GGF plans to steer The Pirate Bay freeloaders straight Global Gaming Factory X (GGF) hopes to transform millions of file-sharing freeloaders on The Pirate Bay into upstanding customers by letting copyright owners remove content or authorize files and receive compensation. Prospective owner GGF has announced initial plans in its $7.8m venture to steer the notorious BitTorrent …
as soon as some content get removed, it is no longer a file sharing site. big Media company must understand there is ONE market: Earth. Selling content at various price point (base on country) is just not working anymore. Also DRM as been proven time after time that it as a 100% failure rate. it simply does not work, maybe selling your content DRM at a LOWER PRICE (you are saving money by removing DRM) not higher price will get you a lot of sale.
GGF or in fact anyone at all would have to have suffered brain damage in order to think buying TPB would make money.
Once GGF take over, all the users will leave. No users = Domain names and some idle servers!
Nice purchase, I got some old 720kb floppy disks you can buy GGF, only £1000 each!
They are about to buy the Titanic just before it hits the Iceberg and everyone jumps ship!
Epic Fail
TPB was set up by Piratbyrån think tank in 2003. Presumably to generate publicity and outrage. A mission it has without a doubt discharged with unparalleled success.
Now the purchase price quite neatly covers the litigation costs and fines for Sunde et al., but offers no apparently sane business investment decision. What is GGFX actually buying?
- User base: yeah right....
- Branding: The TPB logo and other branding material is excluded
- Content: Yeah, pull the other one...
So is neatly wrapping up a policy initiative the real reason behind the transaction? Perhaps once the fuss all dies down, technology will deliver yet another can of worms that will deliver another six years of outrage and publicity.
All the freetards will do is move on to the next means of getting free stuff of the net. Close 1 thing and half a dozen more similar/better methods pop up in it's place. The whole ongoing 'take a pirate site offline' or 'make a pirate site somehow make money for the industry' is never going to solve the underlying need, that so many have, to get stuff without paying for it. When Napster went legal, emule, limewire, kazaa, etc thrived. All users had to google was 'napster alternative' as I'm sure that 'buying the cd/mp3' didn't appear in those results. I doubt much has changed because yet another notorious site has become legal.
Because I simply dont value a movie I'll watch once as being worth £10. I've downloaded the whole of The Wire, again I'll watch it once. It has ZERO monetary value for me since I could just have hit series link on my PVR.
Same for any TV show or movie I've missed. That are tansient to me and as such are worthless as commercial purchases.
Conversely, I tend to pay for music since I'll enjoy it many times over many years and as such it has a value to me.
Come on now folks, how hard have we been yelling for a new business model regarding the sale of digital rights?! Sure, this might not be the best plan in the world, but at least they're attempting to create new models for us consumers..
...give them a break, it *might* just work (million to one shot and all that jazz).
Seriously, as a regular user of TPB, if the subscription model works, I will happily pay up. For me, at least, TPB isn't about getting content for free, it's about getting content in a way that suits me - downloaded to the network, then played at my convenience via the media centre PC under the TV.
However, I am not willing to pay Sky TV rates - under a tenner a month, or realistic micro-billing, say tens of pence per episode or a tenner for a complete series for TV shows, perhaps.
What a great boost for Open Source software. With TPB going legit and therefore removing all the hacked,cracked and other complete with serial key software bundles. Unable to aquire WinXP, Dreamweaver and Photoshop from TPB will the next generation of underground web workers convert to Linux, Blufish & Gimp or just find another torrent tracker?
Yeah, you've probably heard the old joke about "Mandy lifeboats, de ship is sinking".
It is obvious that the new pwners of TPB are trying to come up with a way to keep the service alive, and that means sucking the Ass. of America as they try to drag us firmly back to the old ways where we, the consumer, was shafted on a regular basis in the name of entertainment.
But then, considering the dross that increasingly passes for such entertainment coming out of the member companies of the Recording Ass. and Movie Ass., I'm not so worried if they price themselves out of the market and cut off the supply through such means as TPB. After all, if a show is worth nothing, then it isn't piracy, is it?
For once in my life I find myself in the odd position of agreeing with most of what you said there.
How the hell did we ever get into a situation where Amazon will happily ship a Region <whatever> DVD anywhere you like, but unlocking players is illegal in certain markets. Don't get me started on the utter bleedin' stupidity of region-locked portable players.
This was neatly illustrated recently when O'Barmy gave our Glorious Leader a collection of DVDs as a present. One of the papers in the US (NYT I think) ran an article pointing out how stupid this was as Gordon wouldn't be able to watch them as they were for the wrong region. I still don't know what was funnier from a British perspective, the sheer blinkered ignorance displayed or the fact that half of our press duly trotted out this bollocks verbatim.
compared to almost all of the other sites available in the filesharing heydays. TPB is actually pretty rubbish, no validation of teh content and only minimal organisation. The only reason anyone continued to use it was because it resisted being shut down, not because the contents happen to be that good.
take away the freebie aspect and it will fade into the woodwork!
This may work for those well endowed but how about those poor people? With economic recession in the happenings or nearing a somewhat end, people prefer they not pay at all. Considering how the poor outweigh the rich due to their greed or whatnot, don't expect those that have already touched freeloading to start paying. I'm not saying all won't but most won't. Free cake ain't free once the cake is a lie.
What I could never grasp is how can one be deprived of an income, when the original work has been paid for and the other recipients of the work, would not have gotten it nor would they have paid for it anyway?
I think the internet is one of the best research tools ever invented - and if the works of the world were left exclusively in the hands of the companies who hold copyright, 99% of it would not be avilable nor would it ever be available.....
The master tapes would be boxed up in warehouses six weeks after production and then like the almost total majority of albums and videos and games etc., they would crushed and dumped for non sales - down the tip after 3 to 5 years from release.
I mean the last time I tried to get hold of some 30 year old material from a record company - who held the copyright.... being willing to pay for a copy of the album and all... Email to them = IGNORE...
I think the peer to peer community does a wonderful job of archiving, storing and disseminating the worlds collective history.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
