OSNews

They communicate as if somehow they ‘own’ the Pirate Bay community and can move them elsewhere to their whim. The idea that buying a pub somehow buys you the punters is naîve at best (especially when the punters only went there for the illegal activities and you’ve openly said that it’s your intention to clean that up).

I was thinking the same. Even at the trial, the prosecution made huge mistakes when they tried to explain how the torrent network actually worked. TPB is a public tracker, not a private one. Most of the members will just jump to a different tracker as soon as links to "illegal" content is removed.

So long for the "huge P2P power", they only bought a name and a few servers for a ridiculous amount of money. Establishing a P2P-based, legal content distribution channel is possible (many MMORPGs updaters work this way), but buying the TPB won't help at all.

This is pretty much what happened to Napster. What was once a busy p2p network was made legitimate and the users all left, leaving it useless for downloading illegal content.

I suspect the buyers understand how the stock market works. Their stock is up over 100% on the anouncement.

My gut feeling is that this is a pure stock market and PR play from GGF. Last week no one had heard of this company, now they're on the front page of news sites around the world. Two weeks from now the deal will fall through on some technicality, GGF will be out almost no money at all, but still have an amazing PR buzz on which to build something else on. Perhaps even use that buzz to launch some other project that they've been working on.
But that's just me being cynical

If this is true, then it's interesting that it doesn't matter if the buyers understand how torrent work, or not. As long as the investors also don't understand the subtleties of torrent hosting, then it's easy to cash in on this ignorance.

According to an article yesterday in the Swedish business newspaper, not only have they not been sold yet, but GGF doesn't actually have the money they promised to pay. According to their last quarterly report the company made a loss of almost 120K USD on sales of 130K USD and have less than 200K USD in liquid assets. They're still working on how to finance the deal.

However the company stock more than doubled in value on the announcement, from roughly $0.015 to $0.033, and the Swedish SEC has stopped trading on the stock and are currently investigating to make sure this wasn't some sort of stock scam.

But, in the end, the protocol probably can not be bittorrent. They will likely have to design a new protocol/client to make this work.

Someone seeding a torrent can add other trackers as well, and provide .torrent file downloads wherever they want, thus the leechers will just go elsewhere to get the same content without having to pay.

Edit: Unless everything is encrypted, and you have to pay for the decryption key...

Edited 2009-07-01 23:56 UTC

A user buys a song, the user download, and then the user is paid for sharing that song.

If it's a viable way of having the money back for the song you bought, then this business model could very well succeed - you legally acquired songs and you got your money back.

And the implementation of this is not out of this world. Private trackers keep track of the files you download and your ratio, and seeding times of all your files. Public trackers also have this data, but they might not disclose it, and due to the large amount of people that come in, they discard it quickly.

Tho I'm not expecting they will pay you enough to actually cover the costs of a single music file. But that's just me.

Well, I'm not sure how they could. Most of the money they would get, no doubt, will go to the big industry middlemen as it always has, a small portion would need to go to ggf itself... and that money would have to come from the buyer of the media I would think. It might save you a few cents per track, but I don't see how they could possibly pay you all your purchase price back.
Where this is interesting me is that, presumably if they're going to be using file sharing as a business model, we may be able to purchase non-DRM content. I don't know how they'll talk the big movie tycoons into this, but they almost have to otherwise sharing makes no sense. I sure wouldn't be complaining about that, and I don't think anyone else would either.

Can I assume then that you are also opposed to a business model that profit's from others work as well? You know, kind of like the old Pirate Bay?

"Old" Pirate Bay never sold hosting services to anybody, even though the Swedish prosecution accused them that they do. "Old" Pirate Bay also never sold copyrighted media.

OTOH media corporations' sole business is to make profit of other people's work...

Correct, they sought to facilitate the distribution of copyrighted material and gain revenue through advertising. By not actually selling directly, they insured that more people would visit the site=more hits for the ads.

Well this one has lost. Again, the we have the almost insane argument that freely distributing copyrighted material is better for the rights holders? Can't you at least try to think of a better excuse? So a studio takes all of the money made from a movie and never pays anyone right? I mean it's not like the actors, directors, writers, producers, etc.. never get royalties. Those poor musicians that get paid when their albums are sold, it is so much better when kiddies just download it for free right? And let us not forget the software developers who get just stinking rich off of having their software "sold", excuse me distributed freely on Pirate Bay.

Sorry to say, but this excuse you and others use is just downright idiotic, and you need to be called on it. There are issues on this planet that are complicated, this is not one of them. Quite frankly I for one have an enough of these downright childish excuses you ignorant kids make. Of course the arguments are idiotic, because what the truth of the matter is that you simply do not care to be honest.

If people truly cared about seeing artists and developers getting their fair share of reimbursement, then the last thing people would support is pirated material. They would however lobby and support different trade groups, unions, and guilds formed to support these individuals. But you don't, and your childish hypocrisy shines right through.

agree 100%. While I'm the first to admit I've d/led copyrighted material in the past I certainly don't feel I'm somehow entitled to do so. I don't work for free and don't expect anyone else to. If they CHOOSE to then that's mighty kind of them.

Honesty like this I truly respect, and I certainly hold no grudges, ill feelings, contempt. It would be nice if so many others would have the same moral character as you, who could be honest. What really drives me insane is the arguments some have making this out to be an issue of freedom.

This is not about freedom, nor should getting a copy of Transformers 2 be a "civil right". When people around this globe have to actually risk injury, imprisonment, and death for freedoms, it cheapens the word when those who use it so casually do so to defend something that is just simply not a right. Games, movies, software, music are not essentials in any regard. This has nothing to do with political free speech or freedom to assembly, nor does this have anything to do with censorship. People at TPB and it's supporters were only truly interesting in the freedom to download material they were unwilling or incapable of paying money for.

If I somehow could trade some of my unused bandwidth for legal content I'd be all for it. What's not to love with that idea (or than the fact that it probably won't work)?

You make it sound like that's impossible today. Go to Jamendo.com -- they also use BitTorrent (as one option -- not exclusively, though).

http://freenetproject.org/

There you go. Have fun.

There I go what? I'm fully aware of freenet and what it does. I even used to run a freenet node. Yet I completely fail to see what point you think you are making. Could you clarify? How does freenet solve the legal aspect of downloading copyrighted music and videos?

Ouch, you sound like a bitten animal try to save itself.

I wasn't attacking you, seriously.. I'm surprised you had to react that way.

I never accused you of not knowing about freenet. Nor that you have never used it for a while. Even I used it..

Freenet has plenty of legal content there.
Freenet indeed allows you trading your unused bandwidth.
Freenet doesn't solve copyright music issues, I don't see where you brought them up in your post.

I think you fail to see while you're replying to the thread, I was only replying to you. In such a small post I don't think I was making any point at all, or even solving copyright issues.