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Comment by johndoe90 | Hacker News Reader

I hope TPB will teach copyright owners a lesson that there's no point and no way to fight piracy.

There is, just make it easier (and in some cases, even possible) for people to pay for content (see the comment above https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15920913)

There are always people who are ready to pay and people who will go to every length to not to. Instead of focusing on giving a good experience to the first crowd, companies end up screwing it up and then waste time on trying to force the second crowd to pay.

I read a great article years ago where a Disney executive argued that they had to view pirating as a competing business model, and provide a better experience instead of just trying to shut it down.

Disney and pirates compete on price, quality, availability, ease of use, and so on. Price is going to be hard to compete with since pirated stuff is free, and I guess they are attacking the availability of pirated material to increase their own by comparison, but what I wish they would focus on is to make it easier for the user to find the stuff they want. If I knew I could go somewhere for all of Disney's catalog of shorts and feature films, I'd be happy to pay a small amount per movie or subscribe for continuous access. Instead it's spread across multiple services, or you have to buy individual DVD boxes and try to assemble your own collection which is a lot of work. They could make it a lot easier for me to watch that specific short (now I go to YouTube and hope it's there) or movie (I check if it's on Netflix or another streaming service, and if not, I skip it).

My (limited) experience of NFL.com is that they've done great when it comes to making it easy to watch current and older games, with options to subscribe to all games or just one team. The English Premier League doesn't have the same centralized streaming service I know of and instead depends on selling the rights to TV channels to show games, which leads to consuming a lot of pirated material if you want to follow a specific team all season or want to watch all concurrent games.

If the content providers just compete in the areas they can affect, most people will pay to use it it's more convenient than the alternative.

> I read a great article years ago where a Disney executive argued that they had to view pirating as a competing business model, and provide a better experience instead of just trying to shut it down.

This is exactly how Spotify get my money. It's so much easier than trying to manage a pirated collection.

Disney is building their own streaming service, so you may get your wish. Not sure about the "small amount", tough.

That reminds me of the fanfare up in the cold north when Netflix expanded their offerings those shores. Only that once one checked the catalog on offer, it was downright anemic. Several TV series lagged by multiple seasons for example.

Never mind that since then Netflix have lost the right to distribute quite a few movie catalogs that may hold hidden classics, as they shift their focus onto producing their own content and the copyright holders wants to keep the percentages that Netflix got for themselves.

This however leads to market balkanization and drive people to once more consider alternative sources.

For the one TPB that has survived, there are several file sharing websites (decent ones that are actually usable) and torrent sites that have been pulled down and the copyright owners have prevailed. I think this more points to the technical acumen of the ppl behind TPB.

I am not taking strong sides against or for fighting piracy. I do hope the greater share of the profits do end up with the original authors and not the content distributors.

These days TPB is little more than a indexer of magnet links.

I think there was a claim floating around that one could offer all the TPB magnet links in a simple text file that would be a maybe a MB in size.

It's more but not even 100MB: https://archive.org/details/pirate-bay-torrent-dumps-2004-20...

This does not include the descriptions though.

Also check out https://github.com/sergiotapia/magnetissimo

I downloaded it once. The entire catalog of TPB in magnet link form worked out to 63mb zipped IIRC.

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