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Courts Force Danish ISP to Block Torrent Tracker
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Mon Feb 04, 2008 12:43 PM
from the forest-meet-trees dept.
from the forest-meet-trees dept.
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."
Related Stories
[+]
Danish ISP Tele2 Challenges Pirate Bay Blockade 129 comments
krasmussen writes "After Monday's injunction on Danish ISP Tele2 to block access to The Pirate Bay, the company has now decided to take the case further in court. 'We do not like being put in a role where we as ISP have to regulate people's freedom of speech' says Nicholai Pfeiffer, regulatory manager i Telenor, which owns Tele2. However, because the current ruling against Tele2 still stands, the customers are not going to regain access to The Pirate Bay at the moment."
[+]
ISP Block on Pirate Bay Not Having Desired Effect 177 comments
TechDirt is reporting that the recent block placed on The Pirate Bay torrent site is not only relatively ineffective, but actually driving more traffic to the site because of the attention. "The news from The Pirate Bay appears to confirm this suspicion. According to The Pirate Bay's new Court Blog, Danish traffic has not dropped since the implementation of the block. '...the number of visits from Denmark has increased by 12% thanks to IFPI,' the blog post reads. 'Our site http://thejesperbay.org is growing more because of the media attention than people actually coming to learn how to bypass the filter - our guess is that alot of the users on the site now run OpenDNS instead of the censoring DNS at Tele2.dk.' 'We also started tracking some stats before and after the block. There's no noticeable difference between the number of users from Tele2.dk before and after.'"
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Well... (Score:4, Funny)
Goodbye, direct access. Hello, proxy!
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...
Parent
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.
Parent
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
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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]
Parent
they don't get it. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:they don't get it. (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:they don't get it. (Score:5, Informative)
you'll have to put thepiratebay.org in your hosts file until they change it.
Parent
Re:they don't get it. (Score:5, Interesting)
Proxies, alternative sites, usenet, etc. etc. Plenty of alternatives.
Parent
Re:they don't get it. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:they don't get it. (Score:5, Interesting)
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IFPI (Score:5, Interesting)
I think that sums it up quite nicely.
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...
Parent
Good for the goose... (Score:5, Interesting)
Shakespeare was right.. (Score:5, Funny)
Just a DNS block. (Score:5, Informative)
So the issue is really the on the censorship itself and where it ends.
Not surprising, Danish courts are pro-right owners (Score:4, Informative)
For another example, Google News is available in all Scandinavian languages, except Danish. During the bubble a similar Danish news aggregating service was shut down by the courts by a decision that could be taken as out ruling deep linking altogether.
The scary thing for me is that there see to be a strong degree of acceptance of this situation in the nerd community. There seem to be a huge gab between us and Sweden in this regard.
Denmark is also where Microsoft domination is most firm, and before that, the one market where OS/2 really penetrated. We love out corporate masters. Every action taken against corporate abuse seems to come through EU, never the Danish government (no matter their political composition).
This isn't the end.. (Score:5, Informative)
IFPI decided to attack Tele2 again because they have a reputation of not fighting back, which is most likely the case here (court documents haven't been released yet) - TDC and Telia the main operators here in Denmark have stated they will not implement this unless they lose in court.
Also, the block will be a DNS level block, so it has zero effect since it will only be on Tele2 DNS servers and it wont take long for kids to figure that out.
BitTorrent, P2P have many legal uses (Score:5, Informative)
It's also important for musicians like myself [geometricvisions.com], as well as to the musicians that are members of Jamendo [jamendo.com], which distributes Creative Commons-licensed music via BitTorrent and eMule.
A struggling musian who distributes his work via HTTP can easily be bankrupted if one of his songs suddenly becomes a hit. P2P filesharing, via BitTorrent and other protocols, provides an affordable alternative.
In discussing P2P with other people, and especially with your legislators as well as your ISPs, it's important to stress the legal uses of it. Otherwise they will only see it as a source of lawbreaking and copyright infringment.
Re:p2p tracker (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
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.
Parent
Re:what's next? (Score:5, Interesting)
What's to prevent all the tracker information from being put into a master DNS server with a low TTL, and building up torrent search software which queries DNS?
You could store this into TXT records and query DNS to find the results;
"Thomas-Edison-The-Lost-Chord-1888" IN TXT a9cd93da939d9c9
The TXT being a unique code which again is looked up in DNS
a9cd93da939d9c9.subdomain.domain.toplevel
And the result is a list of IP's that are currently seeding the torrent,
and thus BT can subscribe to. I can do a dynamic DNS update to
add my client to the list of machines seeding the torrent.
So there is no HTTP traffic involved in this exchange. The DNS is
typically provided by the ISP, so caching would be in effect. So
you want TTLs to be low. The clients will be querying against the ISP's
DNS server. Dynamic DNS would be to the parent DNS server. The ISP could
blackhole the zone by putting in a dummy record, but that can be overcome
by using the root DNS servers or using any of the many open DNS servers.
Anyway, my thoughts on the subject. ICMP would be another protocol one could
potentially use to get around this too.
Parent
Re:what's next? (Score:5, Informative)
The actual file (or rather, chunk) copies are held by peers, and transferred only between peers. In order to be able to get chunks, though, you need to know who the peers are, so that you can communicate with them.
The identities of those peers are provided by a tracker. Trackers are the equivalent of BitTorrent servers -- a client contacts them and, using the BitTorrent protocol, they inform the client of how to contact other peers.
A
An indexing site, or Google, can readily provide you the
A tracker, given a
Both a
(PEX and such complicate matters.)
Parent
Re:what's next? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:what's next? (Score:5, Informative)
Hosting trackers is the primary function of TPB; they're one of the most common and reliable tracker hosts. I'm also fairly certain their search feature only includes torrents for which TPB is the tracker. They don't host any of the actual contents, though; you won't see a TPB server acting as a seed. They merely act as coordinators, collecting and redistributing lists of the IP addresses and stats of the various clients participating in the torrent.
Parent