Pirate Bay - The Good Ship?

Mininova, the BitTorrent site, has entered Alexa's Top Global 100 alongside Digg and other megasites, serving up 20m daily page views, reports TorrentFreak.  Disgraceful, eh?  Another example of the evil web spreading evilness and corruption into the minds of sponge-brained, keyboard junkies, right?  Well, remove those MPAA goggles for a second and go watch Pirate Bay founder Peter 'Brokep' Sunde on The BitLord Show talking about his motivations which include anti-censorship, speaking for the users of the internet, his negotiations with the Big 4, broken American law, his plans to launch an uncensored version of YouTube and best of all, buying Sealand!  All delivered in calm, relaxed Swedish tones in a local park.  Inspiring stuff, especially as Pirate Bay consists of three people.  These days lots of emerging technology appears first in legally problematic environments but then gets scrubbed up and enters the mainstream.  BitTorrent is getting just such a make over now, in the shape of Joost, run by market-makers Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who themselves haven't always been so squeaky.  The lesson is that it's always worth watching the pioneers who are prepared to bend the rules along the way.  And as P2P gets shinier and Prince throws down his purple open source gauntlet, it's the 'respectable' commercial waters that beging to look a little murkier.  As Brokep says at the end of the video - keep sharing!

Comments

[brad]

"BitTorrent is getting just such a make over now, in the shape of Joost..."

From the point of view of an end user, Joost and BitTorrent have little to nothing in common. BitTorrent is great for users, Joost is great for media corps (or one should at least hope so, as it's not very good for users).

BitTorrent fills in the gaps and reduces the inconveniences of non-global programming, ie. you can get TV shows from around the globe on demand, rather than the delayed marketing schedules of broadcasters.

Joost brings globalized corporate TV culture to the internet in a very 1970s (pre-VCR) way, ie. you can watch 'live' shows from global corporations that are already available globally; you get ads, you can't record, you can't skip ads, and there's less content than on TV. If you want to save a show, you need to find it on BitTorrent, which really begs the question why one would use Joost in the first place.

For users, it seems to stack up like this:
1. Digital TV - convenient, DVR, lots of user control, best quality, but regional
2. BitTorrent - on demand, most content, lots of user control, good quality, global and historical programs, but long download times.
3. GooTube - on demand, short videos, user control varying from lots to none, poor quality
4. Joost - poor content, very litttle user control, ads, corporate content, adequate quality
5. Broadcast on demand (by broadcasters, DVD rental companies, etc) - DRM, supremely inconvenient to completely nonfunctional.

What we are missing is global TV, ie. one should be able to watch any TV shows from any country - at least in the name of global harmony and understanding. One approach might be simply building an industry on rebroadcasting regional shows, in the same way that cable TV started by rebroadcasting TV shows via cable. Unfortunately, when that was tried by iCraveTV.com and others about a decade ago, it was shut down for copyright infringement by lawyers from - guess who? - the US networks and cable companies.

These days lots of emerging technology appears first in legally problematic environments but then gets sued out of existence and everyone forgets about it, only later to become overly excited by something much less ambitious that *does* meet with approval from the media overlords. (I just want to get back my experience watching Toronto breakfast news while I eat my lunch in my office in London. Too much to ask?)

[James Cherkoff]

Thanks Brad, great insight.

[david]

thanks for that knowladge brad.

[michael.gentry]

Whether or not The Pirate Bay and others will move away from torrent files in the future, the closure of the world’s largest Bit Torrent tracker is nevertheless a milestone in the history of the Internet.
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michael.gentry

lawyer marketing >

[adam.smith]

This ship cannot be sunk. MAFIAA cannot stop us even with millions of dollars. .... within the torrent comments sections, things do not look good for the ...
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adam.smith

lawyer marketing >