Be Excellent To Each Other

As mentioned, the four guys from The Pirate Bay have been found guilty of 'assisting in making copyright content available', and got a year in prison each, and ordered to pay $3,620,000 in damages.

Bugger

I can't say I'm surprised.

What confuses me though is that this doesn't appear to have been accompanied by any kind of takedown order.

When I become Lord of The Earth with my army of Paddy Ashdown clones I shall make all IP open source.

A year in prison for assisting in people getting hold of copyrighted material that they may well not have bought if it hadn't been available for free? Fuck's sake.

DEVIL'S ADVOCATE

Will you expect programmers, writers, musicians, directors, actors, and a zillion other content creation career folk to work for free?

Well, I guess that's the end of piracy then.

There's no takedown order on TPB itself, and they've woven such a complicated web of servers across the planet I don't know if they even could be taken down. Even if torrents vanished, we'd still have Usenet, and darknets, and a hundred thousand other ways to shuffle the bits around.

The *AA's best hope here is a blaze of publicity to put people off trying, because there is no technical solution to the problem.

Shiver me timbers.

Yarrr, they made 'em walk the plank, etc.

The best way for the corporations to stop people doing it is steps like these, but coupled with the aggressive takedown of any similar site. There are zillions of them, and knocking down the front ends won't perhaps stop the determined, but it'll massively cut down the casual user.

If they can add to this more methods where stuff can be accessed simply and at competitive prices then they might even make more money.

Yes, or the Paddys will get them.

Yeah, I know. But there needs to be some sort of sensible middle ground between that and what we have at the moment, where IP is enforced not for the creator's benefit but for the rights holder, who seems to generally be a big evil multinational. I'd be far more behind this sort of criminal prosecution if the people getting ripped off *were* actually the struggling artists.

Companies need to sell stuff cheaper. A lot cheaper.

Companies need to cock off. I'm don't have much sympathies for the guys of thepiratebay.org. They basically made loads of money through other people's effort, but i still think this is BS. Besides there are tons of torrentz sites around, piracy will never go away (hopefully).

No. Companies need to sell things people want to buy.

It may, however, be too late. Remember that when Radiohead and NIN gave their stuff away for free, it still ended up on the torrents. The record industry has managed to create an entire generation that now thinks music should be free.

Actually, if you look at the peering servers in the .torrents (US TV at any rate), no matter where you get them from they normally feed back to tpb anyway (or that stalker thing, that always seems to have billions of seeds and peers but never much capacity).

Still, I imagine eztv will switch over immediately if it hasn't already.

And there's always dht, or whatever that serverless thing is called.

Sorry, but I don't agree with that. The Internet Pirating industry created that.

More bands need to offer their albums for sale on their own websites via DL. I'd buy 'em from there more readily than a shop.

I bought the new Decemberists and Gomez albums from iTunes in recent weeks for 7.99 a pop, which seems like a fiar price to me. The Decemberists now offer theirs off their own website in high quality, which seems like a smart idea to me. The more people that do it, the better, IMO.

And how do new bands get your attention?

by waving their cocks at curiosity

Yes. And sell them cheaper than they are doing rather than inflating prices to claw back imaginary monies lost from Yarzorz. And give back any Starpoints they've stolen as a token of goodwill.

Not via Pirate Bay, that's for sure.

Yes, granted. A lot of mouth breathers on slashdot will all repeat that the middlemen are evil and all record companies should die and bands should sell music straight to the fans and it'll all work out. Look at Radiohead! And NIN!

They overlook the fact that Radiohead and NIN already had millions of fans before they did that, and they gained those fans through the promotional services of record companies. The fact is the record labels provide a genuine service, and if the world is going to be rewritten according to the desires of Gen Yers who think all music should be free someone is still going to have to provide that service for bands to thrive.

I'm not defending the record companies. They've been in an unassailable position for a long time, and they've become fat and greedy from it, and they've made a lot of stupid, scared moves as digital distribution has begun to eat them alive. But, in pure economics terms, they would never have become so powerful if they weren't providing at least one service of value, and this "bands-sells-to-punters" model doesn't allow that service to fit in anywhere.

One possible solution floated around is for record companies to run like venture capitalist funds. They would invest in bands in a much more hands-off fashion, providing PR know-how and marketing capital in return for return on investments over much shorter periods than current recording contracts run for, perhaps only two years or so. Someone is going to figure this out, figure out what a record company looks like in the post-Napster post-iTunes world, and that someone is going to become very, very rich from it.

Yeah, that sounds plausible. I thought you were coming from the angle of "The Pirate Bay introduces peopel to new music" angle, which is one I disagree with.

Oh, no, I'd agree with you there. It does allow you to sample stuff once you have discovered an artist, I guess, but Spotify is far more convenient for that, and legal.

You need ways to make it easy. Offer up free tracks all over the place, but only promo tracks. Then make it easy to grab the whole album from that track for a reasonable price. Right-click -> Buy album -> Amazon|Play|HMV sort of shit.

Advertising was only part of it; loans for studio time, production, duplication and distribution were at least as major a contributor. Possibly moreso, given they've always advertised the cash cows and not the, er, niche minnows.

Bedroom studio stuff is cheap and online distribution is free. The latter, in the form of MySpace and iTunes and that, are also free advertising of a form. As are free-or-cheap other websites (including fans').

The current recording industry needs to just fuck off and die, taking the scum operating it with it. Which isn't to say something needs to replace it; something more appropriate (and less full of cunts, or at least less able to be dictated by a few of them) does.

Unfortunately, because it's so entrenched and rich the only plausible way to achieve this is to completely deprive them of income for a protracted period, until they can't afford the lawyers and lobbyists and bent politicians (or possibly just the hookers and blow) any more, which has the unhappy side effect of making entire generations think music should be free.

The same will also be true of movies in 10 years, when every laptop can render 1080p in near-real-time, UIs are reduced to slapping assets like models and textures into your live-action video, filmed on consumer-grade 1080p camcorders with terabyte SSDs, and distributed over universal >=10mbps broadband. See the big movie places already tightening their grip on cable and DSL in the US.

I disagree. The economic situation, right now, is ripe for someone to come up with a better model, make it work, and reap the benefits. Existing record companies are on the back foot, fighting a losing battle against piracy; consumers are more educated than ever about the problems of the current model and the mechanisms of digital distribution; artists are nervous of the whole thing collapsing and will be looking for solutions.

When selling content to the consumer, you can compete on three axes: price, convenience, quality. It's hard to compete with "free", so price is out of the window.

Convenience, though? To warez every episode of, say, Chuck I need to piss about grabbing the torrent, extracting the RAR, converting the MKV to play on my PS3. I can use RSS feeds, but then I need to define filters that won't always work. When I sit down to watch it, and it turns out to have AV sync issues or be the entirely wrong file, I need to find a different torrent, queue that, wait a few hours or even a day. Or I could just click "series buy" in iTunes and every episode shows up in perfect quality on my Apple TV as it airs.

As for quality, there's lots of room here too. iTunes+, with higher bitrates, and lyrics in the file, and embedded digital booklets, and other neat extras: steps are being made in that direction.

There is no technical solution to internet piracy, and trying to kill websites is like fighting the hydra. It's actually easier to simply be more appealing to the consumer, and accept there will always be some consumers unwilling to buy your content who will pirate it -- but that those consumers were never going to buy it anyway.

Agreed - Spotify shows one way where money can be made. iTunes is another. Biggest seller of music in the US, isn't it? And from nothing just about half a decade ago.

It can be done, but the industry is so stuck in the dark ages that it has missed its opportunity, and the likes of Apple have muscled in and stolen (oh-ho) it from under their noses.

Which is why the music industry is to blame for the current trend, the napster trial gave them an insight in what could happen before the main internet boom but instead of changing there current model they seemed more intent in punishing the consumer than to try new methods.

Also I think the advertisers need to work their products into programmes where possible instead of adverts which get cut out. 30 Rock shows how product placement can be done and be acceptable. When it's done in a glaringly obvious and funny way in that show it can work. Admittedly it would be hard to work injury lawyers into a programme..

Maybe that wasn't such a good idea after all.

As you say, it doesn't work in the wider context -- but the bit with Jack and Liz Lemon plugging Verizon made me laugh up a lung.

Mmmm. Liz Lemon. Sorry, what were you saying?

Spotify is still burning through its venture capital like it's 2000 all over again. There is no proof that their business model is sustainable.

you can make a service that is cheap and easy to access but you'll still have the other problem about piracy...

people want stuff right away. Why wait for the official download of a movie when you can nab a screener torrent? why wait for a new album when you get a studio leaked copy? Why wait for DS games to eventually get released here?

I've always been a bit of a pirate games-wise until the 360 where I went completely legit and supported the full retail and XBLA scenes. Look where that has gotten me... XBLA selling dogshit at £6.80 a pop minimum and buying overhyped bigger games only to find them to be cut-down but prettier versions of PS2 games.

Yeah, but it's brilliant.

I do wonder about Spotify, on the one hand I think surely it can work because radio does. But then I can see that it might eat into sales rather than stimulating them in the way radio can, hmm.

The fact that so much of the industry doesn't understand how 'new media' changes the whole setup is massively annoying. If you air a TV show in the UK 3 months after you air it in the US, people will download it for free. So don't do it!

See also - eBooks. You can actually pay $20 for a hardback version of an eBook and $6 for a paperback version. That's so unbelievably mental I just don't understand.

Obvious question but how is a hardback ebook different from a paperback ebook? There must be some difference.

That's rather the point - there is no difference. Hardback real books make a ton of money out of the markup though, and they want the same cash cow in the eBook market.

On the ebook paperback versions the digital pages fray and bend more easily.

Are they released at the same time?

Malc

No, and that's why - the premium of early access. But that becomes infinitely more annoying when you don't even get a nicer quality bound book out of it.

I can't stand hardbacks. I like a small book I can hold easily and bend to my heart's content.

Fo' realz?
Got a link?

Nowhere does it specifically say 'this is a hardback', of course - but when the paper version of a book is only out in hardback, the eBook version is hardback-priced.

Well that makes a bit more sense.

Except that the justification for the £18 rrp for books always used to be that the book was more expensive to produce and a nicer product. Not that it was a blatant early adopter's fee. The fact that the prices are the same for eBooks completely blows that out of the water.

I always thought the justification was that it came out earlier and the nicer format was just a bonus.

Also worth noting, I think, is that Spotify's main adverts are for MUSIC sales stuff! Why advertise that you can buy an album from HMV while streaming it for free? Why would you want to buy at that point?

So I can listen to it in the car or on my MP3 player?

And also because Spotify are making referral money from (e.g.) Apple for iTunes sales. This is a compelling business model to me; listen to it on Spotify (and discover it through their pretty reasonable community features, like emailing playlists), decide you like it, then click to buy it on another service. For this to work, Spotify need a big enough userbase to get the network effect up to speed, and I guess that's why they are burning through cash right now.

The labels are desperate to prop up any competitor to iTunes though -- I bet Spotify gets a good deal on licences for their content.

Amazon should buy them. No-one knows as much about turning communities into money as Amazon do; they reckon the reviews section on the site drives billions of dollars of extra revenue to them. Plus, Amazon are already iTunes's most credible competitor in the digital music distribution space.

The question was "Why would you buy it", not "Why would Spotify want you to buy it".