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The Pirate Bay Is Back Online
Posted by
timothy
on Sat Jun 03, 2006 07:37 AM
from the have-those-responsible-been-sacked? dept.
from the have-those-responsible-been-sacked? dept.
Many readers have submitted news that The Pirate Bay is back online, operating for now as "The Police Bay." Writes one anonymous submitter: "Pirate Bay got new hardware, moved the servers abroad and used recent backups. So the only bad side-effect of this police raid is that hundreds of clients of the ISP PRQ still have not got their servers back from the police. When the police did the raid on Wednesday, they took Pirate Bay from Bankgirot's secure server room. Then they also took all the servers in PRQ colocation facility STH3, effectively disabling a lot of small companies. The connection between PRQ and TPB? - Same owners, nothing more, this is beginning to become a huge scandal in Sweden with coverage on TV and all newspapers 4 days in a row."
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Digital Media Winners and Losers of 2006 36 comments
An anonymous reader writes "MP3 Newswire released its annual list of winners and losers in digital media for 2006. Winners include Azureus, the Pirate Bay, and YouTube. The losers list includes Streamcast, Captain Copyright (and his sidekick Lieutenant Lame), and the Online Guitar Archive. At the bottom of the post are links to past year's winners and losers lists."
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Sucks to be the MPAA... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.consoleia.co.uk/)
Re:Sucks to be the MPAA... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.megacity.org/)
Re:Sucks to be the MPAA... (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html | Last Journal: Friday August 11 2006, @09:20PM)
Considering last weekend Google Video had a full copy (view and download) of "Fear and Loathing" I'd say they're tied. Hell, at one point it was number 35. I'm sure there was somekind of age-check-before-download (there has to be a single, cool word in German for that) to protect the children from such dangerous thoughts.
A cache of the page: http://64.233.179.104/search?q=cache:ZwUcUdtinKUJ: video.google.com/videoplay%3Fdocid%3D-572069601692 0047541+google-video%2Bfear-and+loathing&hl=en&gl= us&ct=clnk&cd=1&client=firefox [64.233.179.104]
Shpxva' terng.
Re:Sucks to be the MPAA... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.megacity.org/)
Re:Sucks to be the MPAA... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Sucks to be the MPAA... (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://stiffproposition.com/)
OK the answer is obvious, but what happens when all the torrent sites are shut down? Does the MPAA go after the search engines next?
Re:Sucks to be the MPAA... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.wherethesundontshine.net/ | Last Journal: Tuesday May 27 2003, @04:48PM)
Incidentally, when's the last time YOU won a game of "whack-a-mole" with an infinite number of levels?
Re:Sucks to be the MPAA... (Score:5, Informative)
(http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Wednesday August 22 2001, @07:50PM)
Hence no one can be totally sure whether The Pirate Bay is legal in Sweden, because the legal precedent is not 100% clear. The question if intent should be very interesting here. While it should be evident that The Pirate Bay is set up with intent that people should be able to use it to commit crimes, the proprietors have no knowledge of what copyright infringement users are going to commit and no direct intent that those specific crimes will be committed.
The claim that Sweden doesn't have laws against "contributory infringement" is wrong, however.
Re:Sucks to be the MPAA... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Sucks to be the MPAA... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Sucks to be the MPAA... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Sucks to be the MPAA... (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Thursday September 21 2006, @07:20AM)
Re:Sucks to be the MPAA... (Score:4, Informative)
(http://www.houghi.org/)
In Belgium (where I am from) the cout has stated that it won't go after distributors who just share. It will only go after people who do copyright infrengements for money.
So what would happen is the following. **AA gives the IP to the police. The police brings it to the court and the court drops the case. As this brings unneeded work to the police, they would NOT be happy with it.
The local version of the **AA have tried to bring cases to court and where told to come back when money was exchanged. They also have tried to intimidate providers and some just informed their customers that they MIGHT be doing illegal and that that would be against the AUP. However as long as there is no courtcase, a provider can not give my information to SABAM (the local organisation) and they are not allowed to look wether I am sharing the latest SUSE torrent, a movie I made myself or the movie Daens.
Re:Sucks to be the MPAA... (Score:4, Insightful)
(Not that I don't agree with their service. The MPAA does deserve to go out of business. But claiming innocence about the service's intended usage is pushing it a little bit too far...)
Re:Sucks to be the MPAA... (Score:5, Insightful)
The police raid of TPB (at the direction of the United States) is widely believed to have been illegal under the laws of the country in which the raid took place. Attempting to applying U.S. legal theory to the situation does not magically change the jurisdiction.
Yeah, so what? I don't care about the raid, I am simply pointing out that TPB is happy to help with piracy. They don't host the material, OK. They're in the clear wrt Swedish law, OK. So what? It does not mean you can pretend that piracy does not take place thanks to their portal. Then if their law allows this, more power to them.
Why does the United States and some of its citizens believe respecting the sovereignty of nations is optional?
I don't know, ask an American. In the meantime, were you in favour or against the bombing raids on Milosevic? What do you think of regulating the activity of farmers in my country so that the farmers in yours get a better/worse ROI? And I could make countless examples... Don't believe Europe is immune to this kind of games. The USA are definitely not alone.
Re:Sucks to be the MPAA... (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://indigoparadox.livejournal.com/)
Re:Sucks to be the MPAA... (Score:4, Funny)
(http://slashdot.org/)
Re:Sucks to be the MPAA... (Score:5, Informative)
No. Their sole purpose is to host torrent files. Whether those are torrents of copyrighted works or public domain works is not something they consider, they host them either way. So your statement is inaccurate.
Google removes things from the cache, the pirate bay tells people to fuck off.
Well, duh. When its in google's cache, they are directly hosting it on their servers- that's a crime, no ambiguity included. Do you think they clear all pages of sites like TPB or www.torrentspy.com from their cache as well? Of course not, because they know its not illegal. In fact... hey look, a google cache of a page linking directly to a torrent file of a copyrighted work! [72.14.203.104]
Re:Sucks to be the MPAA... (Score:4, Funny)
The Curse of the Pirate Bay
Pirates of the Baltic Sea
The Return of the Pirate Bay
Can you think of others? Let them know at www.mpaa.org!
The Top ten (Score:5, Funny)
(http://yoharryo.wordpress.com/)
Re:The Top ten (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.hylobatidae.org/minerva/)
Quiet, you - it's not criminally illegal, it's rightcopy defringement, or something like that. Yeah. It's in Sweden, and they're pirates, so that makes it absolutely all right. The fact that Sweden's got some odd legal loophole which makes it not a crime to post links to copyrighted material means that it's therefore absolutely not a crime to go ahead and download any of this copyrighted material, laws in the users' native countries be damned. Swedish pirates say what they're doing is fine, so therefore everything else they facilitate is too!
Erm...
Isn't actually downloading anything from such sites still illegal?
I pay for stuff, or do without. It has its advantages, especially with games...
* prances around in free Half-Life 2 T-shirt *
Re:The Top ten (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.neutronstar.org/)
Looking at it from another angle, you paid $40 for a shirt.
Re:The Top ten (Score:4, Funny)
(http://ptth.net/squish/ | Last Journal: Monday October 01, @11:26AM)
Re:The Top ten (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.no2id.co.uk/)
Bragging about paying for Half-Life 2: $35.00
Claiming that a bundled t-shirt is free: er ... priceless.
For everything else, there's Pirate Bay.
:-)
Re:The Top ten (Score:5, Insightful)
Kind of like Russia and allofmp3.com. Maybe the Russian legislature just wants the law to work that way, they have had ample time and obviously been pressured to fix it, yet have not.
And btw, downloading stuff might very well be illegal for you, but the internet is a global network, which means laws of one country do not apply everywhere, yes yes, I know this is a difficult concept to grasp but it is true.
BTW, i wouldnt be proud if I were wearing a half life 2 tshirt.
Gasp! (Score:5, Insightful)
Political campaign for the Piracy Party (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.elpauer.org/)
Re:Political campaign for the Piracy Party (Score:5, Interesting)
With the kind of support this incident has raised, they are now likely to enter the swedish parliament in the elections in september.
Although (still) officially denied, it looks like TPB was raided on the direct order of the swedish Minister of Justice, Thomas Bodström, after pressure from MPAA and the US government. This is highly illegal in Sweden, and the leader of the opposition in the swedish parliament has requested an investigation [johanlinander.se].
Re:Political campaign for the Piracy Party (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://slashdot.org/)
Any word on how they're doing in the polls? I've just looked at the member stats, which are sort of an open issue, because the smallest party in parlament (Green Party, 247000 votes) just over the 4% margin (225000 votes) has about 7200 members, the pirate party only 5000. The ratio of votes to members seem to vary greatly though, but the Green Party is in the good end. E.g. the central party has 50-80000 members (depending on how you count) and 350000 votes. Since the number is growing so rapidly it's hard to tell, but I wouldn't say "likely" just yet. Then again, this might be the sort of party not that many "publicly" become members for but could vote for on election day. I really wonder what'll happen in september...
Investigators liability? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Investigators liability? (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.earlconsult.com/)
According to the Swedish news coverage, there is some legitimate doubts as to whether it was a legitimate investigation or not. Their laws don't make linking to infingements an illegality. As such, since The Pirate Bay didn't host anything that is illegal per Swedish law. Now, it gets even better than this. According to people over there the national police happen to keep whingeing about not having enough manpower, etc. to enforce problems like drug trafficing, etc. and little gets done about real problems- but they can muster 50(!) people to "bust" a place that doesn't do anything illegal per their laws as a result of pressure being put on them from MPAA and others in the US. It's my understanding that there's a lot of people pissed about it over there right now.
Re:Investigators liability? (Score:5, Informative)
(Last Journal: Monday February 13 2006, @07:11PM)
Agreed, I'm a Swede and there are problems with police shortage in many cities here. Ours would basically celebrate if we got as few as 10-20 more our way to, you know, handle abuse and rape and drug cases.
To make matters worse, the Swedish police have also earlier said they aren't intending to prioritize these cases too much, which made a lot of sense given the overall situation. Then this happens, where they get 50 officers to arrest 3 people and clean 1 server hall. If it weren't for the serious matters here, I'd start trying to come up with "how many Swedish police officers does it take to screw in a lightbulb", but I'm to annoyed to be in the mood right now.
Anyway, thankfully, the case with piracy involved hasn't scared away politicians, and a political party member has contacted the Parliamentary Ombudsman part for these reasons, part for others in this controversial move (like not granting lawyer defense for one of the arrested, but still for another), and it remains to be seen whether any actions will be taken against Thomas Bodström.
Re:Investigators liability? (Score:5, Funny)
Two - but how do you get them in there?
Re:Investigators liability? (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://trolltalk.com/ | Last Journal: Sunday November 11, @07:43PM)
Oh come on ... the video from the surveillance cameras shows they took their sweet time checking out the server racks. They didn't have to take all the hardware they took (and who the fuck needs to wear camo on a raid of a server room anyway?).
The warrant was for seizing the servers hosting TPB; any seizure exceeding that was outside the scope of the warrant, and that's why they (the police and the minister of justice) are in the crapper - taking something that's outside the scope of the warrant is theft. That they covered the security cameras with garbage bags partway through just makes them look guiltier.
So - either:
- the police couldn't properly identify the hardware in question, in which case they were incompetent, and should have called in someone with more expertise, or
- they could, but over-reached.
- they purposefully grabbed more than they were entitled to, hoping for a backlash against TPB for causing the inconvenience
Those are the only options. How much you want to bet it was #3, seeing as politicians and the **AA were involved? This is a very public cluster-fuck, and someone will have to pay, both politically and financially.Re:Investigators liability? (Score:5, Interesting)
They are liable for any damages, including downtime for legal services. They have publicly confirmed that after the raid.
And most likely they will end up paying big time. Instead of just taking TPB's servers as the warrant allowed, they took all servers hosted by the same hosting provider [www.prq.se] . Most likely to make an (illegal) example, trying to make the hosting provider go bankrupt and instill fear in other hosting providers. About 200 legitimate businesses in Sweden are down right now because of this.
Re:Investigators liability? (Score:5, Insightful)
He's right -- the video does indeed show the police covering up the cameras with garbage bags. Until the cameras were covered, the video doesn't show much: A bunch of guys standing around looking at the servers, chatting on a cellphone, a guy pointing around at the cameras(!), etc.
I was immediately suspicious once the cameras were covered -- I'd have thought the police (of all people) would welcome the cameras since it'd be hard proof that everything they did was on the up and up, they have video backup for when they testify in court, the defendant(s) can't claim they planted evidence, etc, etc.
When the police covers up cameras to hide their actions, that shows very clearly they know they're planning to do something questionable (if not outright illegal). In my books, that's not flamebait, that's worth investigating.
The fact they took a whole bunch of servers rather than just TPB is hardly flamebait-worthy either. It's a serious issue. Especially for the (more) legit businesses involved.
Re:Investigators liability? (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.exacttarget.com/)
No kidding. Much more effective camo in that terrain would be a Sun microsystems hat and a half-life 2 t-shirt. And don't forget the sweat pants! He'd be nearly invisible!
Re:Investigators liability? (Score:5, Interesting)
Both groundless searches and excessive destruction of property would be possible in this case; there has been no attempt whatsoever of the parties to in any way hide what they're doing, there has been public debate on the issue, there have been court cases giving credible support to the idea that linking is not infringement, everything's been open and available. Even seizing the actual pirate bay servers might be excessive, there is no grounds to suspect any destruction or tampering with evidence would be done; the parties in question do not consider their content illegal.
Basically it reeks of intimidation. Anyone around you doing something the MPAA doesnt like? Never mind if it's illegal or not, better get them to stop, or _you_ will be targeted. Collective punishment without due process.
They even took DNA from the _legal counsel_. In a possible contributory IP infringement case?? What are they going to use that for? As it has no value as evidence whatsoever, one can only assume they're planning to place it on some other crimescene or hand it to foreign intelligence. I cant think of any reasonable reason to take it, so the conclusion has to be they have some unreasonable purpose.
This isnt justice. This is state-sponsored political terrorism.