The Pirate Bay Tops 10 Million Users 300
An anonymous reader suggests we go over to Slyck for news that The Pirate Bay has cracked 10 million users. The publicity from the upcoming court case probably helped. "Today, The Pirate Bay asserts itself as the self-proclaimed 'World's Largest Tracker' by topping over 10 million peers, while managing over 1 million torrents. Peter Sunde of The Pirate Bay told Slyck, 'We're very happy to be part of all of this and we hope our users keep sharing those files!... And we're looking to break 20 million as well.'"
It all comes down to $$$ (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It all comes down to $$$ (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It all comes down to $$$ (Score:5, Insightful)
A couple of other companies have used a similar argument, shortly before getting shut down. Napster and Grokster were basically search engines that could be used for both legal or illegal purposes, but the courts didn't buy it.
Google, or an ISP, can reasonably argue that they provide services that are mostly used for lawful purposes, even though some illegal activity takes place. The difficult argument that the pirate trackers are faced with is that when you are providing a service that is being used primarily to infringe copyrights, even if the service can be used to share Linux distributions, you're potentially liable.
Re:It all comes down to $$$ (Score:5, Interesting)
The google defense seems to be working just fine since theyve used it for years already...
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A couple of other companies have used a similar argument, shortly before getting shut down. Napster and Grokster were basically search engines that could be used for both legal or illegal purposes, but the American courts didn't buy it.
Fixed that for you.
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Google, or an ISP, can reasonably argue that they provide services that are mostly used for lawful purposes, even though some illegal activity takes place.
OK, yes, this is exploiting the "safe harbor" clause of the DMCA.
However, Sweden has no DMCA, which led to the story about Pirate Bay mailing their lawyers about sodomizing themselves with their batons, and the lawyers not being able to push that case further than their scary letters.
What TPB is supporting themselves on is an old BBS law that set a precedent to cases like these. It says that a public "bulletin board system" (probably a quite broad concept which TPB claims they fall under) is not posting il
WTO (Score:2, Insightful)
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It's like saying that Nokia should be sued because terrorist might use their phones ( insider TPB joke )
Re:It all comes down to $$$ (Score:5, Insightful)
But talking about children and teens again, I don't get it. Why do game and media companies focus so much on selling to people who have NO MONEY?!? For the typical teen, who only has a computer because his dad gave him one on Christmas, paying $50 on a game is most of the time impossible, period. I'm 30-years old and only now I'm starting to be in a position where spending $50 now and then on useless entertainment is becoming something I can do without a second thought.
If you're a lone developer really wanting to make money by selling offline games, I suggest you make something very casual-friendly (10 minute play time is ideal), playable by people in their 30s and 40s who aren't gamers (think the Solitaire or MineSweeper loving kind), and good enough to be picked up by something like RealArcade. It's convenient enough and, at $15 or $20, also cheap enough for its target audience. Two clicks, they have the game installed, Real has its share, and you have your money, everything with hardly any piracy at all, since those games are not what (poor) teens usually look for when they want to play something.As the fine folks of the Swedish Pirate Party have put it, the ease with which anyone can copy anything on the Internet has caused a dichotomy to develop between entertainment business, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, technological development and online privacy. For the entertainment business profits to remain as high as they were before the Internet developed the only long term solution is both for key technological developments to be blocked as well as for intrusive (and very exploitable) online surveillance laws targeting all citizens to be passed and enacted in as many countries and jurisdictions as possible. It's either this, or the entertainment business adapting to a lower revenue stream.
So, if our options are between and unencumbered technological developments, a free Internet, and no authoritarian surveillance society, with the downside of "music and movie studios closing", as you put it; or a strongly controlled technological landscape, a locked Internet with mandatory ISP content analysis, and government backed intrusive preemptive surveillance of online activities, with the upside of music and movie studios making tons of money; I know which one I prefer. What about you?
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"But talking about children and teens again, I don't get it. Why do game and media companies focus so much on selling to people who have NO MONEY?!? For the typical teen, who only has a computer because his dad gave him one on Christmas, paying $50 on a game is most of the time impossible, period. I'm 30-years old and only now I'm starting to be in a position where spending $50 now and then on useless entertainment is becoming something I can do without a second thought."
Just a cursory glance at adverti
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>>Then you did a poor market research. You see: offline games can be pirated easily, don't expect generally underfunded teens not to pirate them.
If you take up
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They need a different business model, it's over.
There's some truth in this. Personally I still think it's desirable (from a moral and pragmatic perspective) that there's *some* mechanism in place- direct or indirect, legal and/or market-driven- to ensure that people are able to reap the rewards of intellectual effort that would not have taken place without some *potential* reward, just as happens with physical labour.
Not that I'm implying anyone is owed a living any more than someone creating a building is owed a profit if no-one wants to buy it. Only
Re:It all comes down to $$$ (Score:5, Informative)
I guess that will be one of the main points in the upcoming trial.
The PB guys make it sound like it's ideal hobbyist project and the prosecution wants to paint them as IP thieves bathing in money.
Here's one article (unfortunately in Swedish)
http://www.svd.se/nyheter/inrikes/artikel_334410.svd [www.svd.se]
It "claims" PB is pulling 600k SEK / month with their ads (a sum quoted for last 4 months of activity).
That works to about USD 93k/month. PB claims most/all of the money goes to upkeep of the site, bandwidth and servers.
Interesting to see if the prosecution manages to get a coherent case out of this... I have my doubts.
Re:It all comes down to $$$ (Score:5, Informative)
if 1/2 their registered users visit just once a month and they get another 5 million drive by's (which is easy to see happening) and the average bandwidth used per user is 0.5meg (also pretty mild) it would mean they need 5 terabytes of bandwidth spread out over multiple 100mbit links, not to mention how much all the rackspace would set them back.
if google can make billions providing ad based search results then i can't hold the PB guys to ransom over what ever measley profit they make. after all all the PB stuff is indexed on google anyway.
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So your '10 million in a month' is virtually guaranteed.
(It's possible that peers came from other websites and just used TPB's tracker, and it's possible that some peers stayed connected to a torrent for a month without going to the site. I find it
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You're wrong. They have user accounts and a registration process. It can be used, among others, to place comments on torrent files, filter out porn, upload and delete you own torrents, and have a public list of torrents you uploaded as some kind of a credibility system to filter out fake uploaders.
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Nothing stops you from figuring out the category from the missing numbers
in the torrent category browser.
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and that's around $300 per month. Swedish service providers can get
you a metric fuckton of bandwidth for cheap.
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Re:It all comes down to $$$ (Score:4, Interesting)
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The files themselves are not downloaded from the tracker . The tracker is like a map , telling peers from who they can download . It controls the traffic .
But with 10M peers , even that becomes a huge amount of traffic .
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Very interesting film, worth watching. It's a bit like The Matrix, but in our reality. And it's not made in Hollywood
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"They don't make any money at all."
Incorrect. Several operators of smaller public trackers (TBP wannabes, I suppose) have stated that net income is in the four figures per year. Heck, I have a site with traffic that's far, far less than that of TBP by an order of magnitude, and I clear a profit on advertising after paying for the servers and bandwidth. And, like TPB, I do it without the obnoxious (but apparently high revenue generating) pop-up ads and the like. I do it all with Adsense.
Countless high-
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Umm, yay? (Score:2)
Suprnova? (Score:5, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Suprnova? (Score:5, Informative)
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Supernova was >75% of torrents back then.
And i dont know the total for supernove, but even a.scarywater.net, one of a lot of anime trackers, had many Gbit of peer trafic back then.
And supernova had 1000s of peers for just about any big movie/game.
They have several 100 to 1000 new torrent per day, and a LOT of them were => an CD-ISO, and got 4 digit downloads before the first day was over.
Just do the math.
Re:Suprnova? (Score:5, Funny)
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(Which are frequently related to aforementioned topics anyway.)
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Say hello to Sweden (Score:5, Interesting)
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(It's still impressive, but it's NOT 10 million users).
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Biggest tracker and it shows (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Biggest tracker and it shows (Score:5, Informative)
The SEARCHING part would be part of the PirateBay website, the one you get the
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Yes, private trackers are: 1. overrated for the reasons you state, and 2.elitist and annoying.
However, let this not detract from the parent's original complaints, ones which you failed to deal with. Namely, that TPB has a terrible search engine that almost never pulls up the same results twice. Finding something is a lucky dip - or best undertaken by an external search engine (most of
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I have to admit, I do not use TPB search often, but when I used it, it usually found what I was looking for. That's enough for me. Sure, there are better ones, but then again, one doesn't have to use the TPB one as you already stated. You don't even have to get your torrents from there.
If you regard tpb as simply a tracker and use sites such as mininova for
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The problem with transfer rates is caused by the fact that a large majority of bittorrent users are on ADSL. ADSL can have as bad as 1/100th the upload speed to its download speed. Bittorrent depends very heavily on users' upload bandwidth to work: You can't download faster than the seeds you're connected to can upload.
Re:Biggest tracker and it shows (Score:4, Informative)
A "private" tracker (a misnomer, most of those people would refer to as private trackers are not, in fact, private. It's easy to join -- especially if you have an account on another such "private" tracker with a decent "share ratio" you can point to.
Virus-laden files can easily crop up there, anybody simply trusting downloads because it is on a "private" tracker is asking for trouble. While it may take a bit more work, poisoning such torrents would be incredibly more rewarding to a would-be attacker.
Mistagging ? Well, I suppose tpb could increase its tagging capabilities, certainly. Then again, its torrents are not just indexed on their own site, but also on other, independent sites such as mininova and others -- all with their own tagging, popularity, and filtering systems.
Anonymity is not lost. It's usually an easy thing to cycle through multiple usernames, or even to build a network of sock puppet accounts -- contrary to what some administrators on such sites say, it is easy to evade detection with some care. I wouldn't liken TPB or the h3q tracker to a back alley, but rather the more mainstream all-purpose (including sinister) trackers by virtue of them being open. Combined with proper indexing and filtering systems, you can not only get high-quality long-lived torrents, but also a considerable number of peers (and more peers is virtually always better; given the choice between a torrent of a given file with 5 seeding peers and 5 "leechers" on a private tracker and a torrent of that same file with 500 seeding peers and 1500 leechers, I'd choose the latter and will usually get a better torrent-experience out of it (due to locality of peers, longevity of seeding, and total available bandwidth).
There is this inexplicable focus on "giving back what you take", which completely sidesteps the built-in mechanisms of BitTorrent to achieve a somewhat fair distribution of resources based on that exact metric -- sharing. Generally and given a higher-than-2 number of peers, those peers with more upstream bandwidth dedicated to a particular torrent swarm will also get a faster ingress speed (on the protocol level due to tit-for-tat and its associated choking/unchoking, on a higher level when initially seeding due to "superseeding" (i.e. tracking the proliferation of uploaded pieces to one peer through to other connected peers and giving that one peer a higher priority if successful, etc.). This looks only at single-torrent viability, of course, and does not track progress over multiple torrents, but given less-than-infinite upstream bandwidth of your peers, if you upload fast, you will get a fast download. True leechers never reinjecting any pieces into the swarm will still get the file, sure, but at a much slower speed due to constant choking. A certain number of sharing clients is required, of course, but generally the majority DOES have uploading enabled, the question is just whether they go up to a share ratio of > 1.0 after having downloaded the entire file. The seeding base usually increases over time until the death of the swarm approaches (which it does on private trackers, just the same).
You generally don't have a closed userbase. Even those invite-only trackers have a lot of churn. Sure, there are TRULY private trackers, but those do not have invitations either. A "private" tracker without churn will loose members due to attrition and eventually die due to not enough bandwidth or diskspace left to sustain itself.
As for weeding out those who don't contribute
Re:Biggest tracker and it shows (Score:5, Informative)
You could find anything on there, and it always had seeders, and it was always well described and had a lot of comments, and there were never fakes, and it was always good quality. Demonoid just plain owned.
1:10?!? (Score:2)
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The upside with public trackers is that you generally get a lot more visitors, which translates into a lot more content, and cash to the creators of the website via ads.
eMule, Gnutella, Gnucleus & Tom Slyck (Score:4, Insightful)
The only time Slyck mentioned eMule was when he questioned the reasoning of Sourceforge in awarding eMule as the "Best New Project" of 2007. He didn't mention eMule at the title of the article of course.
Not that a juggernaut like eMule needs Slyck, but smaller open source projects like Gnucleus did and Tom almost never said a word about them [google.com]. He was too busy advertising Limewire for his buddies [google.com].
How sad is it... (Score:2, Insightful)
Wow!! (Score:2, Insightful)
The Pirate Bay asserts itself as the self-proclaimed 'World's Largest Tracker' by topping over 10 million peers, ...
OMG!!! It's the elusive triple redundant double reflexive superfluous tautology!! (I tried to make that triply redundant and doubly reflexive but failed dismally.)
This kind of construct is quite subtle. According to TFA, The Pirate Bay is not claiming to be the world's largest tracker, but the "self-proclaimed world's largest tracker". Positively Colbertian.
Problem with Pirate Bay's success (Score:3, Insightful)
Once that happens, an enormous source of torrents dries up. There used to be several others, but most of them have fallen by the wayside. No doubt several more will spring up in the event of TPBs demise, but it'll be a long, dry, several days while the xxAAs crow about their victory.
Well duh (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:10 million users? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:10 million users? (Score:5, Insightful)
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No.
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The supreme court disagrees with you (Score:4, Informative)
The "community standard" for porn is "I can't define it, but I know it when I see it." If the average person in a community wasn't terribly offended, it wasn't porn.
The next question is, if its reasonable to apply the community standards test to pornography, why not to other areas? Is it okay to discriminate against rights of people who aren't fans of pr0n (all 3 of them)? Is it okay to say "community standards" for pr0n but not other conduct that communities now find acceptable?
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"Comparing obscenity laws to other cases of law doesn't make too much sense. Free speech is a protected right under the constitution so the whole notion of obscenity is drawing a line between acceptable and unacceptable forms of speech based off community and legal standards."
No - pornography based on acceptable community standards specifically disregarded the whole "legal standards" approach in favour of community stadards. That's why what actually constitutes the "community standard" is not codified as
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So what you're saying is... since pretty much the whole world wants bars of gold, the federal reserve should hand them out for free.
Makes perfect sense.
Re:10 million users? (Score:4, Insightful)
Certainly prostitution, extortion and drugs should be legal. Just like the Internet.
So... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:10 million users? (Score:4, Insightful)
Besides that the laws around copyright and copyright infringement are a lot more complicated than the idea that killing someone is wrong.
I guess I shouldn't even have justified this comment with a response but I'm just blown away that it somehow got modded insightful...
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So in Catholic dominated countries [adherents.com] abortion is wrong and illegal but where its not its the opposite?
The only thing I see here is a lot of people unwilling to pay market prices for media. If anything this suggests prices are too high or that ideas like compulsory licensing might make sense. Or in most likelihood mean that people are selfish and will do anything for a f
Re:10 million users? (Score:5, Funny)
P.S. for all you literal people out there, this post was mostly half joking and not serious
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or better yet, put a US style patriotic spin on it:
.org .org .org
Freedom for all information.org
Democratic Freedom Media
Patriotic Freedom data
FREE (as in beer) trade
We fight terrorism with movies and music if you shut us down the terrorists will win.org
Why cant I please m
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I thought you already had that ... or did I just dream the last 2 US elections and when I wake up its still 1998?
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Spartacus Moment.. (Score:2)
"I am a pirate."
Re:But remember kids - piracy actually *helps* peo (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe if the Pirate Bay is able to make so much money off this, the RIAA/MPAA should get smart and do the same. I'd happily buy the TV shows and movies I download now if there was a legitimate way to pay for them and get them in a format that I actually wanted (Xvid, please). If DVDs didn't have 10 minutes of forced watching at the start, they'd get more sales out of them too. Do you really think the multi-million (billion?) dollar corporations need you here to stand up for them?
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Maybe if the Pirate Bay is able to make so much money off this, the RIAA/MPAA should get smart and do the same.
If you're the grand central clearing house for everything digital, you make up for it on volume. There's no way TBP makes anywhere as much as legitimate sales. But if TPB gets a cut of every song, every movie, every tv show, every application, every game, every porn clip ever produced then it all adds up. If I could collect one dollar in taxes from everyone I'd make 8 billion dollars a year and I think people would say I was making lots of money. I guess you could imagine what would happen if you asked the
Re:But remember kids - piracy actually *helps* peo (Score:5, Insightful)
So you don't rent them? If such movies really don't have any value to you, why do you bother seeking them out, and then spend your time watching them? Why don't you download the freely available movies on (say) archive.org? Obviously you think they're better in some way.
I can't argue with you on this one, but a lot of the community here uses all freeware/open source and has no need to pirate shitty overpriced software.
I very much doubt the amount of people browsing Slashdot from a Linux computer is more than a couple percent. Anyway if the software is shitty & overpriced, does that make it OK to steal it? Wouldn't that just drive people into using freeware/open source? Most Slashdot discussion of high-profile open source projects is given to how shit they are - Gimp comes to mind.
Your after-the-fact rationalizations are absurd. Just admit that you can steal easily and there's likely no direct personal consequences, so you go ahead and do it.
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No. They come out at least six months later on DVD.
Unless it's something I'm really dieing to see, I'll download it then buy it when it eventually comes out on DVD. The cost of going to the cinema is ever-rising where I live, but the quality is also ever-decreasing. It's not stealing if I pay for it..
Re:But remember kids - piracy actually *helps* peo (Score:5, Insightful)
So? I don't see how this is anything except rationalization. There are films you simply must see, and you must see them right now, but you don't want to see them enough to actually go to the cinema. That sounds pretty lame to me.
The thing is that you don't have any inherent right to watch movies or TV shows. It's actually not a grey area at all. You didn't make that stuff, it's not yours, you watch it at the pleasure of those who put in the effort to make it. If they decide that DVDs come out at a different time to the cinema release, tough on you! Yeah I don't like it either, but it's not my decision, it's theirs, because they made the film! If it was really such a huge deal, some movie makers would start releasing movies with different schedule, that's how the market works.
Pretty much every problem you have can be solved by just waiting for these movies or TV shows to come out on DVD and then renting them.
Why someone needs to stand up for the RIAA (Score:3, Insightful)
"I download movies I wouldn't pay to see at the cinema. If I like it, I buy the DVD."
I download movies, then... well, I sure as hell don't go out and buy a DVD. I'm fairly certain there is a substantial number of people like me among TPB users.
"Half of the shows I like aren't broadcast in my country, and if they are, in no particular order."
I know, being able to watch The Wire Season five the day after it was on in the US is great. For me. But will I watch it again when it shows up on basic/medium cable in a year or two? The question sort of answers itself, no?
"I can't argue with you on this one, but a lot of the community here uses all freeware/open source and has no need to pirate shitty overpriced software."
I am curious - if the "overpriced" (I.e. price>0) software is indeed "shitty", why do so many people pirate it on sites lik
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Anything relative to a local market: (ie: manufacturing stuff for your own mom&pop store).
Flipping burgers and washing dishes.
The Service industry.
Thats not gonna make hundred of
Pay them to work (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, paying them directly for working, for doing what they enjoy and are good at. Not for making copies, which is something any trained monkey with a DVD burner can do.
Recording a song, filming a movie, or writing a program takes just as much effort, and deserves just as much compensation, no matter how many copies are eventually made. At least that's what common sense tells us. Copyright, however, links the author's compensation to the number of copies he can sell -- which makes little sense on its face, and no sense at all in a world where copying is a trivial matter that anyone can perform for himself, with no skill or investment needed. Authors and consumers alike would benefit from a more sensible business model.
The New Hollywood focus: Manure shoveling (Score:2)
"Recording a song, filming a movie, or writing a program takes just as much effort, and deserves just as much compensation, no matter how many copies are eventually made. "
Indeed - consumer demand should never enter the equation. And given that "effort" is the metric to be used in determining compensation, I would speculate that your scheme would give us lots of glorious 12-hour movies featuring starvation victims shoveling manure into a furnace, with the camera crew doing bare-knuckle pushups on broken glass, and other similar "high-effort" setups.
Because, you know, that would be like totally high-effort and stuff.
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Indeed - consumer demand should never enter the equation. And given that "effort" is the metric to be used in determining compensation, I would speculate that your scheme would give us lots of glorious 12-hour movies featuring starvation victims shoveling manure into a furnace [etc.]
Only if people were willing to pay for it. And if people are willing to pay filmmakers to produce this stuff, then by definition, there's demand for it, right?
It's a mistake to say demand doesn't enter into the business model I've proposed. This model simply looks at demand for what the artist actually does -- the act of creating a new work -- rather than the demand for round pieces of plastic that may or may not be produced later.
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Common sense tells us the exact opposite actually. If two people produce a movie costing $100 million, and one movie sucks and the other movie rules, why would we not want to reward the producer of the movie that ruled more? How else are you going to encourage the creation of stuff that people ac
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Common sense tells us the exact opposite actually. If two people produce a movie costing $100 million, and one movie sucks and the other movie rules, why would we not want to reward the producer of the movie that ruled more?
You're looking at it backwards. How did those movies get made? Someone must have put up the money to fund them, right? That means, in the minds of whoever funded the production, that both movies are worth $100 million. If they weren't, then they wouldn't have gotten made in the first place.
Anything very expensive wouldn't get made. Lord of the Rings movies, Mass Effect, etc. Copyright lets you amortize the cost of an expensive production over huge numbers of people, who only have to pay a little bit.
But in the copyright business model, the cost of the production is unrelated to the number of people who end up paying. So you really have no idea whether the "little bit" they pay is going to cover production - maybe y
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Well, it sure helps *ME* (Score:2, Insightful)
...because they only download movies they wouldn't watch otherwise.
Wouldn't watch at the current prices, yes. If I wasn't downloading, I would be waiting for the DVD. Even then, I wouldn't be buying - I'd rent or borrow. I'll start paying for things when they start setting a price I like, in a respectable time frame. If they released the DVD the same day/week/month as the theatrical release, then they would see more of my money. I'd pay a little extra DVDs that come out early, but still have special features/deleted scenes/etc.
Same with the programs and games - need s
The Return of the "Troll" (Score:2)
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WoW has 10 million ACCOUNTS! (Score:2)
For that matter a single WoW account could have multiple users.
Don't play loose and fast with statistics, the marketing people might bump you off for trespassing on their turf.
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