The Pirate Bay Purchased

In breaking news, (completely unrelated to Star Wars: The Old Republic as it's at least one thing that it won't have to worry about) it seems that popular torrent sharing site The Pirate Bay, which has been the target of much controversy and legal action and yet remained standing to provide people with torrents for often illegal file sharing, has been sold for $7.8M. And it seems that the new owners want to go legit. Here is (part of) the official press release:

STOCKHOLM, Jun 30, 2009 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- The listed software company, Global Gaming Factory X AB (publ) (GGF) acquires The Pirate Bay website, http://www.thepiratebay.org, one of the 100 most visited websites in the world and the technology company Peerialism, that has developed next generation file-sharing technology. Following the completion of the acquisitions, GGF intends to launch new business models that allow compensation to the content providers and copyright owners. The responsibility for, and operation of the site will be taken over by GGF in connection with closing of the transaction, which is scheduled for August 2009.

"We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site, " said Hans Pandeya, CEO GGF.

"The Pirate Bay is a site that is among the top 100 most visited Internet sites in the world. However, in order to live on, The Pirate Bay requires a new business model, which satisfies the requirements and needs of all parties, content providers, broadband operators, end users, and the judiciary. Content creators and providers need to control their content and get paid for it. File sharers 'need faster downloads and better quality, " continues Hans Pandeya.

It is interesting to note here that the press release talks about "content that is downloaded via the site", which is something the previous The Pirate Bay owners have always contended the site doesn't provide (they provide files, namely the torrents, that tell you where to find the content and not the content itself). This could either mean that they're planning to start hosting content (perhaps through The Video Bay, a YouTube-like service they launched earlier this week), or perhaps that whoever wrote the press release doesn't agree with the contention of the old The Pirate Bay crew.

Regardless, The Pirate Bay itself has the following message on their site:

TPB might change owner

Yes, it's true.

News reached the press today in Sweden - The Pirate Bay might get aquired by Global Gaming Factory X AB.

A lot of people are worried. We're not and you shouldn't be either!

TPB is being sold for a great bit underneath it's value if the money would be the interesting part. It's not. The interesting thing is that the right people with the right attitude and possibilities keep running the site.

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!

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. And - you can now not only share files but shares with people. Everybody can indeed be the owner of The Pirate Bay now. That's awesome and will take the heat of us.

The old crew is still around in different ways. We will also not stop being active in the politics of the internets - quite the opposite. Now we're fueling up for going into the next gear. 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.

The profits from the sale will go into a foundation that is going to help with projects about freedom of speech, freedom of information and the openess of the nets. I hope everybody will help out in that and realize that this is the best option for all. Don't worry - be happy!

I know that they call for visitors of their site to be positive, though I expect that might be part of the agreement as otherwise they'd devalue the property just after they sold it (which can't be legal). I just can't help thinking of Napster with that, which has a popular music sharing program which ran afoul of legal shenanigans and was forced to go legit, upon which everyone stopped using the once extremely popular service.

Interesting development at least, I wonder where this goes and what'll happen next. If anything, The Pirate Bay does seem to make for interesting stories.

Thanks to Kotaku, VG247 and Voodoo Extreme for originally reporting the news.

Michael Jackson is Dead

I was just about to head to bed when I came across this news. Today the once King of Pop, Michael Jackson, has passed away. L.A. Times reports:

[Updated at 3:15 p.m.: Pop star Michael Jackson was pronounced dead by doctors this afternoon after arriving at a hospital in a deep coma, city and law enforcement sources told The Times.]

It seems that he was found not breathing in his house and was rushed to hospital, where he slipped into a coma and then died.

Now I know that he's had a lot of negative press over the last (two) decade(s) or so, whether deserved or not. And I didn't really care much for him anymore. But in my youth he was the King of Pop and my number one favorite musician. I listened to all his records and loved his music. "Thriller", "Billy Jean", "Beat It", "Bad", "Smooth Criminal"... I've just been looking through his singles discography again and it just brings back so many memories.

And I have to admit that I was rather curious as to what his comeback would do, whether he'd bring us more new music on-par with his old work. Unfortunately that will never happen.

My condolences to his family and my thanks to Michael for giving us so much wonderful music, regardless of what happened after.

Death of Two Davids

Among all the glitz and excitement of E3 I regret having to report the, unrelated, deaths of two of my heroes. Or, at least, two persons I quite admired.

First is actor David Carradine, who apparently died through suicide by hanging in his Bangkok hotel The Escapist reports. He is best known for his role leading role in the Western series Kung Fu. And, more recenty, for playing Bill in Quentin Tarantino Kill Bill. Though I don't know the man himself, when seeing him act he always came across as a very charismatic man to me and I am saddened that he seemed to have found no other way out of whatever troubled him beyond taking his own life.

The second is, to me, an even bigger blow as the writer David Eddings has passed away as well, The Escapist reports. Best know for his fantasy novels The Belgariad and The Malloreon, I greatly enjoyed his books when I was young. In fact, I can honestly say that it is because of him (as well as Tolkien and Terry Pratchett) that I am such a fan of fantasy writing, buying all his books as soon as they were available and reading them voraciously. I think I have more of his books than any other author and he had a major impact on my life. That he is now gone from us is, I feel, a great loss to the world.

A sad day.

PC Game Piracy Examined

Seems today is a day for updates that have little to do with SW: TOR. Though this is a little related considering that I noticed the following article first on the SW: TOR forums.

Someone there posted a long and quite in-depth article looking at the issue of PC game piracy, trying to keep as neutral a stance as possible and trying to look at the issue from all angles. It's quite a long read, but if you're in any way interested in the issue of piracy and how it affects PC Gaming then I would suggest that you read it in its entirety.

Here's how the article itself puts it and I quite agree:

I decided it was time to compile an article which takes a close look at every facet of PC game piracy with a view to hopefully clarifying the debate with a range of facts. I'm not looking to repeat the same old one-sided, superficial examinations of PC piracy that you'll find everywhere else. What this article does is examine PC game piracy in a logical manner, taking into consideration a range of publicly available evidence to provide an informed view of the current state of play. I encourage those of you who are genuinely interested in this topic to take the time to make your way through this rather long but thorough article, as I believe it provides a great deal of food for thought for those willing to read it.

I think that a lot in the article is fairly common sense, but with the general panic and hate around DRM solutions and the state of PC gaming in general I think common sense is exactly what's needed. And there's a fair amount of data and linked articles and such to back up the findings.

PC Game Piracy Examined

I highly recommend reading it.

Spore Most Pirated Game of 2008

That subject title, or something close to it, seems to be doing the rounds as a headline now. Apparently TorrentFreak released a list of the ten-most pirated (through BitTorrent) games with Spore unspurpisingly leading the list:

1	Spore	(1,700,000)
2	The Sims 2	(1,150,000)
3	Assassins Creed	(1,070,000)
4	Crysis	(940,000)
5	Command & Conquer 3	(860,000)
6	Call of Duty 4	(830,000)
7	GTA San Andreas	(740,000)
8	Fallout 3	(645,000)
9	Far Cry 2	(585,000)
10	Pro Evolution Soccer 2009	(470,000)

The message that people seem to be distilling out of this, including the original TorrentFreak site, is that Spore was pirated so much because of its DRM measures. After all, at about the time of the release of the game there was a huge ‘panic’ around the DRM measures that Spore would employ. And the general thought seems to be that because of these DRM measures a lot of people pirated the game where they otherwise wouldn’t have.

There may be truth to that. Or at least, there may be truth that because of the panic around its DRM that more people decided to pirate the game than would’ve otherwise be the case. Though I think this has more to do with the panic surrounding it and not actually with the DRM (Mass Effect, after having been scaled down due to more panic, uses the same DRM and people seemed overall quite happy with that). I’ll at least concede that DRM in one way or another had an effect on the number of pirated copies.

But beyond that I think it’s hogwash to say that these numbers prove in any way, shape or form that DRM is responsible for more pirated copies. In fact, I say that on their own these numbers are fairly useless. You see, I believe that Spore was pirated more simply because it was a far more popular game.

You see, the TorrentFreak site says that after ten days already half-a-million had downloaded the game, but by that time the game already had near to a million copies sold. And three weeks after release, the game was already close to two million copies sold. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if by now that number had already doubled to close to four million copies (but I don’t have any data to back that up).

And you see that in the rest of the list as well. It reads a lot more as a list of “which games were popular this year” than a list of which games were pirated more. To get a true representation of which games were pirated more you have to compare the number of pirated copies to the number of total sales. Then any game that has a significantly higher portion of pirated copies to legitimate sales is a game that’s been pirated a lot more (and I’m guessing that the DRM-free World of Goo is likely to top that particular list, though there too saying that DRM has much to do with it is misleading).

People are, in my opinion, way too quick to attribute pirating to DRM and success to a lack of DRM. The truth is that pirates pirate everything regardless of DRM or not and people are all too quick to find any excuse to justify doing something illegal, particularly if it feels like they’re not directly hurting anyone as a result. I think that there are a lot of people who jumped on the Spore DRM bandwagon as an excuse for them to pirate a game and thus be able to play it without paying for it, regardless of whether any DRM issues were justified or not. The way to protest against something in a game (like its DRM) is by simply not buying it, not by pirating it.

Don’t get me wrong here, I don’t think that DRM is the solution to the problems and even though I think that StarDock is getting far more popularity due to their stance on DRM than they deserve they do have a point in that it is continued online content delivery which is the surest measure against pirating. And I can see us heading to a future where all games, single-player or multiplayer, are streamed online (or perhaps even played directly on servers with local machines just displaying the results, so to speak). That way games simply can’t be pirated since you need an online connection and a legitimate account to be able to play the game. And until then I do believe that companies continuing to provide additional value to your games online is a good way to go.

Luckily such pirating issues aren’t really of a concern to MMO games (and hence why I think that MMOs are currently the most popular form of gaming on the PC as there companies know that they always keep full control). There’s little point in pirating a game if you have to pay a monthly subscription to play it anyway.