Thoughts on torrenting?

[Psydye]

Not everyone thinks too highly of this, but I think it can be a very useful tool on finding things that are no longer available materially, or at least just incredibly hard to find. What do you think? Where do you stand on torrenting?

[Neon Black]

I take no issue with it, be it legal torrenting or no. It's just a more decentralised method of sharing data online - and not just for pirates, it's also used extensively by the open source community where server overheads for small independent projects can be mitigated by sharing their work out to everyone else. It's also a reflection of the free software community's mantra: nobody should have to pay for their software, but everybody should do their part to help the spread of it.

By starting this thread I assume though that you're really referring to the torrenting of copyrighted material, as that's the contentious part of torrenting in the first place. Music and video piracy has always existed since the days of tape trading and as long as software's been around, so has software piracy.



Whether people are morally for, against or just neutral to piracy, it is now at a stage where it's a fixture and it is not going to stop. The industry has tried many times to put an end to it (most recently the highly expensive and meticulously planned takedown of The Pirate Bay, which brought the site to its knees for all of a few days before it popped up again elsewhere, with its content completely intact and unscathed).

Gabe Newell of Valve/Steam fame has said thus about piracy, and I think this is the best stance to take for any vendor, be it media, software, bands getting their music out, etc:

We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24-7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable.

Our goal is to create greater service value than pirates, and this has been successful enough for us that piracy is basically a non-issue for our company. For example, prior to entering the Russian market, we were told that Russia was a waste of time because everyone would pirate our products. Russia is now about to become our largest market in Europe.

Our success comes from making sure that both customers and partners feel like they get a lot of value from those services. They can trust us not to take advantage of the relationship that we have with them.