Google versus The Pirate Google
All the recent excitement about The Pirate Bay dragged uncomfortable arguments to the fore. Yes, The Pirate Bay was rather flagrant about its enabling access to copyrighted material. But when it boils down to it, The Pirate Bay is merely a search service for finding torrents—torrents that can also be legal, such as videogame demo downloads.
A whole bunch of people noted that The Pirate Bay was being singled out, in an attempt to provide a high-profile casualty and scare similar sites into shutting down. But much larger sites also provide access to torrents, notably Google (via a ‘filetype:torrent’ query).
The logical upshot of this was The Pirate Google, available from thepirategoogle.com. This site merely provides a front-end to a torrent-specific Google search, in the same way thousands of other sites provide access to Google Custom Search. The point is to show that Google’s functionality isn’t, in some cases, a million miles away from The Pirate Bay’s.
Google, apparently, thought differently. At the time of writing, Google’s blocked access to The Pirate Google. I’ll bet the official reasoning is down to the site’s name, in suggesting there’s some link between ‘piracy’ (bootlegging) and Google. It’ll be interesting to see if Google does the same if someone decides to create an identical site with a less controversial name.
I’ve been using torrents to download t.v concerts from around the world that would never see the light of day here in the useless states of america for years, what’s the ‘harm’ in that, these concerts are rarely, if ever released on dvd so who exactly am I ‘ripping off’? if they are released, I purchase them.
I have, for example, 4-5 excellent quality Tom Waits dvd concerts, NONE of whichn are available on dvd and, if Tom follows form, never will be.
I have around 12=15 Radiiohead concerts from around the world and yes, I purchased the ONE available one when it became available.
MOST artists make their money when on tour, so I also purchase, when possible, those tickets. This is all about the ‘labels’, who have been ripping US off for years.