Quinthar

Fighting and Winning the Pyrrhic War

This is my response to:

http://gonze.com/blog/2010/05/28/the-sue-em-all-mystery-solved/

Are you sure it's working out well? All the troubles of TPB amount to little more than a couple slight dips -- from enormous piracy to slightly less enormous piracy. TPB is still alive and well, even if its founders are in hot water:

http://thepiratebay.org
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/thepiratebay.org

isohunt.com made the mistake of operating from the US, but it's not like shutting it down will do anything other than cause those users to go elsewhere. And it's worth noting it hasn't been shut down either:

http://isohunt.com/lite/#q=avatar
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/isohunt.com/

As for the next rung, Demonoid seems to be gaining steam -- perhaps picking up isohunt and TPB users who are hopping ship:

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/demonoid.com

And the third rung is looking healthy too. Mininova took a hit, but their both seeing decent growth otherwise:

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/btjunkie.com+mininova.com/

In short, nothing has been remotely effective at reducing torrent pirating. Indeed, the only tangible effect is now there are actual *pirate political parties* with seats in major world governments. Does that seem like a force on the decline to you?
As for Limewire, the only thing surprising by it is that it took a *decade* for such an overtly infringing and inducing product to come under threat. The law is still barely able to fight late-90's technology. Speaking of which, it's worth noting that you can still download and use Limewire today, not to mention all the obvious GPL clones that both already exist and will continue to exist:

http://www.limewire.com/

As for that Viacom case against the world's largest pirate, YouTube in its early days, how's that going?

http://www.tomsguide.com/us/Viacom-Google-P2P-Downloads,news-6943.html

The only party "winning" against pirates are businesses who hemorrhage money giving content away at a loss (or with business models nobody feels are remotely sustainable).

Indeed, in what possible universe can you claim pirates aren't demolishing their foes in every field of battle they choose to fight? (Streaming being the notable example of a field they haven't yet taken an interest in.)

The only battles the copyright forces are winning are Pyrrhic. They're *masters* of those.

-david

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