‘New’ Pirate Bay to ISPs: Pay us, we pay users
p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- “The Pirate Bay gang have either totally ratted out all the people who for years have been supporting them, or in a canny business move, they’ve moved from text to video,” said p2pnet on Tuesday, continuing:
“As the world was today informed, TPB has been bought by a gaming company which promises to, ‘eliminate today’s … pirates‘. So can Hollywood breathe a sigh of relief? Meet vBay (as it’ll inevitably be tagged) aka the Video Bay.”
And yesterday, “Did The Pirate Bay’s new owner, Global Gaming Factory X (GGF), indulge in insider trading?” – asked a p2pnet post. “And if so, will the action leave TPB open to criminal charges?”
We’re still waiting on that one.
‘Good in theory’
Meanwhile, TechDirt founder Mike Masnick has serious doubts about whether TPB’s new owners will be able to turn their acquisition into a moneymaking venture.
“One of the things that got a lot of attention with the announced sale of The Pirate Bay to GGF was the claim that the new owners would launch new business models that would compensate copyright holders,” he wrote yesterday, continuing »»»
Many took this to mean that it would stop offering tools where people could freely exchange content themselves — but that’s not what GGF said. It just said it would compensate copyright holders. That could involve a variety of different business models, as surely they recognize that trying to charge directly would simply lead to mass abandonment of The Pirate Bay.
And, indeed, it appears that GGF isn’t planning to charge users at all.
Instead, it’s actually trying out a business model based on BitTorrent’s original purpose: making sharing files more efficient by breaking up the pieces so that a single source doesn’t bear the brunt of the bandwidth costs. GGF’s argument is that they can use the community at The Pirate Bay to reduce congestion for ISPs and bandwidth costs for other service providers.
On top of that, GGF claims that rather than having users’ pay, its plan is to pay users for providing a service to those who have files to distribute. In an interview with the BBC, GGF’s Hans Pandeya explained the plan:
“More than half of all internet traffic is file sharing and P2P [peer-to-peer] traffic and buying Pirate Bay gives us one of the biggest sources of traffic.
“We can then use this massive network of file-sharers to help [internet service providers] reduce overload.
“Let’s say a popular song comes out. Rather than a million downloads from a site – which would cause a considerable strain on that ISP – we can take that song and put it out on P2P.
“The copyright holder still gets paid, the users still get their file, the ISP doesn’t have a million people all grabbing a file and – for the users who share that song – a payment for putting that file on the P2P network.”
This is the sort of thing that sounds good in theory, but that the entertainment industry will never go for.
GGF is right, in some ways. The fact that individuals are sharing the content via BitTorrent actually is helping decrease the distribution costs, but as we’ve seen, the entertainment industry likes to ignore that, and assume that the entire value is in the content, not in the distribution.
I can’t see the entertainment industry seeing this as a viable solution, even if it makes some amount of sense (distribution is expensive, GGF can use TPB to reduce distribution costs, that seems like a service worth paying for). I just don’t see the industry buying into it.
Separately, I have to take issue with one comment from GGF:
Mr Pandeya said that one of the biggest hurdles in overcoming illegal file-sharing was that there was zero cost to the users, while legitimate sites required users to pay for content. The only way to make something more attractive than free was to pay users to share files.
But on this, Pandeya is, “fundamentally wrong,” says Mike, adding:
“There are many ways to make something more attractive than free without paying users. In fact, there are many cases where paying users actually makes something less attractive than free because they’re doing things for non-monetary reasons, and the money actually changes the equation significantly.
“Yes, paying users is potentially one way to make something more attractive than free, but it’s hardly the only way, nor is it always the best way.”
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
p2pnet – ‘Bye-bye The Pirate Bay, hello Video Bay, June 30, 2009
wasn’t impressed – The Pirate Bay sell-out, July 1, 2009
TechDirt – The Pirate Bay’s New Owners: Service Providers Will Pay Us, We’ll Pay Users, July 1, 2009
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July 2nd, 2009 at 10:50 pm
do yourself a favor and get into private trackers. the best filesharing community on the net bar none is http://www.thepiratesociety.org
July 3rd, 2009 at 3:57 am
Okay, gotta comment on this:
“content via BitTorrent actually is helping decrease the distribution costs, but as we’ve seen, the entertainment industry likes to ignore that, and assume that the entire value is in the content, not in the distribution.”
They assume no such thing.
Their business model is based on controlling ALL aspects of the process: creation, distribution channels, and “content” itself.
They want a monopoly on distribution, every bit as much as they want one on “professional” level recording/copying gear, and the “content” itself. Think of it this way: distribution may be “expensive”, but failing to monopolize distribution is far more “expensive” because it would actually open them up to things like competition (which, as we all know, is actually a *bad* thing, from the point of view of corporate capitalism.)
So let’s say this actually worked, and created a viable platform where p2p could actually be “leveraged” in this way:
1. It’s remarkably easy to get “professional” level gear nowadays (You can build up a good quality DAW — digital audio workstation — using off-the-shelf parts, and readily available software, for example.)
We’re no longer in the era where the “major labels” were the only ones to have multitrack tape capability, or suchlike, so there’s really no credible reason for “labels” to exist on the “production” side of the equation.
(They’ve always know that decent-quality gear in the hands of mere “consumers” — or even “indie” folks — was bad for their business model, hence their tendency to try and get stuff banned or lobotomized. — Valenti’s “Boston strangler” bullshit, and region-coding in the DVD standard, as just two examples.)
2. Assuming this actually worked, what’s to stop “indie” artists from leveraging p2p (like they’re already doing?) P2p — Whether it’s BitTorrent or not, drastically lowers — or even removes — one of the biggest barriers to entry, in that you no longer have to have warehouses full of storage space, big “professional” burning equipment or record-lathes, or suchlike, to have a potentially global audience.
So they’d totally lose out on the “distribution” aspect of their business-model, too, because why let the albums rape you, if you can just to your own distribution and build up your fanbase that way?
3. The last part — paying folks to do what they’re already doing (p2p filesharing): great idea — except that, yet again, there’s absolutely nothing that the MAFIAA can bring in, that people don’t already have. (Hint: every p2p network is basically the equivalent of a bottomless “server-farm”, which is why such vast amounts of data are easy over p2p networks.)
So they can’t even make out by selling server-farms, or dedicated hosting, or suchlike, because the network itself will contain millions of folks all happily “hosting” the content *and getting paid to do so.*
No, only way the MAFIAA corporate pigs can actually make out on something like this (which is a really great idea, by the way), is to gouge the hell out of everybody for the use of “their” back catalogs. (You think the Public Domain scares them? Anything they “allowed” on the p2p network would be completely out of their control forever, afterward.)
So something like this would amount to the complete and total, final, irrelevancy of every “label” in existence, simply because it would pretty much eliminate any REMAINING barriers to production, distribution, hosting, bandwidth, etc. — and the prospect of a “side-income” from simply seeding files is actually pretty damn cool, too.
Absolutely no way the “labels” are every going to go for this, specifically because they recognize that the ONLY “value” they bring to the table is monopoly leverage — lose ONE side of it, and they lose it all.
Hope this made sense.
July 3rd, 2009 at 4:01 am
In the above, “Let the albums rape you” = “let the labels rape you”.
Sorry
July 3rd, 2009 at 8:42 am
When I hear stuff like:
P2P + Signing up all Content Owners + Monetizing $675 million a year on Ads
I remember one big fail
Joost.
Joost tried to do the same, but even with all the investor money they burnt, rock star founders, rock star CEO, and all the contacts in the world, the big content owners didn’t sign up.
Joost had all the money and influence to get an audience as big as the piratebay but they couldn’t do it because acquiring all that content is pretty much impossible thanks to copyright laws and bureaucracy.
There are too many rules, and deals already signed when it comes to content, and content owners are very hard to hand content left and right legally, even when great platforms for legal content distribution are present it seems they prefer their content is acquired ilegally. Even Hulu has such problems and it’s backed by NBC Universal and Fox.
They always end up pissing their userbase because of contracts that allow them to publish content online for only a few weeks at the time since they have to cling on to old TV distribution style contracts…
There needs to be a generational turn over for big media to get it
July 3rd, 2009 at 3:19 pm
How come all these new Articles say “they are not charging users any money” this is totally wrong and missleading.
here is how it works why is nobody picking up on this!
here is how it is going to work going to use a music file as an example.
1. the client they will be using is a DRM client that adds a layer of DRM to the content you download.
(i.e. authorized download giving control back to the content provider)
2. User A pays for a song from the pirate bay YES THEY have to pay then piratebay knocks of 1 dollar
on the understanding you use your own bandwidth to transfer that same file to other users who’s bought it will its 1:1.
This means you provide the bandwidth for them to sell their content lol they don’t have to do a damn thing.
now you sheep are their distribution and what do you get in return?
1. a DRM file you can’t do anything with other than what they want you to do with it.
2. use of your bandwidth to help their business and you get 1 dollar of the purchase
NOW you know how it works and whats happening now p2p.net Run that story! dig deep and you will find it 100% right.
July 4th, 2009 at 2:48 am
Actually, there’s several relatively-easy fixes that would actually allow something like this to work:
1. Copy”right” terms reduced to a single, non-renewable, 14-year term: The MAFIAA’s own “research” indicates that the vast majority of what they put out are commercial flops, and, further, that the vast majority of the sales for an album are within the first two years (If I recall correctly.)
See the problem? If Copy”Right” is about commercial privilege (and we know it is), then any copy”right” term lasting longer than what is absolutely ‘needed’ commercially is stupid/evil. Of course, as we also know, there are many ways to profit from “content” — gouging the hell ot of anybody who wants to use it, for one (hence their antipathy to stuff like “fair use.”
If a fourteen-year monopoly isn’t enough “incentive”, then I dunno what will be.
Plus, if everything automatically goes Public Domain after fourteen years, that eliminates all the “licensing” bullshit, in terms of sampling and derivatives and such. (Sample clearance is really lucrative, so the “industry” won’t go for this, even if it makes sense.)
2. To even get the 14 year monopoly privilege, “rights-holders” should be explicitly required to register their “content”, and include a version of it in some sort of widely-available, or explicitly “open” (non-drm’ed) format. Upon expiration of copyright term, the non-DRM’ed copy of the “content” gets seeded to every p2p service, and made available on some form of “archive” site — maybe a collaboration between the Library of Congress and the Internet Archive would work.
These two changes would pretty much eliminate all the bullshit we deal with, while STILL allowing the opportunity for the coercive monopolies the MAFIAA says it “needs”, so as to be profitable.
The only problem is, they’d basically deprive the corporate scumbags of their REAL source of “profits” — gouging everybody for clearance and re-use of “their” content — and we can’t have that