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Comment by amix | Hacker News Reader

I think the Pirate Bay is a shady operation. They probably earn millions on giving other peoples work for free. I don't understand the model of "free copying" - if everyone is leeching and nobody is paying how will we get movies like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings or a game like Halo (they cost millions of $ to produce)?

I hope an alternative comes where you actually pay for the stuff you leech (especially for movies). And the argument with "trying stuff out", does not really hold - you don't go and try an ice cream for free, you buy it and if it's bad you don't buy ice creams from that store any longer.

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> if everyone is leeching and nobody is paying how will we get movies like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings or a game like Halo

It isn't really the end user's responsibility to fix a broken business model. I agree with you that it's problematic but trying to infringe upon the public's demand to copy with suing/drm/fear hasn't really done much to stem the tide of copying. And at this point it all just feels like a lack of creativity - charge everyone a yearly subscription fee to a site that allows you to download anything for free at high quality/speeds. That's just one idea off the top of my head; get 30 smart people in a room for a week and I'm sure they could come up with tons of viable alternatives.

Shutting down the Pirate Bay won't stop people copying things. Hollywood need to come up with a better way of distributing movies now, whilst they are in a relatively strong position.

I have 100 times more hard drive space and 400 times the bandwidth than I did a decade ago. In another decade, I'll have 100TB of space and 8Gbps of bandwidth, probably all on my cell phone. Not only does this make movies ridiculously easy to download and store, but all those slow, distributed anonymous P2P networks we have today start to look like feasible way of downloading files.

Hollywood face an enemy of exponentially increasing resilience. They can either attempt to come to an understanding now when they have a good hand, or wait until they have no choice but to bargain from a position of weakness.

I'm not sure where you live, but here in the US, I can go to most ice cream shops (Marble Slab Creamery, for example) and try various ice creams for free before I buy. ;)

You get a taste of ice-cream - it's the equivalent of hearing a snippet of a song or seeing a trailer for a movie. You don't get a full banana split.

I'd argue that is a flawed analogy.

When you taste the ice cream, you get the full essence of it. All the subsequent bites will taste like that one. You know what you are getting.

When you hear a 30 second song clip or see a movie trailer, you get a selectively packaged subset of the full product. I have heard many clips and seen many trailers that are simply awesome, and then the actual song or movie ends up being terrible.

So the analogy would be better if you got to hear the song once for free, and then had to buy to own, which is kind of between the two extremes now (leech it or buy it unheard). Radio (traditional or internet-based) does a decent job of this now, but only for singles. There is still no way to try a whole album before buying unless you catch it on the headphones in Best Buy.

The trouble with movies is that generally you don't watch them many times. I can't really speak for everyone there, but I know I would be much more willing to pay for movies if I could get a good 720p copy of it for say $10-15. The reason I don't buy movies now is that I don't want a pile of DVDs in my tiny apartment. I could buy them, rip them, then resell them, but as I understand it, this is just as illegal as downloading them to begin with. So to summarize, give us some format options besides just a DVD that costs $23.

So you'd agree to the try-before-buy principle for oh, say, condoms?

There was no obligation to "try-before-buy" policies handed down to sellers of wares by Moses, you know.

I fail to understand how paying for the music that you listen to is a sub-optimal arrangement. All this talk about obsolete business model is just bullshit. If you dig underneath all the "freedom" hyperbole and "fat-cat record companies" self-righteous finger-wagging, what you really have is desire to rationalize behaviour whose analogue in the real world nobody has any difficulty whatsoever to see as stealing.

These self-described pirates deserve nothing less than jail. I say that as a musician who in an ideal world would find record companies that can finance producing or promoting an album, and instead finds a record industry hollowed out by a 50% decline in revenue within a decade. How does the idiotic "expert" professor for the defense explain that figure in the context of massively more pervasive access to music? It just doesn't compute. People are stealing music. Period. We need to stop it, so that the whole ecosystem of jobs related to music (most of these are not fat cats. People like mixing and mastering engineers, session musicians etc) is allowed to flourish. It's currently the case that a lot of the talent in mastering, for example, is being lost. Simply because it's too expensive to have it done by these people now idea. Result: over-compressed albums with totally fake dynamics. I'm an example: I'm a programmer, who would really love to be able to do music. But I don't really want to live on a tour bus the rest of my life. Now, ten years ago, you could go the Steely Dan way and just record studio albums; no touring. That approach simply doesn't work now, and inevitably that means that some real talent is not coming through; the incentives simply aren't there.

...if everyone is leeching and nobody is paying how will we get movies like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings or a game like Halo (they cost millions of $ to produce)? ... I hope an alternative comes where you actually pay for the stuff you leech...

Really? I hope production costs keep falling as rapidly as they have been. If more people produce great content that doesn't cost millions of dollars to make, we all win.

It's a matter of taste, but I think less money would be good for games and bad for films. Most of the movies I really like were at least somewhat expensive to make.

I think movies are at the tail-end of the curve. Production costs are falling, but they still haven't fallen far enough that good movies can be made by lots of people.

> if everyone is leeching and nobody is paying how will we get movies like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings or a game like Halo (they cost millions of $ to produce)?

Whoever wins this trial, P2P filesharing is unlikely to go away. So I think filesharing will have a number of effects:

Movies and games will get cheaper to produce

People will make less financially ambitious movies and games

Some movies and games will be funded by varients of the Street Performer Protocol -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_Performer_Protocol

Some movies or games will be funded by the state. Organisations such as the BBC do this today. Possibly there will be a broadband tax to fund the creation of downloadable works, along the lines of this proposal: http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/a-broadband-tax-fo...

"Probably earn millions"?

You a) don't seem to be following the case, where the people running it credibly claim to be pretty much broke, b) don't seem to know much about such websites - they're almost universally giant money sinks.

Their traffic is the triple of plentyoffish.com and their site is filled with advertising 1). I doubt it's that expensive to run a tracker and especially when they run it in Egypt. I can't really see how they could be broke - they probably state this to not pay taxes and to get people on their side.

1) Check http://i40.tinypic.com/hv77kx.jpg for reference

advertising works on plentyoffish, because the visitors are looking for dates etc, and there are many paid for matchmaking advertisers who want those users.

What is the equivalent on something like the pirate bay? "Buy the movie from amazon"? I'm skeptical you'd get anywhere near the same revenue. People go to somewhere like the pirate bay for a specific reason - to get a specific file.

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