File-sharing site The Pirate Bay has been sold to a Swedish gaming company.

Global Gaming Factory (GGF) has paid 60m kronor (£4.7m) to take over the site from its founders.

Once it has taken control, GGF said it would start paying copyright fees for the movies, music and games linked to via the site.

…

GGF has not released details of how it will charge for the content downloaded via the site. The Pirate Bay will be handed over to GGF in August.

Despite the headline, I’m not really that upset with the owners for selling their site; they deserve to reap some reward for their creation. However, the idea that users will have to start paying for content they find through The Pirate Bay is a little worrying, to say the least. If it’s anything more than a nominal fee then I really don’t see how it will possibly work; users will just go elsewhere.

BBC News article.

This is from a few weeks ago. It’s 40 minutes long, so it’s possibly only of interest to other Nine Inch Nails fans.

Tyrannosaurus Reznor: best nickname ever.

Update: I googled Tyrannosaurus Reznor and found this. The song is ‘Pilgrimage’ from The Fragile.

A court in Sweden has jailed four men behind The Pirate Bay (TPB), the world’s most high-profile file-sharing website, in a landmark case.

Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde were found guilty of breaking copyright law and were sentenced to a year in jail.

They were also ordered to pay $4.5m (£3m) in damages.

[...]

Speaking to the BBC, the chairman of industry body the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) John Kennedy said the verdict sent out a clear message.

“These guys weren’t making a principled stand, they were out to line their own pockets. There was nothing meritorious about their behaviour, it was reprehensible.

“The Pirate Bay did immense harm and the damages awarded doesn’t even get close to compensation, but we never claimed it did.

“There has been a perception that piracy is OK and that the music industry should just have to accept it. This verdict will change that,” he said.

I’m downloading six torrents as I type this; nobody’s going to stop downloading music and films because of this trial. If anything, it will only make people less likely to pay for music and films, since everyone has been given fresh evidence that record companies and film studios are run by unpleasant people. I’ll never buy a CD again, but if I had the money I’d buy a Pirate Bay t-shirt to show my support for Messrs. Neij, Svartholm Warg, Lundstrom and Sunde, who are nothing short of internet heroes.

Long live The Pirate Bay!

I don’t want to big it up too much, but I think that TheLivingDeadbeat.com is set to be the best website of all time. However, in the interests of full disclosure I must reveal that Mr. Chainsaw, one of the site’s founders, and myself go back a long, long time…

Usually, when somebody links to a YouTube video and says “I bet you can’t sit through the whole thing!”, what they really mean is either “this is infuriating” or “this is dire”. Thus, it’s usually possible to sit through the video but it’s not very enjoyable to do so. However, there are times when the wager holds up, such as in this example, which I genuinely could not bear to watch anymore after about two minutes (the only reason I persevered with it for so long was that it had been linked with the warning that “[t]his is going to be the most difficult challenge of your life.”)

For a long time (or a few weeks at any rate) I did not think this feat could be repeated. How could something be so bad, so idiotic, so juvenile and so downright wrong that it could plumb to deeper depths of human degeneracy than that video? Well enter Stephen H. Webb, a professor of religion and philosophy at Wabash College, and his article about how “soccer”, by which he means football, is ruining America. The piece is in jest, of course; Webb doesn’t sincerely believe that football is destroying America. However, I can’t say this for certain, because the article is so goddamn bad that I couldn’t read it all. I presume that some of the things he says are purely for fun, and others mostly for fun but intended to illustrate what he thinks are serious points, or maybe he’s just a troll of epic proportions, but, whatever his intent, the whole thing made me seethe. I’m not even going to dig quotes out of it because the chore will just enrage me further. Go read it yourself, ‘if you dare!11′.

Update: I don’t want to start making a habit of this (see last post), but having calmed down a little bit and forced myself to look at the article in sections I find I’m now a little less upset with Prof. Webb. The last part of it was even kind of amusing. Webb just doesn’t understand the appeal of football, and he thinks that American sports are inherently better for a variety of reasons, and obviously I disagree with him on all of this. However, the article is neither “bad” nor “idiotic” nor “juvenile” nor “wrong”, it just wound me up, and so it looks like that YouTube clip remains the worst thing on the internet.

What are some of your most frequently visited sites?

NIN performing ‘March of the Pigs’ during their 2008 Lights in the Sky tour. Trent wanted to make a DVD from tour footage, but due to complications with his former record label Interscope it couldn’t be organised in time. So instead he had over 400 GBs worth of high-def footage recorded at three shows late in the tour, and he’s now made this available to fans for free so they can make their own DVD from it. I’m not sure how the whole thing is going to work out (some enterprising fans had already started compiling crowd-recorded footage into a live NIN project, which is where the video above is taken from), but I’m pretty sure the end result is going to be great, whatever it is. I just hope nobody tries to profit from it, since that would against the whole spirit of what Trent’s doing here.

So in conclusion, three cheers for Trent Reznor for his latest pioneering new media project and for giving us NIN fans more free stuff. If they announce an Irish date during their forthcoming European tour it’s going to keep me happy for weeks. Not just happy, delirious. It’s going to be, without doubt, the best concert ever. And if they don’t come here then I guess I’ll have to see them in the UK, at massive personal expense, but still, it’s NINE INCH FUCKING NAILS!11 AHHHHHHHHHHH!11

I think this Monday morning coffee might have been a bad idea. Now I have to go to the library. FUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCKKKKK!!!

I laughed anyway.

There’s a few things to be said about this. Firstly, the tone of “Fitna” is reportedly so over the top and hysterical that no sensible person would be swayed by whatever arguments it tries to make. Therefore, having it out in the public domain isn’t doing anyone any harm. You shouldn’t ban things just because some people, or even most people, don’t like them. As John Stuart Mill explained in On Liberty, it’s better to have incorrect views aired publicly, where they can be evaluated and rejected by society at large, rather than try to stifle their expression, and in the process create a kind of cult following around them.

Of course the problem here is not that “Fitna” was banned by a government, which would be an outrage, but that it was pulled by a website because of security concerns. Thus, yet again, intimidation has carried the day, as it did back 2005/2006 when newspaper editors across Europe caved into fear and refused to publish offensive-yet-newsworthy cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad. It is of course understandable that LiveLeak would remove the video after its staff receiving death threats and so on, but their decision is still disappointing.

However, the real villains of this piece are obviously not the LiveLeak management but the people behind the campaign of intimidation itself. Although their thuggery is remarkable, the most outstanding feature of these clowns is their stupidity. Through their crazed threats of violence they’ve managed to spin the news cycle 180º and have turned a minor news item about a scaremongering Dutch film into another major free speech issue in which the entire media establishment will be arrayed against them and not Geert Wilders. In fact, Wilders and his juvenile film are now likely morph from a minor and derided curiosity into a cause célèbre for the media, in which almost all of the political right and a good deal of the left will end up backing Wilders by default.

By strangling the release of “Fitna”, these enemies of free expression are only going to encourage more people to believe that maybe Geert Wilders has a point when he claims that Islam and Liberalism are incompatible. They’re making Wilders’ argument better than he could ever have, had he been allowed to speak.

While I was doing my GAMSAT exam (post due in the coming days, when I’m feeling less tired), Anonymous was busy protesting worldwide against the vile Church of Scientology. Good for them, and props to the guy with the longcat placard.