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The Grey Area Website
By Max | August 14, 2007
A reader of this blog pointed me to this sale over at Sitepoint. He asked for my opinion of the site and the sale. I thought I would review it here for everyone’s benefit.
If you browse Sitepoint often enough, you’ll see several sites for sale that fall into what I like to call the “grey” area. Actually, some are downright illegal, but there are a lot that may or may not be legal depending on the country and the practice.
This particular site makes money by charging the uninitiated a fee to show them how to download movies presumably via torrent searches. While the site hosts no movies itself, it is certainly playing a part in the piracy of copyrighted material. I don’t really know if this site is legal or not. One of you will probably have a better idea than I do. Even if it is technically legal, I would still be cautious about purchasing a site like this.
One problem is that the site makes money from an illegal practice, the downloading of copyrighted material. In the short life of the internet, the preferred method of downloading illegal content has changed several times. Napster got shut down. Then came the Gnutella clients. Kazaa came and went. Now we have bit-torrent and the torrent search sites. In each case, the RIAA and other similar organizations have swooped in and rendered the technology nearly useless. This forces the emergence of new schemes for downloading. Torrents as a format seem here to stay, but many of the large torrent search sites are under attack. Who knows how long it will take to shut down some of the more popular ones?
The risk in purchasing a site like this is that you are almost guaranteed to have to update the program to account for changes in the illegal download environment. That would be the best case scenario. It is possible that a simple update wouldn’t be sufficient. If the method for downloading changes too drastically, its possible the program can’t be updated to continue the service. Or even worse, the RIAA could target your site specifically forcing an expensive legal battle. This could happen to get you to shut down regardless of the legality of your site.
I stay away from these types of purchases. Unless you really know what you’re getting yourself into, you should too.
Topics: Website Valuation |
August 14th, 2007 at 11:27 am
These kind of sites don’t interest me. I know someone that is working on a site that makes moving copyrighted material easier with an ipod. I told him he is nuts but he thinks it is fair use.
August 14th, 2007 at 2:15 pm
One could easily replicate that site’s backend, providing a much better user experience for way less money.
If it’s aimed at newbies, why not filter the repetitive listings and only offer one or two links to Spiderman 3, etc. Instead they just let it all hang out like typical torrent sites do.
Thanks for the heads up Max.
August 14th, 2007 at 2:28 pm
Joshua,
Did you end up getting a demo account to check the site out?
August 14th, 2007 at 2:38 pm
Yeah I did. It’s pretty basic back there.
Not designed overly well or aimed overly well towards the newbie market.
I think you’d retain and generate more word-of-mouth if it were a lot slicker.
August 14th, 2007 at 4:07 pm
I would be very hesitant to spend more than 5k on anything that is dodgy let alone his BIN of 320k!, I wouldn’t count his revenue for crap as that could very easily disappear tomorrow with a a couple letters from the RIAA or MPAA. Torrent sites are here to stay I think but they will constantly be under attack and thats they are best having webmasters/owners in foreign countries with anti-american governments.