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Copyright Holders Have to 'Resend' Millions of Pirate Bay Takedown Notices:
After several weeks of absence, The Pirate Bay became accessible again through its main .org domain last weekend.
At first sight the site looked more or less the same but there are some significant changes, both under the hood and in appearance.
Many users immediately noticed that the site doesn't work well with several ad blockers. Whether this is a bug or a feature is the question, but it was both frustrating and annoying for some.
[...] With the new Pirate Bay design also comes a new URL structure. Instead of the old torrent pages that were accessible through thepiratebay.org/torrent/12345, the format has now changed to thepiratebay.org/description.php?id=12345.
Other URLs, including categories, the top lists, and user pages, all updated as well. To give another example, the 100 most-active torrents on the site can now be accessed from thepiratebay.org/search.php?q=top100:all, instead of the old thepiratebay.org/top/all.
For users, this isn't a problem. All old links simply redirect to new ones. However, for copyright holders, it's an outright disaster as it means that they will have to resend all their takedown notices.
[...] Looking at Google's transparency report we see that copyright holders have asked the search engine to remove more than five million URLs. Pretty much all of these notices have been rendered useless.
For example, this 2012 takedown notice from Paramount Pictures removed the link to The Pirate Bay's top 100 video torrents. However, after the update, the same page reappeared under a new URL. Another consideration is that Google is just one search engine, so the same applies to other search engines too.
Previously:
(2020-04-11) Pirate Bay No Longer Uses Cloudflare, Visitors Sent to 'Black Hole'
(2020-04-09) Anti-Piracy Copyright Lawyer Decides to Abuse Trademarks to Shut Down Pirates
(2020-04-07) Movie Company Boss Urges U.S. Senators to Make "Streaming Piracy" a Felony
(2020-03-26) Supreme Court Rules States are Not Liable for Copyright Violations
(2020-03-23) The Invisible Man, Emma, and The Hunt Hit Pirate Sites after Rushed Video on Demand Releases
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Monday April 20 2020, @06:00PM (3 children)
You mention science-fiction and fantasy.
One of the major publishers of science-fiction and fantasy, Tor, sells all their ebooks without copy protection.
One science fiction author reports that he has kept one of his books on the New York Times best-seller list by posting a blog entry giving the ebook away for free every time it threatened to drop off the list. Every time he did this, sales picked up again.
They seem to have gotten the message.
Yet they are still profitable.
-- hendrik
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday April 21 2020, @12:09AM (2 children)
Some of them have gotten it, yes. Cory Doctorow is notable for that. Is he the SF author you mean?
Good for Tor. Baen also. They launched their Baen Free Library some years ago, stocked it with older material that had fallen out of print. I understand it worked, and their sales rose.
Yet these are small steps. Ultimately, fee for copy is unworkable. We all know this, but I think it worthwhile to spell it out anyway. Audio CDs were big in the late 1980s, and the system worked okay because the means to copy them were out of reach of ordinary folk. Best we could do was cassette tape. The 1990s saw the arrival of the CD-ROM drive, then the CD burner, the incredible leap in hard drive capacity, the mp3 audio codec and computers fast enough to decode it in real time, and home Internet. All the pieces were there, and Napster put them together. Big Media treated them to a vicious and hysterical legal lynching that of course utterly failed to turn back the clock. They've been trying that one again, on the Pirate Bay, and it too has failed miserably. When they managed to pervert and corrupt the legal process to hand them an unjustified victory against the Pirate Bay, with the far too harsh punishment of prison time for the operators, they seemed to expect that the public's belief in the justice system would result in general acceptance. They found out how wrong they were. People were not fooled. In the backlash, the Pirate Party won its first seats in the next election.
Now we have flash drives that hold over 100 times as much data as a CD, likewise with hard drives, and home Internet is inexorably getting faster. You hardly bother downloading just one song now, no, you download a collection, perhaps just one album, or perhaps the entire published output of one artist, and throw away or ignore the stuff you don't want. What used to take dozens of boxes of vinyl records now fits in a pocket. It's only going to get more powerful. They should be building new ways of making a living from art, not fighting these hopeless rearguard actions. They really aren't, and still haven't accepted that securing control of copying is a lost cause.
I love e-books. Dumped most of my paperbacks for them. Can do lots of cool data mining on e-books that is totally impractical with paper. For instance, I was curious how often Lord of the Rings mentions "money". A quick search of the text turned up every reference. Until the final chapter in the final book, chapter 10 of the 1st book is the last serious mention, with it used one more time in an expression in the next chapter. Might have thought it would be mentioned at least a few times in connection with the famously money-grubbing dwarfs, but no. Gold, yes, money, no. Just can't do that with paperbacks.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday April 22 2020, @10:19PM
No, it wasn't Cory Doctorow I was thinking of. But he does give away electronic versions of his writing for free from his web site. He started doing it when he started publishing his writing because he needed to stand out in some way in order to get noticed.
The author I mentioned was already an established top-ten author when he started doing it. But I forget his name.
-- hendrik
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 23 2020, @07:14PM
Sorry to nit, but cassettes were hardly the best we could do. The old Reel-to-Reel was a great duplicator and Hi-Fi enabled VCRs would both easily surpass cassettes for sound quality. Some of us were using these to make "better" copies of the CD since many of the earlier CDs were poorly mastered for the CD media (excessive highs typically).