Originally Posted by RawAlex

Gideon, do you get up in the morning by yourself or does someone at Pirate Bay come over and prop you up in front of your computer and spoon feed you pap?

Your P2P arguments are laughable: Valid "backup recovery" is a total joke, because if you had a valid copy of a software and a valid license, you wouldn't need a "crack code generator" in every software program on torrent sites. People wouldn't have to publish haxor'ed copies or otherwise provide access, because a valid license holder would have a key (usually on paper). The software could be provided as is without issue.

It is clear that 99.9999999999% of all users of torrent sites are looking to get something for nothing, a something they don't have a valid license for. Otherwise they wouldn't be called "pirate bay" but "backup software central" or "the recovery center". The argument is meaningless becuase the people on TPB and other torrent sites are fully aware that the material they list is either entirely pirated or of questionable sourcing, and they don't blink.

As for DMCA, it is the American version of laws that exist in many countries under various provisions. The example is all of the trackers and bittorrent sites that have in the last few months been shut down by the Dutch courts. Past "safe havens" don't remain safe havens, and even Sweden is likely to change it's ways in the near future.

Torrent sites have a real issue. More than 50% of the torrents are served up by maybe 3 or 4 sites total, and the total number of trackers has dropped enormously in the last year. It really only takes one or two more major bombs to set the P2P communities back years, because of the way they are structured. They have literally retreated to the very few places they have left to "legally" operate (sweden and china being to two biggest) and the chinese situation is such that it could expire at any time, especially if chinese authorities find out that porn and other degenerate material is being distributed from china. The anti-porn squads over there are very effective indeed.

P2P will survive, but it is very likely that it will go more the route of putting up older material that copyright holders aren't chasing after, more specialized material, and more than likely mostly behind password protected sites with private invite systems. The public P2Ps packed with current (and often not yet released) movies, porn, msuic, and software are sitting on a bomb that will explode sooner or later.