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The Pirate Bay Tops 10 Million Users
Posted by
kdawson
on Sunday January 27, @01:31AM
from the my-word-it's-a-convoy dept.
from the my-word-it's-a-convoy dept.
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.'"
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Your Rights Online: Pirate Bay Gets a 4,000-Page Complaint 643 comments
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Swedish prosecutors appear to be close to finally pressing charges against The Pirate Bay, having served them with 4,000 pages of legal papers. While this might appear bad, the administrators have already moved some of the servers out of the country, so Swedish prosecutors can't shut it down, even if they want to. Moreover, the people of Sweden are decidedly on their side, with the Pirate Party, which is sympathetic to TPB's cause, being one of the top ten political parties in the country. Still, this looks like a dirty trick on the part of the prosecutors — like they're dumping all of this on the defendants in the hope that they won't have enough time to sort through it and defend themselves. For comparison, the second-biggest murder case in Sweden required only 1,500 pages."
Firehose:The Pirate Bay Tops 10 Million Users by Anonymous Coward
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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...
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 Inter
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 $$$ (Score:5, Informative)
if 1/2 their registered users visit just once a month and they get another 5 million drive by's (which is easy to see happening) and the average bandwidth used per user is 0.5meg (also pretty mild) it would mean they need 5 terabytes of bandwidth spread out over multiple 100mbit links, not to mention how much all the rackspace would set them back.
if google can make billions providing ad based search results then i can't hold the PB guys to ransom over what ever measley profit they make. after all all the PB stuff is indexed on google anyway.
Re:It all comes down to $$$ (Score:4, Interesting)
Suprnova? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Suprnova? (Score:5, Funny)
yeah, there is lies, damn lies, statistics and the RIAA
Re:Suprnova? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Suprnova? (Score:5, Funny)
Say hello to Sweden (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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.
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].
Re:10 million users? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:10 million users? (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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?
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.
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.
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.