The movie/music/tv industries need to learn from Steam.<p>I used to steal games all the time. New game came out? Steal it. Open up BitTorrent or an FTP client and start downloading, immediately. But then Steam came along. <i></i>Now I buy all my games<i></i>. I don't just buy games I want, I buy games I have stolen in the past. I buy new games. I buy games on sale. But the most important part? <i></i>A new game comes out, and I think about buying it on Steam before I think about stealing it.<i></i> Stealing doesn't cross my mind, because being a legitimate customer (which is what I want to be...) is just so easy.<p>Music is getting easier with products like Spotify, but what about quality freaks? Lots of people want FLAC, but don't buy CDs. When a real solution for this problem comes out, I'm sure people will flock too it.<p>TV? How does someone in Lithuania legitimately pay for HD American TV shows? He or she can't, but they can certainly steal it without any problems. It's not even hard. My grandma could do it. It's a similar problem with movies. Ridiculous release times (US only for two months, etc), difficult to get a 1080p mkv legitimately - but that's what people want.<p>Netflicks is certainly helping to solve this problem, but their catalogue is not extensive. It is not always up to date.<p><i></i>The only way to compete with piracy is to offer a better alternative.<i></i>
I was speaking to a friends dad at his last Christmas party. He was talking about downloading movies. I asked if he used a proxy. He said. "Of course I do. I use blah." He then told me how he checked to make sure it was working.. I was genuinely surprised that a casual internet user knew about proxies.<p>As always such domain bans are ridiculous and do not solve the issue of why people choose to pirate stuff. I now use Spotify. I used to pirate music, downloading thousands of albums. Most were deleted after one play. I brought albums, merchandise and saw live bands that I liked. Bands I would never have discovered without "pirating" the music to begin with.<p>The article talk's about how piracy is dropping and Spotify use is raising. This isn't to do with TPB being blocked. This is to do with people realizing that music discovery is easier with Spotify than it is via piracy. This is the way it should be.<p>I am sure less TV shows are being pirated due to the rise of catch up and streaming services. I only download TV shows and the only reason for this is the delay in availability in my country. I don't download movies any more because there is already an abundance of stuff to watch - be it new or old - on streaming services like Netflix. I recently discovered the TV show Jericho. Check it out. It was brilliant.<p>If anything these ban's are endangering users making them more vulnerable to viruses, keyloggers and becoming a part of a bot net. If someone wants something THEY WILL DOWNLOAD IT. Sites like TPB have great community moderation. Dodgy downloads are flagged. Good ones are up voted. I don't remember the last time I got a bad download.<p>Compare this to the less known sites which people are being pushed towards. More bad links, less community moderation, bad site owners pushing dodgy downloads. A lot of people who are not expert computer users are becoming more vulnerable.<p>All this is because the music / film lobbies have convinced the UK Government that Piracy is destroying their revenues. Its not. The Internet combined with the glacial speed in which these industries are moving is. Better content, easier access and fair pricing will crush piracy. Blocking domains moves piracy to another source.<p>Music streaming services have done more to stop piracy than anything else. If music / film industry spent less on lobbyists and court actions and more on innovating access to their products they would see a far bigger turnaround in profits.<p>When TPB was banned I said it would kick a ball rolling that wouldn't stop. Here we go. I wonder what is next.
The slippery slope has started.<p>This is why it's so important to fight with everything you have over the tiny scraps of civil liberties you enjoy. Once a bite is taken, the whole cake inevitably follows.
Everyone in the UK already knows how to use the thousands of proxies out there to access TPB. This will simply force the operators of the current proxy aggregators eg. <a href="http://ukbay.org/" rel="nofollow">http://ukbay.org/</a> to start aggregating proxies for these other sites as well. This will actually make finding pirated content easier.<p>But as we all know, the purpose of these laws isn't to stop piracy.
>However, a recent report from market research firm NPD suggested that there had been a large reduction in the number of users illegally downloading music, with fans instead favouring legal options like streaming site Spotify.<p>The implication that this block is what is resulting in an uptake in services like spotify is so disingenuous it's not even funny.
Time to move to Andrews and Arnold if you are in the UK:<p><a href="http://aaisp.com/" rel="nofollow">http://aaisp.com/</a><p>They have an explicit no censorship policy:<p><a href="http://aaisp.com/news-censorship.html" rel="nofollow">http://aaisp.com/news-censorship.html</a><p>Not only that, they offer IPv6 and their connection isn't a total piece of shit! Rather glad I moved from O2 (Telefonica) who apply the censorship and horrible traffic shaping even though they say they didn't on my contract.
It's really sad to see phonographic industry fighting piracy that way. There is a million of proxy sites which make Pirate Bay available in UK anyway...<p>The only way to deal with piracy is enable users to have access to they content they want in any possible way at affordable prices!<p>I used to download a lot of music, but since spotify offered Premium service for just 4 pounds a month in Poland I bought it instantly (I have Polish CC).<p>If Netflix had good XBMC app I would gladly pay for that as well.
If you'd like to support the fight against this kind of stupidity, please consider supporting the Open Rights Group. It's the UK equivalent of the EFF and they do great work.<p><a href="http://www.openrightsgroup.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.openrightsgroup.org/</a>
The torrent user experience is poor. You interact with tacky, ad-rich sites to download files that you have to open up in often buggy desktop client software before receiving a product of highly variable quality.<p>Contrast this with private trackers, which often offer:<p><pre><code> 1) Extremely high quality files.
2) Extremely well curated.
</code></pre>
Having used Spotify for the last year, I find the experience vastly inferior to when I used private torrent sites. Of course, I get to massage my conscience with the knowledge that I am paying real money. More and more though, I'm sceptical of how much of my money content producers ever see. I'm starting to feel the same distaste for Spotify as I do the traditional media distribution companies. More, I've lost that sense of building my own library of music.<p>Can it be so hard?<p><pre><code> 1) Low cost. Low middleman fees.
2) High quality product.
3) Absolute ownership of what I buy.
4) Good UX.
</code></pre>
Once this is done, there'll be no need to lobby for breaking the internet.
Ok. I really didn't care that the piratebay got blocked except for the legal precedent that created but as expected here comes the banning of every site remotely considered as "bad" by any corporate party.
We will all be old and gray talking about this magical thing called the internet where everybody was free to do whatever they wanted but young children would be looking at us like we're crazy because the never experienced it. It's all down hill from here folks.
I'm curious about which ISPs they're targeting, and whether that'll mean more business for the other ISPs.<p>A small number of file-sharing users can take a lot of bandwidth which wouldn't be a problem if the plans were priced realistically, but plans are priced for lowest-common-denominator use while being described and sold as premium product.