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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.
Censorship
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)

    by oberondarksoul (723118) on Saturday June 03 2006, @07:40AM (#15461115)
    (http://www.consoleia.co.uk/)
    So soon they crowed victory, so soon will they be humbled. By the looks of things the takedown of the Pirate Bay was less than legal, and now with the 'Bay back online the MPAA must be feeling more than a little upset. Personally I'm of the view that the Pirate Bay was perfectly legal - they didn't carry any copyrighted works themselves, just as Google don't carry the materials they link to. What fun this whole affair will turn out to be...

  • The Top ten (Score:5, Funny)

    by yoharryo (874777) on Saturday June 03 2006, @07:41AM (#15461116)
    (http://yoharryo.wordpress.com/)
    Nice to see an illegal copy of Vista is number one...

    • Re:The Top ten (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Ford Prefect (8777) on Saturday June 03 2006, @07:51AM (#15461153)
      (http://www.hylobatidae.org/minerva/)
      Nice to see an illegal copy of Vista is number one...

      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 *
      [ Parent ]
      • Re:The Top ten by popeguilty (Score:2) Saturday June 03 2006, @07:56AM

      • Re:The Top ten (Score:5, Funny)

        by Legion303 (97901) on Saturday June 03 2006, @07:56AM (#15461167)
        (http://www.neutronstar.org/)
        "* prances around in free Half-Life 2 T-shirt *"

        Looking at it from another angle, you paid $40 for a shirt. :)
        [ Parent ]

      • Re:The Top ten (Score:5, Funny)

        by Blue Stone (582566) on Saturday June 03 2006, @07:57AM (#15461171)
        (http://www.no2id.co.uk/)
        Berrating a supporter of copyright infringement: $0.02
        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.

        :-)

        [ Parent ]
        • Re:The Top ten by Ford Prefect (Score:2) Saturday June 03 2006, @08:02AM
      • Re:The Top ten by ClamIAm (Score:1) Saturday June 03 2006, @08:14AM

      • Re:The Top ten (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Tweekster (949766) on Saturday June 03 2006, @11:15AM (#15462002)
        Have you ever considered that it isnt a loophole and just the way the law is supposed to be. They have known about it for a long time, if it were a loophole it would have been "fixed" maybe that country wants it to be that way.

        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.
        [ Parent ]

        • Gasp! (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Mark_MF-WN (678030) on Saturday June 03 2006, @04:22PM (#15463359)
          Gasp! Are you saying that American law isn't the supreme law of the world? Handed down by god himself to the puritans, so that they might convince the entire world of the immorality of nipples, pot, and sharing?
          [ Parent ]
      • Re:Free Half Life T-Shirt? by hackwrench (Score:1) Saturday June 03 2006, @06:55PM
      • Re:The Top ten by mrogers (Score:1) Sunday June 04 2006, @06:33AM
      • 3 replies beneath your current threshold.
    • Re:The Top ten by MasaMuneCyrus (Score:2) Saturday June 03 2006, @09:50AM
    • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.

  • Political campaign for the Piracy Party (Score:5, Interesting)

    by paugq (443696) <pgq@@@poboxes...com> on Saturday June 03 2006, @07:42AM (#15461122)
    (http://www.elpauer.org/)
    Looks like the Swedish Police is making a free, wide and very positive campaign to favor the Piracy Party. I bet they will be getting a lot more votes thanks to this weird operation. Thank you Swedish police officers!

  • Investigators liability? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by LinuxGeek (6139) * <`moc.dnajd' `ta' `keegxunil'> on Saturday June 03 2006, @07:43AM (#15461123)
    So, at what point does it become the responsibility of the police to do enough homework to make sure that their investigation dosen't harm many other businesses that are completely uninvolved in the search for evidence? What recourse do the other effected isp customers have?
    • Re:Investigators liability? by Kjella (Score:3) Saturday June 03 2006, @08:10AM
      • Re:Investigators liability? by MarkByers (Score:2) Saturday June 03 2006, @08:22AM

      • Re:Investigators liability? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Svartalf (2997) on Saturday June 03 2006, @08:25AM (#15461276)
        (http://www.earlconsult.com/)

        Basicly, as long as the police are conducting an legitimate investigation you don't get anything.

        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.
        [ Parent ]
        • Re:Investigators liability? by Kojiro Ganryu Sasaki (Score:2) Saturday June 03 2006, @09:29AM
        • Re:Investigators liability? by erroneus (Score:2) Saturday June 03 2006, @09:54AM

        • Re:Investigators liability? (Score:5, Informative)

          by Jugalator (259273) on Saturday June 03 2006, @10:52AM (#15461886)
          (Last Journal: Monday February 13 2006, @07:11PM)
          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.

          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. :-p

          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.
          [ Parent ]
        • Re:Investigators liability? by Snaller (Score:2) Saturday June 03 2006, @04:47PM
        • Re:Investigators liability? by cfavader (Score:1) Saturday June 03 2006, @07:15PM
        • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.

      • 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:

        1. 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
        2. they could, but over-reached.
        3. 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.
        [ Parent ]
        • Re:Investigators liability? by nutshell42 (Score:2) Saturday June 03 2006, @10:16AM

        • Re:Investigators liability? (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Husgaard (858362) on Saturday June 03 2006, @10:53AM (#15461890)
          The video [youtube.com] shows that the police covers up the cameras, so they most likely wanted to hide something during the raid. And I guess that they forgot that they were in a high-security hosting facility - most likely the swedish secret police is p*ssed at them for covering the cameras.

          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.

          [ Parent ]
          • Re:Investigators liability? by Bromskloss (Score:2) Saturday June 03 2006, @01:05PM
          • Re:Investigators liability? by Hope Thelps (Score:2) Saturday June 03 2006, @02:06PM

          • Re:Investigators liability? (Score:5, Insightful)

            by Black Pete (222858) on Saturday June 03 2006, @02:38PM (#15462912)
            Why was the parent modded as Flamebait?

            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.
            [ Parent ]
        • Re:Investigators liability? by geobeck (Score:2) Saturday June 03 2006, @11:31AM
        • Re:Investigators liability? by dapyx (Score:2) Saturday June 03 2006, @11:58AM

        • Re:Investigators liability? (Score:5, Funny)

          by ruiner13 (527499) on Saturday June 03 2006, @01:01PM (#15462461)
          (http://www.exacttarget.com/)
          "and who the fuck needs to wear camo on a raid of a server room anyway?"

          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!

          [ Parent ]
        • Server Room Camouflage by Sloppy (Score:1) Saturday June 03 2006, @04:59PM
        • Re:Investigators liability? by syukton (Score:2) Saturday June 03 2006, @07:31PM
        • Re:Investigators liability? by init100 (Score:1) Sunday June 04 2006, @01:16PM
        • Re:Investigators liability? by mattsucks (Score:2) Monday June 05 2006, @05:00PM
        • Re:Investigators liability? by tomhudson (Score:2) Sunday June 04 2006, @07:46AM
        • 2 replies beneath your current threshold.

      • Re:Investigators liability? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Znork (31774) on Saturday June 03 2006, @08:38AM (#15461317)
        "(groundless searches, SLAP-style shutdowns, excessive destruction of property)"

        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.
        [ Parent ]
        • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
      • Re:Investigators liability? by Rogerborg (Score:1) Saturday June 03 2006, @08:57AM
      • Re:Investigators liability? by SvnLyrBrto (Score:2) Saturday June 03 2006, @12:31PM
    • Re:Investigators liability? by v1 (Score:2) Saturday June 03 2006, @08:35AM