It's a country opening up

March 4, 2013 8:17 PM

The Pirate Bay has announced via a blog post that they will be using North Korea as a haven to serve pages without facing prosecution from copyright authorities.

We believe that being offered our virtual asylum in Korea is a first step of this country's changing view of access to information. It's a country opening up and one thing is sure, they do not care about threats like others do. In that way, TPB and Korea might have a special bond. We will do our best to influence the Korean leaders to also let their own population use our service, and to make sure that we can help improve the situation in any way we can. When someone is reaching out to make things better, it's also ones duty to grab their hand.

There are some doubts about the whole situation - the "Kim Jung-Bay" signed blog post itself only suggests a "new provider", and while traceroutes have shown traffic going through North Korea, though there is also a thorough technical explanation of how it could be faked.

posted by 23 (74 comments total)

This is obviously a joke, but I would have said the same thing about Dennis Rodman and the Harlem Globetrotters
posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 8:21 PM on March 4, 2013 [9 favorites]

Violation of human rights is one thing, but now they're violating copyright?

Send in the drones!
posted by TwelveTwo at 8:22 PM on March 4, 2013 [32 favorites]

First comment on TPB:

As things are progressing, in 20 years, living in North Korea will be preferable to living in United States of MAFIAA.

I seriously need inline images back so I can post that pic of Fry squinting with the "NOT SURE IF SERIOUS" caption.
posted by Justinian at 8:24 PM on March 4, 2013 [30 favorites]

Heh. Servers run on electricity, fools.
posted by Artw at 8:26 PM on March 4, 2013 [57 favorites]

I am also firmly in the 'this is a joke' column, and hopeful that I'm right. But the world these days, it keeps surprising me, and not always (hell, not often) in pleasant ways.

After the recent and idiotic RODMANPLOMACY, I just don't know any more.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 8:28 PM on March 4, 2013 [1 favorite]

This is a great way to promote the ideals of freedom of information to everyday people. And by great I mean hilariously stupid and foolish.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 8:29 PM on March 4, 2013 [5 favorites]

Also, this joke is not a funny joke.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 8:29 PM on March 4, 2013 [8 favorites]

Does anyone use Thepiratebay who doesn't want to get infected or hacked? It's the slum of the internets.
posted by Benway at 8:31 PM on March 4, 2013

Hosting from North Korea? What two 28.8 bps modems?
posted by mattoxic at 8:35 PM on March 4, 2013 [2 favorites]

Does anyone use Thepiratebay who doesn't want to get infected or hacked? It's the slum of the internets.

Well if you've got invites to a better option, let a brother know. I have had to make do with it since the passing of my beloved Demonoid (/pours out beverage).
posted by erskelyne at 8:37 PM on March 4, 2013 [34 favorites]

Came for the Dennis Rodman comment, left satisfied in one.
posted by mr_crash_davis at 8:38 PM on March 4, 2013

mattoxic, that would still be better than about 50% of rural America.
posted by mr_crash_davis at 8:39 PM on March 4, 2013 [4 favorites]

Does anyone use Thepiratebay who doesn't want to get infected or hacked?

Yeah, I reckon lots of people can probably survive a malicious mp3.
posted by pompomtom at 8:39 PM on March 4, 2013 [6 favorites]

Does anyone use Thepiratebay who doesn't want to get infected or hacked? It's the slum of the internets.

Well, it depends on what for. I certainly wouldn't install software from TPB without some real qualms, but to casually grab some media files? Sure.

People who are seriously into that scene might not be caught dead there, and if I had a better option I might use it, but I don't really want to invest a lot to effort and what little social capital I have just to get the occasional TV show or screener.
posted by tyllwin at 8:46 PM on March 4, 2013 [5 favorites]

As things are progressing, in 20 years, living in North Korea will be preferable to living in United States of MAFIAA.

I'll stick with the United States of "MAFIAA" so I won't have to deal with people that think that was clever. Instead they'll be suffering from malnutrition and watching whatever terrible movie they just pirated via their satellite internet connection.
posted by Redfield at 8:51 PM on March 4, 2013 [2 favorites]

I've known someone who installed, uh, some warez from there. So far they believe they've suffered no ill effects. They also are fine downloading ebooks and mp3s and videos. They generally shy away from the software scene, but occasionally will pick up something if they want to mess around with something new. It is, of course, entirely possible they catch a zero-day, and some of the cracks show up as malware via detection which is shitty of the malware detectors because they're merely doing it to stop piracy, not to prevent malware, per se. Of course, that's a great way to hide actual malware, get someone to think it's a false positive then ignore it, which is why malware providers do a disservice when they label cracks as malware in and of themselves for being merely cracks.

Anyways, I laughed when I read this. I'm not sure how I actually feel about this.

And Rodman, what the fuck.
posted by symbioid at 8:56 PM on March 4, 2013

Actually it's funny, I switched over to gReader and noticed that the last set of blogs I was looking at was North Korea Leadership Watch, and then the North Korea Tech Blog, and that was the story they had there.
posted by symbioid at 8:58 PM on March 4, 2013

Does anyone use Thepiratebay who doesn't want to get infected or hacked?

My, uh, friend finds TPB very convenient for getting TV shows that aren't on Hulu or Netflix. Type in name of show plus "SxxEyy" where xx and yy are the season and episode number, sort by number of seeders, grab the magnet link and go. Very convenient. For my friend, I mean.
posted by Kadin2048 at 9:03 PM on March 4, 2013 [5 favorites]

It is certainly not a super great torrent site, but it isn't all that unsafe. Most popular files have informative user comments as to quality or dangers. Also, scene releases trickle down to TPB and are uploaded by super users with good track records. I would be more concerned with who is watching TPB or a takedown of their servers than the downloading of the latest tv episode.

Or so I have heard.
posted by boubelium at 9:06 PM on March 4, 2013 [2 favorites]

Safe or unsafe, it has to be a joke, albeit a technically clever one. Arrr, I think that ship be flying false colors.
posted by tyllwin at 9:09 PM on March 4, 2013

And Rodman, what the fuck.

There were actually a few people in my Facebook feed who said stuff like "See, Obama just needs to pick up the phone."

I sense a FB cull coming on.
posted by KokuRyu at 9:10 PM on March 4, 2013

symbioid: "some of the cracks show up as malware via detection which is shitty of the malware detectors because they're merely doing it to stop piracy, not to prevent malware, per se."

Is that for real? If so, that's incredibly scummy.
posted by dunkadunc at 9:18 PM on March 4, 2013

Cracking tools like keygens do sometimes get flagged as malware by virus detection software, yes.

Also, this joke is in extremely poor taste.
posted by Scientist at 9:34 PM on March 4, 2013 [1 favorite]

There was a good AskMe recently for anyone looking for TPB alternatives.
posted by mannequito at 9:38 PM on March 4, 2013 [7 favorites]

Job creators!
posted by klangklangston at 9:38 PM on March 4, 2013 [5 favorites]

dunkadunc: "symbioid: "some of the cracks show up as malware via detection which is shitty of the malware detectors because they're merely doing it to stop piracy, not to prevent malware, per se."

Is that for real? If so, that's incredibly scummy."

Not only that, but I have a..friend...who likes using trainers in some games. He gets them from a legit source, but they frequently trigger "generic" heuristics. He gets frustrated.
posted by Samizdata at 9:55 PM on March 4, 2013

Now the North Koreans have gone too far..
posted by vidur at 10:01 PM on March 4, 2013 [1 favorite]

Yo, Pirate Bay, I'm really happy for you and Imma let you finish, but the Onion's racist and sexist Tweet about Quvenzhane Wallis was the most tasteless "joke" of all year. OF ALL YEAR!
posted by Sidhedevil at 10:02 PM on March 4, 2013 [4 favorites]

if this isn't a joke, i don't have a problem with it. and i definitely had no problem at all with anything rodman did or said. north korea's been off the ranch for 50 years, you think anything our government has done in that time has had a positive effect on it? somebody bringing some positive energy to the situation and not treating the north korean leadership like shit is all good in my book. sports are a perfect way to build good will. if north korea's going to get better, they're going to need help, it's as simple as that. and so far the entire rest of the world modulo china hasn't managed to do shit.
posted by facetious at 10:28 PM on March 4, 2013 [3 favorites]

Ars Technica:

Fake headline of the day: the Pirate Bay “moves” to North Korea

posted by XMLicious at 10:31 PM on March 4, 2013

they're merely doing it to stop piracy, not to prevent malware, per se

Are you sure about this? Because it seems to me that trainers and other kinds of game cracks are doing some of the same sorts of things that malware does. I would hope that anti-malware programs would be watching to see if one program starts modifying another program that's running.
posted by straight at 10:35 PM on March 4, 2013

It's a joke, and a warmed up six-year-old joke at that.
posted by L.P. Hatecraft at 10:49 PM on March 4, 2013

yeah, I hear those piratebay guys are totes dicks

also whisper campaigns are carcinogenic
posted by This, of course, alludes to you at 11:02 PM on March 4, 2013

Does anyone use Thepiratebay who doesn't want to get infected or hacked?

Wait a second, are you kidding me? BitTorrent's main draw over traditional P2P applications is its speed, and it does so by having many different people uploading and downloading chunks of files at a time. When would you have dozens of people willingly seeding malware?
posted by Apocryphon at 11:09 PM on March 4, 2013 [2 favorites]

When would you have dozens of people willingly seeding malware?

It can't be that hard to build a small botnet to seed your malware, right?
posted by BungaDunga at 11:15 PM on March 4, 2013

When would you have dozens of people willingly seeding malware?

Malware is not always noticeable. It's entirely possible for that iWork installer (you know, where you need to put your root password in to install it?) to install some nasty shit.
posted by wayland at 11:22 PM on March 4, 2013

If a television show is moderately popular, tpb has a watchable quality version up promptly. Things likely to appeal to the 18-34 male demographic are particularly well covered. I am perfectly OK with, say, 160 Mb .mp4 files for my fix of Justified. I have never had a problem, but also I am not an idiot. If S4E10 has not actually AIRED yet, and you try to download something that alleges to be that from a source with only two seeders and no reviews, you're gonna have a bad time.

I do not use Tpb for software, for porn, or for video games. I don't *typically* use it for music, but when I have, the stuff I've pulled has been correctly ripped and tagged and exactly what it says on the tin, every time. It also does reasonably well on the audio books that I've pulled. So, y'know. Yo ho.
posted by which_chick at 11:40 PM on March 4, 2013 [1 favorite]

You just need to be careful and be aware of who is who in the scene. A popular game, ripped by a known crew, seeded by a trusted power user, with plenty of comments by people who have used it successfully? Totally safe. It's where I get everything, and my machine still be clean.
posted by Meatbomb at 12:19 AM on March 5, 2013 [4 favorites]

I can`t see how any moderately competent person would fuck around with torrents. Usenet, people. Usenet.
posted by jimmythefish at 12:33 AM on March 5, 2013

Well this is a terrible PR decision. North Korea is the red-headed step-child of the axis of Evil. No one pays any attention to them and they have to set off nuclear bombs and issue outrageous hyperbolic threats of military devastation to get even a page two mention in the Western media. This is not the way to do guerrilla marketing.

You have to go where the cameras will flock. If TPB really wanted to be edgy and defiant - and get more free media attention - they'd put their servers in Gaza and arrange a pirate flotilla to haul in a fibre-optic cable.
posted by three blind mice at 1:06 AM on March 5, 2013 [2 favorites]

This just reminds me that I recently got a stern copyright infringement letter from my ISP for the first time in like five or six years. For impulsively downloading a crappy screener of a mediocre film I didn't even really want to watch, then forgot I even downloaded it and didn't think to remove it from uTorrent until I'd seeded it several times over. Not only have I still not watched the crappy screener, but since then a high quality 720p version has been released (which I've downloaded impulsively, and not watched). Kids, don't do the crime if it ain't worth your time.
posted by El Sabor Asiatico at 1:56 AM on March 5, 2013 [3 favorites]

I can`t see how any moderately competent person would fuck around with torrents. Usenet, people. Usenet.

Well, reason #1 obviously is that the thing you're looking for is quite often not available on Usenet, especially if it's more than a few years old, or very obscure/rare.

Reason #2 is that Usenet is great if you're looking for single items, but torrents are convenient for collections of things, like entire seasons of old TV shows, and especially curated collections put together by knowledgeable fans.

Reason #3 is again, the people. One thing I miss about Demonoid is that there were some pretty dedicated aficionados on there who spent an insane amount of time taking masses of stuff and organizing it, cleaning it up, filtering out lower-quality versions, and posting detailed writeups of the material. If there is a Usenet indexing site that offers a comparable experience, I would love to know about it. I was pretty much solely dependent on NZBMatrix (which did have a pretty lively community and was convenient to use) for a number of years, and now that they're gone I'm sort of wandering the wilderness.
posted by El Sabor Asiatico at 2:27 AM on March 5, 2013 [2 favorites]

Does anyone use Thepiratebay who doesn't want to get infected or hacked? It's the slum of the internets.

Got a better way to get the proceedings from the Hope conference?
posted by rough ashlar at 2:33 AM on March 5, 2013 [1 favorite]

#4 is that torrents were designed for rapidly and efficiently moving large files around the place. Usenet, on the other hand, had a proud and beautiful history which was destroyed by binaries. I wouldn't want to use it for this purpose on principle.
posted by Jimbob at 2:34 AM on March 5, 2013 [6 favorites]

I always thought this would happen in Cuba first.
posted by BrotherCaine at 3:48 AM on March 5, 2013

Does anyone use Thepiratebay who doesn't want to get infected or hacked? It's the slum of the internets.

Nice try, MPAA astroturfer.
posted by DU at 3:57 AM on March 5, 2013 [5 favorites]

Nice try, MPAA astroturfer.

Perhaps they are "useful idiots"?

Because the venn diagram of the often quoted as an authority XKCD infections aren't that common.

(the number of times I've tossed out "you could be infected" VS an actual infection I could detect is a ratio less than 1. The best case was 4 hours after an ex-client turned off my UNIX based firewall/anti-virus they were sending out infected spam email. Rare to be proven right that fast.)
posted by rough ashlar at 4:11 AM on March 5, 2013

Is it possible to have a comment against TPB without being labeled an astroturfer? Asking for a friend.
posted by andreaazure at 4:26 AM on March 5, 2013 [2 favorites]

Is it possible to have a comment against TPB without being labeled an astroturfer?

Sure. But probably not a hilariously non-factual, scare-mongering one like the one I quoted.
posted by DU at 4:37 AM on March 5, 2013 [2 favorites]

Benway: Does anyone use Thepiratebay who doesn't want to get infected or hacked? It's the slum of the internets.

Yeah, unlike sites like speedtest.net or that forum where mobile apps developers hung out to discuss tips and tricks. Those are totally legit and would never spread malware, would they?

Cough.

Not saying that TPB doesn't have annoying ads or that random anonymous people on the Internet when given the chance won't upload harmful material or mere fakes and mislabel it; but remember that Sony for a while also distributed a rootkit with its music, so they're not exactly safe either. And TPB is unlikely to leak your credit card information.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand. I can't believe anybody technical fell for this joke, even for a moment. Hosting a site like TPB behind a satellite connection? Really?

But enough snark. If you thought the traceroute looked convincing, you should've also timed the response time for the actual website; then you should have noticed that, depending on how far from western Europe you are, HTTP GET responses get fulfilled within tens of milliseconds, rather than several hundreds. So a simple test would already have proven the traceroute wrong.

Next up: the global routing system. thepiratebay.se has had the IP address of 194.71.107.15 for a while now, which is from their IP address block 194.71.107.0/24. This prefix is currently being announced with an AS_path of "39138 22351 131279 51040 i" with the various upstreams of the first Autonomous System at the front, but this is the invariant part across them.

39138 is RRbone; 22351 is Intelsat, also listed in the traceroute; 131279 is a DPRK ASN, and 51040 is TPB.

We've already established that packets make it to 51040 as the website works. You'll have to trust traceroute up to a certain point, or look in your own routers if you're an ISP to verify this, though, but 39138 is their upstream.

The suspect portion here is whether 22351 has a relationship with 39138, the latter being a pretty small company in Dortmund, Germany and the former being a global corporation with around $17 billion in assets on its balance sheet. Although registration is mostly voluntary, the various Internet Routing Registries do not list adjacencies between these two networks. Furthermore, TPB's prefix is the only one announced with such an AS_path, in other words a hypothetical contractual relationship between Intelsat and RRbone would specify services delivered only for TPB behind yet another network: in practice this is hard enough to configure on routers to the point that you'd use a logical tunnel, hiding the underlying network.

So, yeah. Pretty transparent joke. Not sure if it's a funny one. Interesting to see that it works to the extent it does technically, though; it would be interesting to see if they can achieve anywhere near global reachability with such a trick for a prefix that is not TPB, already subject to plenty censorship worldwide.
posted by LanTao at 5:15 AM on March 5, 2013 [6 favorites]

Does anyone use Thepiratebay who doesn't want to get infected or hacked? It's the slum of the internets.

Crazy idea--rather than help people who are getting rich by selling you as the product, you could always just buy the products from the rights holders, who, you know, are the creators or paid the creators for the work.
posted by Ironmouth at 5:24 AM on March 5, 2013 [2 favorites]

...random anonymous people on the Internet when given the chance won't upload harmful material or mere fakes and mislabel it...

Another non-issue AFAICT, btw. The number of times I've downloaded the wrong thing can be counted on the fingers of my earlobes.

(I have gotten bad, wrong-language or otherwise unusable copies, though. But then I've gotten the same from "reputable" vendors too.)
posted by DU at 5:40 AM on March 5, 2013

Now that the technical angle has been taken care of, let's return to the real question at hand: is it RODMANPLOMACY or RODPLOMACY?

Although it is incorrect naming, I would like to suggest we go with RODPLOMACY simply because it sounds better and that, I submit, is what really matters here.
posted by aramaic at 5:52 AM on March 5, 2013

Man, if they get Dennis Rodman too it's pretty much game over for the free world.
posted by nowhere man at 5:59 AM on March 5, 2013

I loathe the Pirate Bay. It is just a marketing vehicle for HBO. It is a plot to keep you from discovering all the cool shit out there that has been openly licensed and instead fill up your hard drive with stuff they can bill you by lawsuit for later. Meanwhile by making their product available "illegally" they can build demand by word of mouth and drive cable subscriptions. Look at the YouTube vs Viacom lawsuit. Many of the things Viacom claimed were pirated were actually uploaded by Viacom's own promotions department.
posted by humanfont at 8:19 AM on March 5, 2013 [1 favorite]

PCWorld: The Pirate Bay admits to North Korean hosting hoax
posted by KatlaDragon at 8:31 AM on March 5, 2013

So the Rodman thing was a hoax too then right? Right?
posted by Big_B at 8:39 AM on March 5, 2013

> you could always just buy the products from the rights holders

If that were true, the "rights holders" would turn a lot of pirates into customers overnight.

Instead, often, one or more of the following applies:

1) You can't "buy the product"; you can only buy a limited, revocable license to use it, a license with tens or hundreds of pages of terms many of which are onerous, incomprehensible or both.

2) You can't buy the product yet. It'll be a few months / years before it releases in the place where you live. (If the rights holders get to legal bickering, upgrade that to "possibly, never".)

3) You can buy the product, but it's markedly inferior to the (DRM-free, format-shiftable, non-infested-with-unskippable-ads, non-region-coded) pirated version.

4) You can buy the product, but only bundled with a huge (and expensive) volume of stuff you don't want. (I'm supposed to buy a cable subscription with HBO for $70/mo. if all I want to see is Game of Thrones as it comes out?)

TL;DR: Shut up and take our money!
posted by sourcequench at 9:17 AM on March 5, 2013 [5 favorites]

"Crazy idea--rather than help people who are getting rich by selling you as the product, you could always just buy the products from the rights holders, who, you know, are the creators or paid the creators for the work."

See, the problem with comments like this is that I already do. If I can find something that I want for legitimate sale, I usually do that because it's easier. (Or, with music, if I can stream it from spotify or youtube, I just do that.) But a good half of the media I enjoy isn't available for sale legally, either because of distribution problems, or those same rights holders holding it up (Los Angeles Plays Itself is a good example), or that nobody actually knows who holds the rights to it (a bunch of old psych albums have never been reissued because of that). And plenty of times, when I can buy it, it's clearly from a bootleg house anyway.

So, yeah, it kinda reads as obnoxious when you condescend like that.
posted by klangklangston at 9:23 AM on March 5, 2013 [3 favorites]

Crazy idea--rather than help people who are getting rich by selling you as the product, you could always just buy the products from the rights holders, who, you know, are the creators or paid the creators for the work.

I'd love to, if only they'd show up with a timely, unrestricted product at a good price.

An expensive, DRM-laden offering is not acceptable. If they want to sell it to me, I'm interested in possibly buying it, but only if I'm actually buying my copy, not just leasing it. And, since I can get it for free anyway, they're not doing me any huge favor by making me a copy.

I'd like to support the creators of things I like, but charging $28 for one movie is insane. Just utterly, absolutely around-the-bend insane.

Charge me five bucks for a nice .AVI or .MKV file, and I'd buy a fair number of movies. At $28, I buy zero.
posted by Malor at 9:41 AM on March 5, 2013 [2 favorites]

I see that most of what I wrote is actually already in the arstechnica article XMLicious linked to upthread. The rdns.im guy has posted an update (also linked from arstechnica) but he's still wrong, still wanting to believe too much.
posted by LanTao at 10:14 AM on March 5, 2013

Type in name of show plus "SxxEyy"

Meanwhile, typing "SxxEyy" on its own returns thousands of results of a very different kind of search.
posted by phunniemee at 10:51 AM on March 5, 2013 [4 favorites]

If the rightsholder doesn't want to license it on terms you are willing to accept, why don't you find other things to entertain yourself.
posted by humanfont at 11:26 AM on March 5, 2013

The same old techie tropes are being trotted out yet again. "I'd love to buy the movie, but the studios aren't releasing and packaging it to my exact technical specifications." Ergo, I'm justified in pirating it.

Shut up and take our money!

It's not 2007 anymore. There are so many legal avenues to purchase and/or stream digital content it's not even funny. Beyond that, your 4 points smack of entitlement when you use them to justify piracy.

I'd like to support the creators of things I like, but charging $28 for one movie is insane. Just utterly, absolutely around-the-bend insane.

Taking issue with high prices is completely fair. I'm sure the media companies do price gouge to an extent. It's inevitable. But from my experience buying movies on Amazon, new movie DVD releases tend to fall in the $14.99-$21.99 range, with higher prices being reserved for Blueray discs, combo packs, and DVDs with exclusive content.

And sure, Warner Brothers could sell The Dark Knight Rises for $5, but if that's not economically viable and puts them deeply in the red, then why should they do it? A company like Ford could sell a lot more Mustangs if they priced them at $5,000, but if it bankrupts them in the process, then what have we gained?
posted by foot at 11:33 AM on March 5, 2013

Ford could sell a lot more Mustangs if they priced them at $5,000, but if it bankrupts them in the process, then what have we gained?

Alot of people with new Mustangs and wicked awesome pink-slip races happening every evening on our major highways.
posted by dogbusonline at 11:40 AM on March 5, 2013

> you could always just buy the products from the rights holders

If that were true, the "rights holders" would turn a lot of pirates into customers overnight.

/hollow laugh.
posted by Artw at 11:45 AM on March 5, 2013

> Beyond that, your 4 points smack of entitlement when you use them to justify piracy.

If you think that's what I was doing, you have a serious reading comprehension problem.

My point is that the rights holders could make a whole lot more money by behaving differently than they currently do.

Some pirates pirate because that's the only way to get what they want in a way that's timely and convenient. These people would be customers if they had a reasonable way to do that.

Some pirates pirate because they don't care about creators getting compensated, know they won't get caught and just want free stuff. They'll never be customers. Not if you wave a magic wand and eliminate all piracy overnight. Not if you wave a different magic wand and eliminate all IP law overnight. They're not part of the equation.

Whether or not piracy is justifiable (in general, or in some particular case) is beside the point. It happens. Media companies can either say "We need to try harder to have them all killed!" or "These people aren't buying our products. What can we sell that they would buy?"

I'm suggesting that the latter approach is more potentially lucrative in the long term.

>Sure, Ford could sell a lot more Mustangs if they priced them at $5,000, but if it
>bankrupts the company in the process, then what's the point?

That making haphazard analogies between physical goods and bits isn't always the ideal rhetorical device?

Each Mustang costs something to build (in materials and labor). This is likely more than $5K. If you sell them for $5K each, you'll lose money regardless of how many you sell.

Making the first copy of The Dark Knight Rises costs something like $250M. Making the second and subsequent copies costs nothing, or very close to it. If you sell copies for $5 each, you very well might make more money than if you sell them for $15 each.

IOW, movies are fundamentally unlike Mustangs because as the number of units increases, the marginal cost goes to zero but the marginal profit doesn't.
posted by sourcequench at 12:06 PM on March 5, 2013 [1 favorite]

That making haphazard analogies between physical goods and bits isn't always the ideal rhetorical device?

If that's the case, who cares if you have a license. That's how rights are sold. How exactly does one sell a copy that you own outright and can transfer to another? That's a license for you to resell and rob me of any funds.

My point is that the rights holders could make a whole lot more money by behaving differently than they currently do.

How? Most performers lease or sell the rights to large companies who pay them royalties. Having to set up some sort of distribution system for every piece of work is impractical.

Seriously, this is about people getting free stuff. Plain and simple.
posted by Ironmouth at 12:29 PM on March 5, 2013

"Yes, I do heartily repent. I repent I had not done more mischief; and that we did not cut the throats of them that took us, and I am extremely sorry that you aren't hanged as well as we."
-Anonymous Pirate, asked on the gallows if he repented. [via]
posted by Twang at 1:53 PM on March 5, 2013 [4 favorites]

here's an excuse for pirating: being fucking broke and needing a distraction from being fucking broke
posted by This, of course, alludes to you at 4:24 PM on March 5, 2013 [1 favorite]

I can dig that. At least you're honest and not rationalizing it through a bunch of pretentious digital-future wankery.
posted by foot at 6:05 PM on March 5, 2013 [2 favorites]

“Six Strikes” Boosts Demand For BitTorrent VPNs and Proxies
posted by jeffburdges at 9:24 AM on March 11, 2013

Dennis Rodman Capitalizes On Cluelessness About North Korea’s Human Rights Failures
posted by homunculus at 2:54 PM on March 12, 2013

South Korea lives in the future (of brutal copyright enforcement)
posted by homunculus at 10:03 AM on March 30, 2013