prepare to be boarded
i can’t really blame the TPB guys for throwing in the towel — those crafty swedes been fighting the good fight for a long time, against some real heavies. what’s galling is this ludicrous, self-serving statement they’ve posted:
As all of you know, there’s not been much news on the site for the past two-three years. It’s the same site essentially. On the internets, stuff dies if it doesn’t evolve. We don’t want that to happen.
We’ve been working on this project for many years. It’s time to invite more people into the project, in a way that is secure and safe for everybody. We need that, or the site will die. And letting TPB die is the last thing that is allowed to happen!
heck yes! that would be a disaster. and inviting a for-profit corporation with plans “to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content” to the table sure sounds like a terrific way to foster innovation and maintain the vitality of the site. it’s how napster has managed to stay atop the technocultural-relevance heap all these years, after all. unless…
If the new owners will screw around with the site, nobody will keep using it. That’s the biggest insurance one can have that the site will be run in the way that we all want to.
mm hmm. maybe this is just me being cynical, but bear with me for a second. do you think maybe it’s possible that the new owners — whoever the fuck they are — don’t particularly want or expect the site to succeed? that a lot of very wealthy and powerful interests have already spent years and millions trying, precisely, to create a situation where “nobody will keep using it”? i’m not sayin’, i’m just sayin’: haven’t some unscrupulous characters been known, at times, to take out “insurance” on properties that then mysteriously burn down?
naaah! those guys would never intentionally mislead us in order to put a transparently cheerful spin on their total annihilation in court, and certainly not in adorable skwisgaar-like broken english. just look how excited they are about this great new opportunity:
TPB will have economical muscles to let people evolve it. It will team up with great technicians to evolve the protocols. And we, the people interested in more than just technology, will have the time to focus on that. It’s win-win-win.
… I hope everybody will help out in that and realize that this is the best option for all. Don’t worry – be happy!
golly! i, for one, can’t wait.
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I was just reading a blog about what it will take to end piracy. The author suggests that you can spend all day fighting it, or you can say, “We, as an industry, must be doing something wrong.” Dave Perry is also working on a really cool technology called Gaikai. In this video demo he shows how, with Gaikai, you can run Spore, MarioKart 64, Photoshop, World of Warcraft… all through your web browser, without a plugin:
Gaikai Technology Demo (JULY 1, 2009) from David Perry on Vimeo.
on a recent macworld podcast i heard, the consensus view was that apple has essentially made peace with the inevitable jailbreaking, accepting that a certain segment of their market is always going to want to bust open the hardware and fiddle with it. instead of cracking down, they’re tolerating it and simply refusing support outside the terms of the warranty. seems like a reasonable compromise: you’d prefer people stick with the original firmware and use their iPhones in ways intended by apple, but you effect the desired behavior by incentivizing it rather than by trying to punish those who behave otherwise. i choose not to jailbreak because, largely thru the app store, they’ve offered me an attractive alternative to total user-control which includes a certain level of support. i’m free to go the other way if i choose, with no hard feelings or retaliation on apple’s part, but then i accept the consequences of my choice, including the possibility of bricking — kind of a sartrean attitude, total freedom equals total responsibility and whatnot. they’re betting that more people will choose option A, which seems smart to me, and perhaps illustrative of the kind of truce content providers are going to have to make with consumers in order to stay viable. who knows? maybe TPB 2.0 will be something along these lines…