Courts Force Danish ISP to Block Torrent Tracker 145
Pirate writes "A Danish court ruled in favor of the IFPI, and ordered the Danish ISP Tele2 to block all access to the popular BitTorrent tracker. The Pirate Bay, currently ranked 28th in the list of most visited sites in Denmark, is working on countermeasures."
Re:what's next? (Score:5, Insightful)
First purpose:
Google is a very general search engine, it hosts nothing. The question of its cache is still up for debate, but things can and have been removed from it. Google can not arguably be considered responsible for what is linked to on its site, since it controls nothing outside of the google domain (unless explicitly noted.)
TPB is very specific, they host torrents and make no bones about it. They host trackers, which coordinate the transfers. They are in every way responsible for the torrents being uploaded, though it's the users that are actively violating the copyrights.
And intent:
Google is essentially a query driven directory where (the majority of) results point externally to the site. Google directs anyone to anything that matches the search term with no mind paid to the content, the author of the content or the poster of the content. Were you to remove the Google cache (the only part that arguably violates copyright,) Google would continue to function.
TPB is dedicated around the hosting and location of torrents. Were you to remove the tracker and delist torrents of material whose distribution via bittorrent was not permitted, TPB's usefulness would plummet massively. The same goes for pretty much any site like TPB.
The purpose and intent of search engines and sites like TPB are very, very different.
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
Usually a given business will do its level best to avoid solutions that are expensive and practically worthless... unless they're desperate, at which point a dying business will begin to clutch at anything and everything to save itself - no expenses spared.
Doesn't anyone stop and think before they act anymore? Forget the fact that rights are being trampled for a minute: This is just wasteful and insane on the IFPI's part, a "solution" akin to transporting water around with a giant colander.
One has to wonder at the sheer stupidity of certain industries these days...
Re:IFPI (Score:5, Insightful)
1. TPB is illegal under Danish law
2. TPB is legal under Swedish law
Now, at this point they can react in one of three ways:
1. Give up any sort of jurisdiction because everyone "is" in Sweden from their livingroom chair. This is different than going to the Netherlands to smoke pot, it's more like routing money over your offshore account. This would make the whole world subject to the least common denominator forbidden on the Internet, which they're powerless to change. Countries like USA would have to permit international gambling and artistic nudes too strong for the US public, Germany would have to give up its hate speech and nazi memorabilia ban and don't get me started on what the oppressive regimes would have to give up. In short, not happening.
2. Try to strike at the foreign site and exercise some kind of world law via cheap shots like threatening local subsidiaries. This has generally been frowned upon by slashdot, the companies themselves that don't want to deal with every other country's law and the local courts, which feel they're being overrun by foreign law and are losing their soverignity. In the most extreme consequence, the world would be subject to the least common denominator allowed on the Internet, which would obviously be a terrible thing for the whole free world.
3. Block it at the border, keep our law in our country and lat you have your law in your country. Yes, you're building border infrastructure that could potentially be used to censor other traffic. Then again, the real-world border infrastructure we're building could potentially be used to prevent the population from escaping like in the old East Bloc, I'd say a lot of other things would have to go very wrong first before we're there. I don't want the most presmissive or the most oppressive community standard and there's no such thing as one unified global community standard. Hell, you'll find it very difficult to find one within the US or EU or even smaller areas. And a forced global standard would be the ultimate lack of local governance...
Re:they don't get it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not surprising, Danish courts are pro-right own (Score:2, Insightful)
PS: And I might even sell you my apartment. It's pretty close to the subway station opening up in 2011 - for even faster travelling to Cph
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
So, what does this boring explanation have to do with the record industry and why they are doomed? Because at one time, they were making lots of money making a product. But it just wasn't enough for them. They had to show continual growth and they did so by cannibalizing their best modes of marketing their products. Internet Radio, for instance. For decades, radio has existed to promote record sales. Internet radio was doing that very thing when the the record industry, realizing that someone was making money that wasn't them, decided they had to either get any money that Internet Radio was making or at least destroy Internet Radio while trying.
Back in the 80s, cool young MBAs used to say "Greed is Good". There was even a popular movie that said that very thing. They were completely wrong, and now that those 1980 vintage MBAs are turning 50 and realizing that all those BMWs and condos and blow-job rings they bought their girlfriends on credit now have to be paid for, and that congress, acting at the behest of the credit industry passed a bankruptcy bill that takes away their only out, things are looking kind of shitty.
Greed is not good. Teach your kids.
Re:what's next? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:what's next? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:what's next? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well... (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, with pretty much every client supporting trackerless torrents nowadays, Joe Dane won't have to do anything; it will simply take a bit longer for the torrent to find peers and pick up speed.
No, the real issue here is that the courts even tried. Nordic countries a nice place to live, but lately they have suffered from creeping copyrightism: Lex Karpela in Finland, the illegal raids and harrasment against the perfectly legal Pirate Bay in Sweden, and now a Danish court trying to make an ISP into a censorship enforcement agency. I hate seeing my home turning into yet another corporate state.
I guess this goes to show, once again, that copyright is fundamentally incompatible with any other rights and should be abolished completely. As long as it exists in any form, it will always seek to grow and increase its reach by one outrageous abuse of the legal system after another.
Re:Well... (Score:3, Insightful)
1) The Pirate Bay is widely used for distribution by the content makers themselves.
2) It's not illegal to share files with your friends. It's considered fair use. Internet makes it possible for us to have millions of friends, and no evil information monopoly mafia is allowed to put a limit of how many friends one can have.
3) Authors and musicians have no rights what so ever to filter communications between people. People have the right to share information and files with each other, so yes: It includes sharing stuff that someone has the publishing monopoly for.
4) Authors and musicians have a time limited (not so limited as it should) exclusive right to publish their work. "publish" is to show it in a movie theatre, print a book or sell CD. Putting up a torrent that people can find in a search isn't. It's "sharing", which is a nice thing that people should do more often!
Fair use = People's rights = Pirate's rights (Score:5, Insightful)
What about fair use? Imagine you're going to download a Scientology secret document exposing the cult's evil activity. You can't do it LEGALLY. This is just an example of legality != morality.
Another example. Let's suppose you're going to analyze the written works of a meditation guru that you suspect is a scammer. If you bought them from him, you'd be contributing to HIS cause. However, if you just download them you can get your work done.
Third example. Try before you buy. There's a new Anime that your friends recommended, and you wonder whether to buy it or not. But unless you watch a significant portion of it, you won't know if it's worth buying it... so you get a fansubbed version from the internet. Or what about a piece of music?
Reality isn't always black and white like media companies want us to believe. First of all, virtual works fall outside the bound of supply and demand, because it's extremely cheap to copy, since you can create additional copies out of thin air (or thin CD's for that matter). With the internet, you don't even need CD's. Therefore, infringing copyright cannot be assured to be stealing - specially if the downloader couldn't buy the item anyway.
And if the content that someone wants to LEGALLY PURCHASE isn't available on his third-world country and he'd have to spend twice the money on overseas shipping and handling, it's much easier to download from the pirate bay. And it wouldn't be stealing. Pirate works also help authors increase the exposure of their works.
And take into account the corporations' monopolic practices like price fixing, exclusivity contracts, selling by bundles to raise the prise, etc. All these things stiffle creativity and tend to produce extremely bad quality "artworks".
Imagine if there were no pirate copies of movies. We'd be forced to purchase tickets for Battlefield Earth or some other blockbuster failures, but guess what, there's no refund for non-enjoyment. Even if the movie sucked, you couldn't get your money back.
In your innocence you seem to think that all money paid goes to the artists. In your dreams. Most money really goes to a bunch of middlemen who exploit the artists. (Hint: Why do you think the writers' guild is on strike?). And let's not forget about Trent Reznor of NIN, who is very vocal about his support for people pirating ("stealing") his works. ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mm6rc7hcFE [youtube.com] ). This makes you ask yourself, who is REALLY trampling on people's rights? Is it really the pirates, or the corporate giants? And for every LEGAL purchase of RIAA-produced music, you give money to the same bastards who sue random people JUST BECAUSE THEY CAN [blogspot.com].
Just because the MAJORITY of the works there are copyrighted doesn't mean that all are. The Pirate Bay - and all bittorrent trackers, for that matter - is also used to distribute authorized works like Linux distributions, free (and legal) copies of Paulo Coelho's works, open documentation (like Open Source Software manuals), homemade videos, hacker guides (whether using them is legal or not, is outside this scope), fair use works like AMV Hell, doujinshi, webcomics (which are available online for free, anyway).
Here are just some examples of AUTHORIZED content found in the Pirate Bay:
h [thepiratebay.org]
Re:Well... (Score:3, Insightful)
If anything, teaching people that it's damaging to seek more material wealth will hurt the economy more. Greed isn't the problem, hyper-consumption is; all things in moderation and all that gab.