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Piracy United Kingdom Your Rights Online

UK Court Orders Block of Three Torrent Sites 99

Posted by samzenpus from the bad-list dept.
angry tapir writes "A court in the U.K. has ordered key Internet service providers in the country to block three torrent sites on a complaint from music labels including EMI Records and Sony Music. The High Court of Justice, Chancery Division, ordered six ISPs including Virgin Media, British Telecommunications and British Sky Broadcasting to block H33t, Kickass Torrents and Fenopy."
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UK Court Orders Block of Three Torrent Sites More

UK Court Orders Block of Three Torrent Sites

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  • My first response is "Must check out those sites" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by viking80 ( 697716 ) on Monday March 04, 2013 @02:02AM (#43065483) Journal

    My first response is "Must check out those sites".

    • Re:My first response is "Must check out those site (Score:5, Interesting)

      by AliasMarlowe ( 1042386 ) on Monday March 04, 2013 @02:10AM (#43065499) Journal

      My first response is "Must check out those sites".

      If you're in the UK, you may wish to use a VPN or suchlike. Until they're made illegal outside "reputable corporations".

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        My first response is "Must check out those sites".

        If you're in the UK, you may wish to use a VPN or suchlike. Until they're made illegal outside "reputable corporations".

        There's no need to use a VPN. The sites will simply pop up under various URL/domains. Some of them already have.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        If you're in the UK, you may wish to use a VPN or suchlike.

        Or any ISP other than those listed in the order. We have lots of ISPs.

        These orders only apply to the retail arms of big ISPs and not the wholesale services they resell to smaller ISPs.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Fortunately, all you actually need to do is not use a big-name ISP. The ISP I use has not yet been ordered to block anything, including TPB (which the ISPs named above have been blocking for months now, AIUI).

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      That would be my first thought, except i'm still doing fine with piratebay. Y'know, the one they blocked ages ago which definitely doesn't have numerous easy to find proxies that make such rulings pointless

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Exactly, this will make absolutely no difference to the vast majority of people using TPB etc.

    • My first response is "Certainly that will work."

      Ok, so who wants to print the "This is a bit, this is a byte" slides, and send them to the judge, so he can find the error of his ways?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Anonymous Coward

      My response is to add them to my foxy proxy list so i get to them via tor.

      firefox+foxyproxy+tor > silly court order

    • Re:My first response is "Must check out those site (Score:4, Insightful)

      by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Monday March 04, 2013 @03:22AM (#43065725) Journal
      My guess is, if you haven't heard of them, it's probably because you don't do much torrenting. That was my first response, too.

    • Re:My first response is "Must check out those site (Score:5, Informative)

      by hairyfish ( 1653411 ) on Monday March 04, 2013 @03:49AM (#43065795)
      If you're using a good torrent search engine [torrentz.eu] it'll give you a whole list of sites that have the exact same content. I fail to see how this achieves anything

    • Kickass is a horrible torrent site. There is so much garbage on their page, half the links lead to stuff you have to pay for (not in a legal way), most of the torrents I have seen don't have any seeders, its hard to find anything . Truthfully, if you can't find it on The Pirate Bay or on some private torrent site, your best bet is a Torrent Search Engine. KickAss is one of those sites that come up if you try to do a torrent search in Google.

      Now I am not saying that the site is completely worthless, just say

      • This is total bullshit. I've used Kickass for years and not run into anything you describe. If you find using a website to be so challenging, I suggest you do something else.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by fatphil ( 181876 )
        Bizarre. KAT has a very wide selection, and as long as you have javascript turned off it's a very clean and easily navigable site. Presently it's my favourite site for just about every reason imaginable.

      • I don't know what you're searching for, but I've never had any results "you had to pay for". You do know the top ones are ads, right?

        As for the seeders, that's common for all public torrent sites (I'm not a regular of private ones). It's usually not a problem anyway, since the DHT will get a few even if the site says otherwise.

  • So... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    What will that accomplish?

    Invest in VPN service providers.

    • Won't they simply mirror? Does the ISP have to watch and block mirrors? Will the whack-a-mole ever end?

      • Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by deains ( 1726012 ) on Monday March 04, 2013 @02:46AM (#43065623)

        There are a million and one proxies for Pirate Bay that are accessible in the UK. As far as I know none of these have been shut down by authorities since TPB itself was banned in the country. So if we assume the same model here then chances are proxy sites will be left alone.
         
        Nothing to say the BPI/government (more or less the same thing now) might not change tack of course.

        • Re:So... (Score:4, Insightful)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) * on Monday March 04, 2013 @03:33AM (#43065749) Homepage Journal

          The Pirate Party UK proxy was shut down by legal threats.

          To the BPI: stop breaking my fucking internet. You added a fiver a month to my bill for a VPN, which I am deducting from the money I would otherwise have spend on your products.

        • Re:So... (Score:5, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 04, 2013 @04:02AM (#43065835)

          As far as I know none of these have been shut down by authorities since TPB itself was banned in the country.

          TPB is not banned in the UK. A handful of ISPs are banned from letting their users access it directly (IIRC, the list is: BT, Virgin, O2, TalkTalk and Sky). Fortunately the UK has local loop unbundling and easy migration between service providers, so you can just move to one that isn't banned.

          • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

            by Anonymous Coward

            So does that mean I can just view these sites using my mobile broadband connection from Three, and then after getting the torrent file or magnet link I can carry on downloading the torrent on my Virginmedia home broadband? Naturally, the torrents I download will be from copyright holders that have given permission to download their work through torrents, I would never download copyright infringing work, honest!

            • So does that mean I can just view these sites using my mobile broadband connection from Three, and then after getting the torrent file or magnet link I can carry on downloading the torrent on my Virginmedia home broadband?

              Yes, since the block only applies to the Pirate Bay site itself (as far as I know).

        • As far as I know none of these have been shut down by authorities since TPB itself was banned in the country.

          I know of only one - the UK Pirate Party hosted one which they were requested to take down and threatened with legal action if they did not comply. I believe some other proxies hosted in the UK may also have been shutdown by similar legal action against them.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Zemran ( 3101 )

      The judge probably runs a proxy and wants to drum up some customers. There is nothing that will be achieved by this. kat.ph used to be a good site but now the advertising is getting to be a pain so I had stopped using it anyway and gone back to thepiratebay.se which they banned earlier and is still going strong.

  • australian courts aren't retarded

  • When will governments learn? I don't know where they're getting their "P2P sharing is down" figures from, if anything torrents are having more seeders these days, I guess they're ignoring private trackers. My money's on proxies going up for these by the end of day, maybe Tuesday.

  • What's next? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jd659 ( 2730387 ) on Monday March 04, 2013 @03:55AM (#43065809)
    This game of blocking the sites cannot be won. Let’s say it takes, at best, one month from BPI or copyright holder to figure out that one site is infringing the copyright, file a suite and have a verdict against the infringing site. That process takes time and money. On the other hand, duplicating the site’s content on some other IP and the alternative name can happen overnight and is virtually free. So there will always be sites providing free access to any works.

    What is more concerning here is that none of the sites blocked hosted the copyrighted works. This is something that only few really consider as a serious shift in the court system. None of the sites blocked for copyright infringement host copyrighted works! What will be the next step? Someone will create a site that will list all the blocked sites along with the new mirrored sites that can be accessed within the UK. Should this new site be blocked? Based on what? It doesn’t host any copyrighted works, nor provides an index to the copyrighted works. Let’s say that the UK block-thirsty judges will issue a new verdict to block the sites that list mirrors. What next? Someone will write a browser plugin that will automatically redirect to the current working mirror of the blocked sites and users will continue to use the sites without even noticing any blocking and without using any VPN. Should browser plugins be blocked or any sites that host browser plugins? Someone will say that it will be good enough if less people are aware of the options. But how did we get to the point that more users are aware of thepiratebay than about the legal ways of obtaining the same material? The reason is that thepiratebay does better consolidating all the media (even that that cannot be purchased anywhere) in one spot at an attractive price point. Offer something better and people will pick the alternative. Otherwise, blocking will not solve any problem that BPI thinks exists.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      "even that that cannot be purchased anywhere"

      Like movies that'll play on anything.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by six025 ( 714064 )

      This game of blocking the sites cannot be won.

      (I think) everyone is well aware of this. If not, they bloody well should be in 2013 :)

      So hardcore pirates will always find a way. It's the casual pirates that they're targeting, the people who would normally buy a CD/DVD/game/app if no other source is readily available, and it's this middle group that is a significant source of "lost sales".

      Peace,
      Andy.

      • It's the casual pirates that they're targeting, the people who would normally buy a CD/DVD/game/app if no other source is readily available

        Publishers can't sincerely target this group of infringers without actually releasing the CD/DVD/game/app. So why can't I get a lawfully made copy of the film Song of the South, the TV series Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea, and the video game Mother 3?

        • Enjoying the oldies subtracts from the time you could've spent watching the latest and greatest premium content, and is tantamount to theft. But you already knew that...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by fatphil ( 181876 )
        Shutting down torrent-hosting sites does nothing to ameliorate their sales figures in such cases.

        ``no other source [being] readily available [...] is a significant source of "lost sales"''

        The businesses are still failing to respond to an economic want. They have no right to survive, they've been terminally stupid for so long.
    • Blocking search engines should lead all the way to blocking google and bing. Blocking organized indices should lead all the way to blocking yahoo (Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle, remember???) and such. Blocking links to content should lead all the way to blocking The New York Times and every newspaper site and every web site in the entire WWW (as someone pointed out that the entire point of the world-wide-web and Hypertext Markup Language is to provide linkages between pages on the internet's

  • Another repeat story (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 04, 2013 @04:05AM (#43065843)

    We already did this one four days ago:
    High Court Orders UK ISPs To Block More Torrent Sites [slashdot.org].

  • Is that some dude in a white wig and black robes said "Kickass Torrents".
    • Consider this perfectly well-formed sentence: "The ass of Jesus was upon an ass." Back when the U.S. Democratic Party still used a donkey motif (before switching to a circled blue D), the official party blog was titled "Kicking Ass". The judge could have easily just imagined describing a clip like two boys kicking a donkey off a cliff [youtube.com].
  • I'm surprised no-one has written a website/web-service where if you submit one blocked address, you get another one returned which hasn't been blocked.

    Should be a fairly simple thing to develop.

  • I mean, this is only a court order, against sites that have _not yet_ been persecuted for copyright infringement. So how can the court order this without at least opening a case against them? This sounds wholly illegal to me.

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