European Pirates Arrested in Massive Police Operation 278
freedumb2000 writes "Europe just witnessed one of the largest piracy-related busts in history with the raid of the popular movie streaming portal Kino.to. More than a dozen people connected to the site were arrested after police officers in Germany, Spain, France and the Netherlands raided several residential addresses and data centers. Kino.to hosted no illicit content itself, but indexed material stored on file-hosters and other streaming services."
Phonebook websites (Score:5, Insightful)
Dear Police,
According to my research, there are a lot of criminals being referenced in the phonebook websites worldwide, making it easier for them to communicate.
Please take those sites down too.
Sincerely,
Killjoy_NL
Of all places.... (Score:3, Insightful)
a title using "pirates" for copyright infringers. I'd actually be interesting in a massive police operation against gunships carrying armed pirates off the coast of Belgium. Until then....
Re:Phonebook websites (Score:5, Insightful)
Allow me to play devil's advocate.... What if that percentage of "allegedly" copyrighted material was 80%, or 50% or only 25%?
Where do you draw the line in making a blanket judgement about a site that is acting as an Index of copyrighted material? What if the website indexed a legitimate percentage of non-copyrighted material - in addition to the copyrighted materials? Those with the best lobbyist / deepest pockets wins?
Cool... so (Score:3, Insightful)
Does this mean we now have official sites where we can stream / download movies in decent formats for reasonable cost? Like DivX sites operating in a erm... unofficial capacity under DMCA safe harbour provisions. These are reasonably anonymous with user uploaded content and a good selection of obscure / hard to find stufff.
AFAIK there's not a single legitimate video site that would satisfy my criteria and even youtube is operating in a grey area. Nobody wants to see compulsory licensing introduced as a result of market failure. Copyright may be a form of monopoly but there's no reason rights holders should be exempt from market forces.
It depends on your definition of "massive" (Score:5, Insightful)
police have arrested a total of 13 people thus far. A 14th person is still being hunted.
13 people. How massive.
Re:Phonebook websites (Score:3, Insightful)
Furthermore, how is indexing copyrighted material wrong? If anything, the infringing parties are the ones making the content available without proper authorization. If indexing copyrighted data is illegal, I can think of several search engines that are going to get in trouble real soon (or rather, their CEOs). Unless the governments, judges and police are hypocrites and decide to make an exception with them, of course.
just shut all down (Score:5, Insightful)
I really wish they would shut down every site out there that illegal links or shares copyrighted material, so that people have no way at all anymore to download movies and music. Then I would see the whole movie and music industry go in to oblivion because nobody will buy there crap anymore.
Are they really believing that if people couldn't share the movies and music, the people would suddenly buy more stuff? If anything, they would buy less stuff because they don't know anymore new artists or new movies.
As I was 18 I used a lot torrents, and I mean a lot. Like 5 movies and games every week. Now I don't use that anymore, do I buy more movies and more games? No, not at all. Why? Because that crap is just so expensive and I found so many new alternatives for entertainment. Like youtube where I watch news and starcraft 2 movies, and southparkstudios.com, and collegehumour.com. And I read a lot of blogs and news on the internet. For music I have youtube and lastfm and other services.
If I go to the Mediamarkt I see it why I stopped to buy new movies or music and why others are not buying, too. I see it because all the DVDs and all the music CDs are laying there around for years and nobody touches them. Because they are so freaky expensive. 20Euro for a old DVD movie, 30Euro and more for new movies and 30Euro and more for TV series.
Every time I go to the shop and see a nice movie, I see the price and I think: do I really want that DVD for that price? And the answer is every time: no, because it's just too expensive for just one movie that I will watch one day and then it will lay around collecting dust. If the DVDs would be like 5Euro each for new movies and under 5Euro for old DVDs I would buy them. But not for that price, no way. Because I have so much free entertainment.
Re:Phonebook websites (Score:4, Insightful)
Pirates violently rob ships at sea. (Score:5, Insightful)
The reasoning (Score:5, Insightful)
Every now and then, someone tries to argue that torrent trackers are supposedly invinsible because they don't outright host copyrighted content, but only the .torrent files. I really wish people would start focusing on something else, because by now it should be blatantly obvious that such reasoning does not fly with the courts. In my country (Finland), there was a court case regarding Finreactor, a major finnish torrent tracker and the defendants tried to argue this very defence. It didn't fly. At all. The court concluded that the site was MOSTLY used to facilitate illegal activity and that the site maintainers made no reasonable effort to clean the site up from torrents pointing to copyrighted content. The tracker admins were found gulty and sentenced to heavy fines.
No, this logic does not apply to Google, because Google is not used MOSTLY to facilitate illegal activity and no, this logic does not apply to gun manufacturers, because guns are mostly used by law enforcement and army and not to commit murder and robbery.
Re:just shut all down (Score:5, Insightful)
I really wish they would shut down every site out there that illegal links or shares copyrighted material, so that people have no way at all anymore to download movies and music. Then I would see the whole movie and music industry go in to oblivion because nobody will buy there crap anymore.
Yeah, because it was all going to oblivion before the Internet and P2P, right?
As I was 18 I used a lot torrents, and I mean a lot. Like 5 movies and games every week. Now I don't use that anymore, do I buy more movies and more games? No, not at all. Why? Because that crap is just so expensive and I found so many new alternatives for entertainment. Like youtube where I watch news and starcraft 2 movies, and southparkstudios.com, and collegehumour.com. And I read a lot of blogs and news on the internet. For music I have youtube and lastfm and other services.
Good for you. But everyone else, why are they then downloading all the TV series and movies? Oh, because they actually want them not the youtube garbage. This is the old "I don't like them so neither should you".
Every time I go to the shop and see a nice movie, I see the price and I think: do I really want that DVD for that price? And the answer is every time: no, because it's just too expensive for just one movie that I will watch one day and then it will lay around collecting dust. If the DVDs would be like 5Euro each for new movies and under 5Euro for old DVDs I would buy them. But not for that price, no way
Every time they offer something for X$, there's someone who comes along and says "If only it was available for X/2$ I'd buy it. But if you actually lowered it, most of them would now say X/4$. Or X/8$. Reality is that we know the truth, those who really liked it already bought it at the high price and those who don't will find some other excuse not to buy it.
I don't mind copyright as such when I buy say a paperback book. The author wrote it, whatever deals good or bad he did with the publisher is not my problem, and he charges a price per copy. I buy my copy and that copy is mine, end of story. No DRM, no regions, no EULA, no licensed player that won't let me flip several pages at once (no fast forward), no disappearing ink pages that'll be gone if I resell it (one-time codes), I can sell it, burn it, make paper planes of it and it's a straight deal in every way except for the few limited rights actually in copyright law.
The problem is copyright enforcement which has turned into a huge inconvenience for the customers and is also threatening lots of privacy, due process and other laws. I don't want companies sitting on remote disable/delete buttons to everything I own. Of course you might say I should become a cultural hermit and just reject all commercial TV, movies etc. but I'd rather just take it while I wait for them to clue in and provide a service equal to the torrent sites - at any cost. I do buy the best on BluRay/DVD as the DRM is broken, but they go mostly unopened as I've already had my "digital delivery" long ago.
Re:Pirates violently rob ships at sea. (Score:4, Insightful)
So what? Everybody committing a crime against a government is suddenly a terrorist. Inflation doesn't just affect money.