TPB is in that sort of category.
"Additionally, you should ask artists who's screwing them"...
I have, and trust me... nobody has any love for record labels except maybe some of the indies.
The trouble is that the new model -- the promised land -- is not appearing. There is no new model. The new model is you give your work away for free and starve.
Like I've said, we've gone from a system where there was some opportunity -- albeit in a shitty model with shitty record labels -- to a system with no opportunity outside touring and merchandise sales.
You can squeeze by on that, but you can't build a career on it. Great art requires years of dedication. That means making it a sustainable career, a vocation. Squeezing out a few tunes in between your two day jobs just won't lead to great art.
It also means you're basically a consultant -- a glorified service sector employee. Why is it that programmers are allowed to build equity in startups, but artists are forbidden from building equity in a portfolio of copyrighted works? It's the only vehicle for equity building they ever had. Without some opportunity to build on your work in a non-linear fashion, you are just a wage slave forever.
I guess we're going to reward all those artists and musicians who enriched our lives by making them eat dog food when they're old...?
Sonny Bono always gets bashed for saying copyright should be "forever and a day." I still don't agree with him-- I think that position is too extreme. But I understand where he's coming from now. He understands economics and business.
To build an industry that can pay actual wages, benefits, and invest in new things, you need to build capital. You need some way of building a portfolio of enduring value that can produce recurrent revenue over a long period of time to fund new things and to support the vast overhead that a real profession demands.
Nobody should understand this more than the HN crowd, which is why I have such an uncharitable interpretation of the down votes I always get for pointing these things out.
I agree with you that it's troubling that a new model for monetizing free work isn't coalescing -- in art, open source, writing, and more. I've personally felt the sting of all of these.
However, I don't blame the downloaders or the Pirate Bays. People want what they want, and Pirate Bay managed to provide that to people: a download index for the price of an ad or a drive-by download. I congratulate them on their success.
I think if you can't convince people to hand over money for what you've made, then what you've made simply isn't valuable, even if it maybe was yesterday. Perhaps this means that the local band will have to pack away their guitars while the one-hit wonder Gangnam Styles rake in the bucks, but nobody is being screwed here.
What society wants from entertainment has evolved, and holding onto a static definition of what constitutes "art", "quality", or "enriching one's life" while ignoring what real people are clearly demanding from their entertainment is, I think, pretentious.
I don't think the internet is destroying anything or screwing anyone. It's just closing gaps and optimizing every industry towards exactly what people want; if that's thrown-together garbage delivered for free at the cost of promotions shoved into your eyeballs, then don't blame the internet, or Pirate Bay. Blame people for consuming crap and blindly selling their souls to ads.
> I think if you can't convince people to hand over money for what you've made, then what you've made simply isn't valuable.
They aren't paying because there is pretty much a zero percent chance of getting in trouble for downloading it illegally.
If magically somehow tomorrow every illegal download came with a bill for 250$ for each infraction at the end of the month things would change and more people would move back to legal purchasing. People are cheap and if they can take something for free without consequence they are going to do so.
The myth is always that either one illegally downloads or pays for it through channels. However, most people I know will pay for some content and not others. It's a question of value. Just because the illegal download costs $250 does not imply that people will pay $10 or $20 instead. The third (and oft-ignored) option is that they will simply find other content that is worth the expense (both monetary and effort).
Who was making a living recording and selling albums before the internet? As far as I know, touring was always much more lucrative than recording. Labels always made much more money than artists and the artists were ok with that because the only way to get famous(and make money touring) was for a label to like you and promote you. Things have changed. It's harder than ever to make a living playing music because less people want to see live shows, but that isn't thepiratebay's fault. At the same time, it is easier then ever to get your music out there. If pirating was completely stopped it wouldn't change anything for "artists". We'd just revert to labels choosing winners, but it would still be harder to make a living now then it was 30 years ago.
> Like I've said, we've gone from a system where there was some opportunity -- albeit in a shitty model with shitty record labels -- to a system with no opportunity outside touring and merchandise sales.
> You can squeeze by on that, but you can't build a career on it.
Steve Albini strongly disagrees with your theory [1]:
"...As a result fans are more ardent for this music. They are willing to spend more on seeing it played live. They are willing to buy more ephemera and eager to establish a personal relationship to the people who make the music. Gig prices have escalated as a result. And the merchandise tables at gigs are universally teeming with activity. Back home, gigs that used to cost five or six bucks are now 20 or 30. Over here the ticket inflation has been more pronounced, with club gigs going for $80 or more. As a result gig income for bands has increased exponentially. My band has been playing a lot of the same places for the entirety of our existence, over 20 years now. I guess you could say we’ve saturated our audience, no matter how long we stay at it. Some of these perennial gigs are now paying an over of magnitude better than they were 10 or 15 years ago. That’s right, some places where we used to earn four or five hundred dollars we now earn four or five grand."
> We've gone from the old pre-Internet system, which screwed artists most of the time, to a new system that screws artists all the time.
In general you make some valid points and I think I understand where you're coming from - as an artist. I strongly believe though, that the pre-Internet system screwed artists because the Internet itself did not exist.
The screwing is coming from the music industry itself. People are still paying for music, it is still (and probably more than ever) a multi billion business. Yet, true, authentic talent don't get the attention/compensation they deserve, why?
Because the big players control who gets what. And that's what they're trying to do when fighting internet piracy, control the distribution. They're not interested in small time artists, they're not fighting for you.
I truly believe that all small time artists should embrace the internet, it's their only true hope to get the attention they deserve, for free. Money will come afterwards. After all, a few companies and a few more monkeys probably get more money than the rest 95%, the internet can split some of that more equally.
> I don't understand why there's so much sympathy for industrial-scale piracy
Most distribution channels make it SO MUCH HARDER to do the right thing vs grabbing a torrent. Steam has its problems, but that was the first commercial distribution channel that seemed to generate a ton of loyalty. What Steam provided was objectively better than the hassle and danger of finding a random binary.
Now days, I stick to iTunes and Netflix for movies. If it's not there, i'm not watching. If the artist isn't big enough to cut a deal with apple they may as well not exist. I'm not really sure which is better.
That's kind of a shame, because i'm willing to spend a little money to watch stuff. But i'm not willing to screw around searching for your work, then installing some ridiculous player software. I'll just go do something else instead.
Exactly. People are just good at rationalizing their behaviour. I don't judge anybody who uses such sites, but what really pisses me off are the guys who like to shout some self-aggrandizing bullshit about fighting for freedom etc. Theres a basic lack of empathy.
Yeah, that's what I'm getting at. I can't see any way to stop this stuff short of stopping everything else, but it irks me that we make heroes out of jerks who are basically just operating plagiarist click-mills. KimDotCom falls into the same category. These people are on a lower tier than scummy domain squatters and spammers.
Want to lionize someone as a freedom fighter? Try someone like Linus Torvalds, or Daniel J. Bernstein, ... someone who ... I dunno ... did actual work of their own to advance the cause of freedom?
My other point is this:
People seem to have this idea that piracy is a rebellious act, that you're hitting back at "the man." I just don't see it. To me it looks more like union busting against the artists... destroying their revenue model so as to beggar them and make them willing to take anything for their work. This in turn benefits the upcoming generation of data-aggregation capitalists who want to monetize everyone's work and use it to sell ads and push surveillanceware. You're scoring one for the man, not against him.
That's a variant of "information wants to be free," which is an argument from the naturalistic fallacy.
The question isn't "what's natural" or "what's easy." It's "what benefits the human condition?"
Do we want a culture where artists can make careers out of creating great art, or do we want a culture where there's no money in that so it doesn't get done by anyone except trust fund kids and people who are willing to take a vow of extreme poverty?
In most societies since the dawn of the human race, 99.9% have lived in hardscrabble poverty while <0.1% own virtually everything. Seems to me that the culture of "free" is -- a bit ironically -- taking us back there by destroying all revenue streams except those based on winner-take-all mass content aggregation. It might be the path of least resistance and it might be "natural," but it is not desirable.
I don't think that copyright (or patents) are the only way (or even a good way) to allow creative professionals to have lucrative careers. Copyright may be "what's easy" but it isn't what is right and it's only been around for a relatively short cultural time period during which is hasn't been particularly successful in supporting artists who weren't "picked" by the gatekeepers (publishers, record labels, etc).
Enforcing copyright pits the artist against their audience and limits the access of impoverished people to our cultural commons. Relying on copyright (ownership of information) to provide revenue steams tends to benefit that 0.1% (owners), not the 99.9%.
We are in the process creating new ways to reward artists for their work.
Non-attribution is an entirely different beast from piracy. Passing someone's work off as your own is despicable. Sharing someone's work, with their name attached, should be lauded.
You seem to think there are only two options: Piracy and artists living in poverty, or no piracy and artists not living in poverty.
Personally, how I want things to be is that authors freely release their content and still make a nice living. That's not necessarily natural and certainly not easy but you asked how I want things to be.
I think it's pretty clear from the 20th century that stronger copyright laws doesn't benefit the human condition in general.
The copyright holders did anything to limit access to copyrighted material, just to make it unnecessarily scarce. (Except in the cases where the copyright holder is the actual artist.)
One of Lessig's points is that piracy made Hollywood possible.
I agree that we need an alternative where the artists can make a living and do their art, but I think trying to stop people doing what they feel is natural is not going to work.
To me it's very similar to the war on drugs... Policy and business models need to change. There are always people resistant to change as they want to protect their revenue streams.
The for profit part is only because it's not allowed to be financed by legal means. I'm sure that sharing was free for non-commercial purposes, there would be not-for-profit organizations that would run websites and only gather enough money (via ads, subscriptions, etc) to cover their operational expenses.
Whether they are making money doesn't matter. Crimes aren't suddenly legal just because you do them for reasons besides profit. Otherwise the only murderers in jail would be professional assassins.
> Crimes aren't suddenly legal just because you do them for reasons besides profit.
Plenty of specific crimes, do, in fact, have seeking a material reward/exchange as a required element of the offense, and the act that is criminal when done for profit is legal (or, if still illegal, illegal under a different provision which often has a lesser punishment) when done without that exchange.
> Crimes aren't suddenly legal just because you do them for reasons besides profit.
I don't think anyone is suggesting that. But, at least in US law, there is a major distinction between commercial and non-commercial copyright infringement. Both are illegal, of course, but they are treated very differently.
Not really; it centers on providing access to material that it's users want (except certain categories, e.g. child pornography). The fact that it's mostly pirated content stems mostly from the fact that it's prohibited almost everywhere else on the internet.
But, your point is very important in a legal sense - a simple, but effective way to build a better TPB would be to center it around some other cause, and have it accidentally be used for piracy.
Though I kinda expect the average piratebay user to have adblock installed.