Slashdot Mirror

Much much better is for everyone who consider this court abuse by BPI to join their local Pirate Party. We're represented in over 40 countries, and if there isn't one in yours you're welcome to copy what you need from another Pirate Party to get started ;)

http://www.pirateparty.org.uk/

http://wiki.pp-international.net/Main_Page

Disclaimed: I'm a proud board member of the Swedish Pirate Party. Changing the world, one byte at a time.

OK, so your comment is Funny...

...but here is how you can help

"*snip* in the face of an expensive legal battle" Well, at least they're subtly acknowledging that, as per the status quo, the ruling will be decided by who has the most money to throw at a lawsuit.

There's already a Call For Help out by the PPUK itself. And they will need it; the music industry is a mega-billion-pound industry, the poor artists are starving-near-death, so you figure out where the money went...

The different links you see here are links to material that have been on TPB's landing page. Links to material that the artists themselves have put up for anyone to download. Non-pirated enough for you?

Ask them

There are only few Upholders of Web Freedom in the UK. Sir Tim Berners-Lee OM, KBE, FRS, FREng, FRSA isn't one of them, since he's in Mass., USA. The Pirate Party UK is definitely one of them. With enough support it can also actually do something about it, instead of just being a forum of discontent, while tonight we'll just watch footy on the telly with a pint of ale in our hand.

You mean something like this, maybe?

And for those with dick ISPs in the UK (and maybe elsewhere), use the Pirate Party UK mirror.

The pirate party in the UK has a mirror that seems to work fine - no need for a proxy, even.

It show the idiocy of the ban on specific websites - you'll need an injunction to take down every mirror, wasting court time for no gain.

Meanwhile BT is a government-owned monopoly that took in 19 billion GPB last year.

Well that's three mistakes in one sentence. Well done! BT was privatized in 1984, over 20 years ago! They ran a lot of adverts trying to get small investors, i.e. individuals, to buy the shares. Although a lot are owned by pension funds etc now, there's still a significant percentage of stock in individual hands. So not government owned. Nor is it a monopoly; BT is actually separate companies under one umbrella. BT Openreach owns the poles, cables and exchanges, and provides access to all other ISPs and phone service providers at the same rates - including BT openworld, the ISP arm. They're heavily regulated to ensure access, and also have price caps set by the regulator. ISPs can either use the BT openreach DSLAMS in the exchanges, or fit their own.

  Openreach for example, haven't got round to upgrading my exchange to ADSL2 yet, but talktalk and sky have both put their own in the exchange, so do offer ADSL2, and only pay BT openreach for rent of the copper line to my house - I don't pay BT directly at all, and the service is cheaper to boot. There's also virgin internet, our sole cable provider having bought up the others, who have an entirely separate infrastructure over about 60% of the country.

BT openworld is the largest single UK ISP because of its brand, but if you tot up the subscriber numbers of the top 6 (via ispreview.co.uk) they've got about 33% of that number; and there are many, many smaller ISPs that all have the same access to the same openreach phone lines and exchanges that the big 6 do. Note virgin, the cable provider, is the 2nd largest.

Finally, 19 billion? revenue is about £4 billion a quarter, but falling. Profit is more like £500 million a quarter, which includes all their sub-company profits.

If you were principled you'd boycott BT.

Why? BT are a private company providing wire and ISP services, same as the others. They have to follow court orders, just like everybody else. They were actually one of the people that fought the order hardest in court; but the judge has decided that he has the right to censor websites not in the UK, convicted of nothing in the UK, and that he can order private companies to spend their profits purely on the say so and to the supposed benefit of other private companies on the basis of zero reliable evidence, to whit Sony BMG, Warner Music, Universal Music and EMI.

If we should be boycotting anyone, if should be Sony BMG, Warner Music, Universal Music and EMI for their abuse of the legal system to require ISP censorship.

Or did you actually mean you just want us to boycott the internet because we must all be dirty pirates if we think blocking thepiratebay is wrong, and shouldn't pay for an internet connection but just send the money direct to artists for music we can't listen to because we have no method of downloading it any more?

Personally, I think you should use the pirate party's own proxy. I'd like to see the brouhaha when a political party that promotes civil liberties and digital rights has its website censored by court order.

They definitely need some assistance with Policy.

We pledge that we will not allow censorship of the Internet for anything except for in the most extreme circumstances

So, they do advocate censorship then. But only for "bad things" and presumably they think that copying movies isn't bad enough. But something else might be.

Censorship is binary: you are in favour of it or you are not. You can't have "partial censorship".

Ugh. Messed up the link.

https://tpb.pirateparty.org.uk/

The mirror they maintain at is yet another reason to get involved with your local pirate party. There website indicates that they can use assistance from UK residents who want to help with:

IT Team - Code
IT Team - Other
Campaigns - Design
Campaigns - Content
Campaigns - Local
Campaigns - Events
Campaigns - Candidates
Campaigns - Coordination
Campaigns - Newsletter
Treasury - Finance
Secretariat - Administration
Press - Pressteam
Leadership - Policy

No, that's the short-term answer. The long-term answer is not just voting for the Pirate Party UK but making sure that everyone you know that's opposed to this also goes out and votes PPUK. Too many nerds don't want to actually physically go somewhere and be bothered with papers, etc. But the only way to put a stop to this is at the root, not circumvention.

It's not accurate because the server didn't even recieve the request. The request was intercepted in transit and blocked by third party.

The "502 Bad Gateway" seems to be the correct code for the behavior. The definition may not be 100% accurate in that it implies the proxy (which is what this censorship is) actually received a reply from the target server.

It would be quite funny if an ISP set the following response:
305 Use Proxy
Location: https://tpb.pirateparty.org.uk/

Same here. Seems to be down for now.

On the other hand, many of the reverse proxies actually still work (see, for example, https://tpb.pirateparty.org.uk/ or many other of the reverse proxies mentioned here... http://about.piratereverse.info/proxy/list.html).

Which is actually quite ironic, if you think about it. Before ISPs started blocking TPB, it would be easy to take it down: just DDoS it. Nowadays, there are so many proxies and copies of TPB, they can DDoS the hell out of it and there's still ways of accessing it.

So, in fact, the ISP blockages have actually INCREASED TPB's robustness.

Even this DDoS is "useless". TPB admins will surely learn from this and will simply make the ship harder to sink.

Meanwhile... you might want to check out bitsnoop.com (you'll probably find it contains everything you'd find on TPB).

https://tpb.pirateparty.org.uk/

^_^

This proxy claims TPB is down, however connecting directly to thepiratebay.se works perfectly (and has never been faster for me)

https://tpb.pirateparty.org.uk/

^_^

https://tpb.pirateparty.org.uk/

Site goes up - site goes down - site goes up - whack a mole etc....

This cat is a long way of out the bag :)

'Anonymous' are a distraction.......

Trivial to swerve around indeed:

http://tpb.pirateparty.org.uk/

There's also an HTTPS version, for those who don't want their ISP logging what they're searching for on the site:

https://tpb.pirateparty.org.uk/

Fucking Slashdot.

THE EASY WAY

The Pirate Party UK is hosting a mirror (or acting as a proxy, not sure which): http://tpb.pirateparty.org.uk/

Yes, very blocked it is, especially on *cough* https://tpb.pirateparty.org.uk/ *cough*

Now that the terribly effective block that you absolutely, no way, cannot, get around by using the proxy I just mentioned or any other of many others, is in place, then it doesn't matter that The Pirate Bay uses magnet links and no longer uses trackers so once you get a link you can torrent the files without further access to TPB.

OK, I now know that
http://tpb.pirateparty.org.uk/
works, without using TOR; but I expect this will be blocked soon so Torbutton will still be required soon.

https://tpb.pirateparty.org.uk/ - this link lets you get onto to pirate bay without even having to bother to use a proxy yourself! GG government

https://tpb.pirateparty.org.uk/ is apparently what they're using now.

You realize that TFA was from a member of the content industry right?

If you had actually read through the links, you would have found that quote right here, on the Pirate Party's home page. Nice rant, though.

Read this then go here and do something about it.

Disclosure: I am not in the UK.

Yeah but have you actually read their manifesto? They have some great articles, and I do support the direction they desire but look at the craziness:

They want copyright to be 10 years. Yes, the current term is ridiculous, but so is 10 years! To put this in perspective, Windows XP, and the first Lord of the Rings film would now be out of copyright. That seems a little ridiculous. In fact it is even more ridiculous when you consider whether expensive software (CAD, video editing, etc) could compete with their free older versions. 30 years seems like a reasonable copyright length.

They want to essentially make all filesharing legal, as long as no money changes hands. I'm not going to be a hypocrite and say that I don't pirate, or I only pirate for moral reasons. I do all the time, and I do it because it is free, easy and restriction-free. I possibly would pay if there were a cheap, easy and restriction-free solution but there isn't yet. But making it totally legal? That's just retarded.

Don't get me wrong, there are good ideas, e.g. requiring a working model for patents, but they need to cut the copyright craziness. Also single-issue parties never stand a chance anyway.

In the UK, if you are questioned for a major crime, even as a witness, and a DNA sample is taken, you are on the database for life. You don't have to do the crime, you have to live within a few streets of someone might have done the crime.

This should be changing soon (if the politicians ever get around to that Protection of Freedoms Bill) because the Courts (now both the ECHR and Supreme Court) have said that this is illegal. Unfortunately, the court decided not to do anything (like punishing the police, or demanding that data be destroyed) until Parliament had their say. ... and people say the Courts have no respect for Parliamentary Sovereignty.

[If you're really interested, I wrote something up for PPUk on this, here.]

Privacy law in the UK is fairly simple but its application is confusing, and this confusion has not been helped by recent events. Over the last few weeks we have seen intense criticism of the law, and its application by the judiciary, coming from politicians, the media and even the Prime Minister. Not everything being reported by any of these groups is entirely accurate.

This helps dispel some of the myths that are being spread around about this case and others like it.

What's next, people who whistle getting charged for public performances?

Yes - http://www.pirateparty.org.uk/blog/2009/oct/21/prs-threatens-shop-worker-singing/

What does this have to do with the Pirate movement? It's outside your core areas of copyright and patents. Your 'MPs' are supposed to take a completely unpredictable stance on anything else.

I see you still haven't got over your butthurt ragequit. What a shame.

If you weren't just trolling, I would point you to our manifesto, which says:

We pledge that we will not allow government censorship of the internet for anything but the most extreme reasons (such as military secrets or images of child abuse).

Why do we need to allow Flash to read the letter? It's a letter ffs, it should be in text or html format.

I just posted the PDF on our website

Yeah, I hate scribd too.

pirate parties pushing for the complete removal of copyright on the other side...

Please: don't fall for the FUD (I know, I know: media tend to portray that this way, but media aren't neutral parties to this fray).

Picking one random example. An abstract:

We will legalise use of copyright works where no money changes hands, which will give the public new rights [...]

Counterfeiting, and profiting directly from other people's work without paying them, will remain illegal.

Fear not. No complete removal of copyright in sight.

And probably all rendered inadmissible in court because they were obtained illegally.

Ignoring the issue of whether or not this would make the evidence inadmissible (after all, the police can always go and demand the original data via a warrant), which law has been broken by those who obtained the data?

The data was made available to the public by the website's back-up system (likely breaking some laws), not by any hack, and there is no necessity that those who initially downloaded it also carried out the DDoS attack. So there wouldn't seem to be any "misuse of a computer"-type offence.

Distributing the information could be considered a "breach of confidence" but that has a very clear "public interest" exception. While some of the emails will fail that, others certainly meet it. Furthermore, breach of confidence does not apply to information which can be considered "in the public domain" (in the general, non-copyright-related sense), which it could be argued it was by being published.

Art. 8 of the ECHR could apply, but that would involve proceedings against the UK, not against any individual or group, and would be over the lack of appropriate remedies - but again, that gets balanced by Art. 10 and "public interest" claims.

This leaves copyright infringement. Some of the content of emails (i.e. photographs, songs) may be covered, but as for the emails themselves, it could be argued that they are not "original literary ... or artistic works" (Section 1(1)(a), CDPA 1988), although the definition of "literary work" in S.3(1) is rather vague and includes databases, which this might count as. So, a lawyer who knows what he is doing could probably make a claim against everyone who uploads it for copyright infringement - but it might not hold. However, there are clear exemptions to copyright for "research and private study" (S.29) and "criticism, review and news reporting" (S.30), some of which could apply here. Finally, even if the emails themselves are copyrighted, the facts in them are not.

------
On the other hand, making this information available in the first place likely contravenes the Data Protection Act and breaches confidence on a massive scale (particularly client/lawyer confidentiality). Someone should get in serious trouble over this, but Mr Crossley seems to be a pretty slippery lawyer (hiring a top QC just for his SRA hearing... etc.) so I imagine he will find someone else to take all the legal flak from. However, one imagines his professional reputation will be further damaged - and I can't imagine the big law firms whose communications were also leaked "by him" are going to be very happy.

Anyways, so while as a lawyer I have no doubt he'll find a way to turn some of this around, I do question whether the files were illegally obtained.

As for the "Pirates hack into law-firm's servers" comment, I do worry about that as well - hence I tried to make it very clear that no hacking occurred (nor Pirates-with-a-P directly involved) when PPUK published its response.

Was this the Edinburgh Liberton/Gilmerton by-election earlier this month? If so, you should have at least received a flyer through the door, and I think our candidate canvassed a decent percentage of homes in the ward (you may have been out when he came round).

Unfortunately, most media is only interested in the "big" parties (I believe that in Scotland, those are Labour, Lib Dems, Conservatives, Greens and the SNP), and without a big campaign that is expensive both in terms of volunteers' time and in terms of money, it can be extremely difficult to get the message out even that it's possible to vote Pirate, let alone why you should.

Of course, if you feel that we missed out on some obvious opportunities to let you know that a candidate was standing, please let me know -- we certainly don't think we have all the answers, and we're always looking for new ways to address exactly the kind of issues you highlighted in your post.

And thanks for voting Pirate!

They also proposed non-commercial copyright infringement be completely legal.

Yes, because millions are doing it anyway; the law is next to useless and serves no point except to criminalize teenagers in their bedrooms

On the other hand, they didn't (for example) say anything about forcing the BBC to abandon DRM, support open standards for distributing its own work, and use CC (or similar) licensing for license-fee funded programming.

This is plain wrong: from the relevant section of the PPUK Manifesto

Government copyrights are increasingly becoming a problem for society, with data such as maps and postcodes being jealously protected by government departments. We will introduce a new right of access to government funded data, requiring the release of all maps, statistics and so on that have been paid for by the taxpayer in open formats, under a Creative Commons or similar licence, giving the public access to research that they have already paid for. An exception will be made for cases that genuinely have national security or privacy concerns.

This will include the output of the BBC, which is funded by the licence paying public and should therefore belong to the licence paying public. We will amend the BBC's charter to prevent the BBC from using DRM technology, and to require the BBC to release all their content under a Creative Commons licence. We pledge to maintain and expand the current list of important national events that cannot be exclusively broadcast pay TV services, and we pledge to put into action the government's existing but widely ignored Open Source Action Plan, which would encourage the use of free software in the public sector, saving money, and making the UK less reliant on foreign software suppliers.

As you can see, we covered all of that.

For a long time people have been complaining about the big copyright owner groups not innovating or coming up with new business models but they seem to have finally done so - and it is an impressively clever one.

The DEA (well, the relevant copyright-litigation measures) are designed to make it easier for rich copyright owners to sue people (or threaten to sue them, see ACS:Law). Their aim is that this will increase their revenue by £200mpa. As there is no consensus about whether stronger copyright will actually help artists, encourage creativity etc., this can only be about the money.

1. get a law passed designed so you can make £200mpa more money.

Of course, their aim is to maximise profit, so they don't want to pay for this (part of the reason they haven't been suing so far is that it is very expensive with small returns in the UK due to their being no statutory minimum damages unlike elsewhere). They start by saying the costs of forcing ISPs to "protect" their copyrights should be shared between them (if you look through the BIS consultation responses nearly all the copyright owner groups argued for a 50:50 split). ISPs, consumer groups, and nearly everyone else rightly pointed out this was ridiculous, so the Government decided to reach a compromise that still means ISPs will be paying to make copyright owners more money.

2. get someone else to pay for your revenue-generating scheme.

But we know that ISPs won't absorb these costs, they'll pass them on to their customers as an 'Internet Levy'. Similarly, the remaining 75% of costs isn't going to come out of copyright owner profits, or their executive salaries/bonuses, or their vast lobbying budgets. The publishing groups are 'middle-men' so most likely this money will come from both ends: We already know how most record labels will add any expenses they possibly can to the "artist's share" of their revenue, so expect to see extra charges here for "protecting the artist's copyright so people can pay the artistpublisher more money". Also expect to see end prices go up (i.e. us paying more for music/films to cover this cost).

3. ????? [fiddle accounts]

Of course, the aim of this is for the "creative industries" (an amusing phrase, although in fairness, they are good at creating new legislation and accounting practices) to generate this £200mpa - but where is this going to come from? Well... us. Either through being sent threatening letters demanding we pay up, a few high-profile lawsuits, or general increased sales due to greater fear over piracy (somehow I doubt this last one will actually happen, but we'll see..) but yes, this £200mpa comes from us, the consumers.

4. Profit.

So, in summary, this law is about getting us to pay copyright owners so we can pay them more money.
As evil as it may seem, that is one impressively imaginative and innovative business model.

Oh, also it is interesting to see that there is currently no shortage of people complaining about this decision but strangely enough only 3 individuals actually responded to the BIS consultation on it... seems people are happy to complain once a bad decision is made, but aren't willing to actually do anything to help people make the right one.

Also, Ireland even has a shiny, new blasphemy law. But anyway;

There isn't actually a lot of money in music. People think there is, (and the large record labels would like to believe it) but there isn't. In 2009, according to the BPI's figures, the entire UK recorded music industry revenue was less than GBP1bn. That's for all their recorded music (CD sales, music videos, legal downloads, ad- and subscription-based services, the whole lot) for an entire year. A top film will make nearly that much. EMI (the UK's one, failing contribution to the "big four" - and the smallest one) made more than that in 2009 (actually, it even announced pre-tax losses of more than that; but that is more due to its screwed up investments and legal battles with its own musicians, or former musicians).

While $1bn may sound like a lot to you or me, on a corporate level, it is hardly anything - there really isn't that much money in actually selling recorded music to normal people. Normal people don't have that much money.

Moving on; yes, this will be an interesting case and will likely be hailed as a success and great progress tomorrow by the IFPI and all their little friends; in fact, it will probably be used to support their efforts in forcing through something similar under the UK's Digital Economy Act. These measures will not work for two reasons. Firstly, they won't stop file-sharing without causing a huge fuss (and likely leading to an even greater backlash against the lobbyists). There will always be loop-holes, there will always be unlicensed file-sharing while it still more convenient. Secondly, even if people stop sharing, they won't naturally move to paying for stuff (and they certainly won't be downloading from iTunes or using Spotify if their Internet has been cut off for a year).

The only people who will win here are the lobbyists (who can get nice big bonuses for getting their laws passed) and the lawyers who will be spending the next 10-15 years trying to untangle the mess it creates in the local, national and European courts. Stopping piracy through legislation and litigation isn't going to work, nor has it ever worked.

Incidentally, I am doing something to stop things like this; I am a member of my local Pirate Party and will be meeting with Ofcom (the UK's communication regulator who has been tasked with drafting - or just using the BPI's draft of - our n-strikes law) to explain to them why they will be unable to carry out the requirements made of them.

What are you doing to stop this sort of thing?

You guys really vote some Pirate party to your parliament to properly put an end to this crap properly tho.

If by some fluke we do manage to get one of our 9 candidates elected we'd actually have a real voice this time around as the polls show we're heading for a hung Parliament

You guys really vote some Pirate party to your parliament to properly put an end to this crap properly tho.

If by some fluke we do manage to get one of our 9 candidates elected we'd actually have a real voice this time around as the polls show we're heading for a hung Parliament

Who tells you to write the press releases and what to put in them? Who wrote the clauses?

Because you don't seem to be in charge but rather a secretary or public affairs officer, who is actually in charge?

No one tells me what to write. Usually some sort of request from a journalist will come into my inbox (and the others on the press team - it's a mailing list), or a big story will be in the news and one of us will start a new PiratePad* and the team will start working on it. It's like a wiki in real time all of the team available will work on it. Once we've agreed on the wording we proof read it, and email it out to our contacts list. All press releases are also available here: http://www.pirateparty.org.uk/press
The ultimate responsibility for anything that gets sent out falls to the Campaigns Officer on the National executive committee (NEC), but for most day to day tasks he helps out like anyone else; there's no sense of hierarchy as we're all volunteers (including all the NEC members; there are no paid party posts not least because we're only ~8 months old and can't afford to pay anyone).

As for the manifesto, it was debated on the PPUK forums and an initial straw poll taken, the options on the official ballot on were ultimately decided by the NEC (I'm not sure of the exact mechanism, but I suspect it's in our constitution), the members of whom were elected by a vote of all party members, and the positions were open to any party member who wished to stand; there was also a re-open nominations option on the ballot. To control the PPUK, the Swedes would have had to rig multiple ballots, even supposing they tried to do that, our copyright policy is different from theirs, so they weren't very successful. I hope I've put this conspiracy to bed.


*An implimentation of the OSS Etherpad

OK, so that seems a bit schizophrenic. You want to increase privacy, but also want to "let information be free" in terms of allowing sharing of information. But increased privacy is the opposite of sharing information, it's increased control over it.

We want openness and transparency from government and organisations but privacy protections for individuals. There's no contradiction there, just empowerment for the normal person. Copyright would still remain (at a much reduced length) for people who try and make money from others work, just sharing between individuals would be decriminalized. A full PPUK manifesto can be found from here: http://www.pirateparty.org.uk/press/releases/2010/mar/22/pirate-party-uk-announces-general-election-manifes/

Have you actually looked at our policies?

No, I haven't.

At least here in the UK rolling back surveillance & defending individual privacy is part of our platform. Just look at the three bullet points on our front page: http://www.pirateparty.org.uk/

OK, so that seems a bit schizophrenic. You want to increase privacy, but also want to "let information be free" in terms of allowing sharing of information. But increased privacy is the opposite of sharing information, it's increased control over it.

Pirate can be changed into Privacy - still a P, so not such a change.

How would changing the name to the "Privacy Party" be relevant? If it's not the exact opposite of what the party stands for, it's at least highly tangential. The Pirate Party stands for sharing information, not privacy.

Have you actually looked at our policies? At least here in the UK rolling back surveillance & defending individual privacy is part of our platform. Just look at the three bullet points on our front page: http://www.pirateparty.org.uk/

A return to the 28-year copyrights of the Statute of Anne would be in many ways arbitrary, but not unreasonable.

It has been reported that 14 years is closer to optimal.

Maybe reasonable would be 7 years, or two.

And of course these speaches on copyright make a good primer on what to expect when the copyright law is percieved to be unfair.

Maybe you should support the Pirate Party? When (ha) we come to power we'll cut the duration of copyright to 10 years.

You can also read our manifesto and see a list of our PPCs -- maybe we're running a candidate in your area?

You can also read our manifesto and see a list of our PPCs -- maybe we're running a candidate in your area?

Everyone that watched the debate last night was pretty horrified at how broken the "wash up" process was, and how obviously this bill was pushed through by the front benches without the support of the backbench MPs present. Labour were responsible for 97% of the MPs that gave a yes vote, because those Labour MPs that didn't would have faced severe consequences, perhaps even eviction from the party. Some rebel Labour MPs did vote against, Tom Watson leading them, this guy deserves serious respect for standing up for what he believes despite the pressure.

The election is coming and we need to take away power from these corrupt parties (the other two major parties are hardly blameless, although the Liberal Democrats did at least vote against). Support the Open Rights Group and also support the Pirate Party UK who are currently raising money to field candidates. You can donate to the Pirate Party here if you are so inclined: http://www.pirateparty.org.uk/party/donate/

My MP voted for the bill, so I'm going to vote against in the next election, I'd urge people to do the same, find out if your MP voted and which way by going here: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm/cmtoday/cmdebate/32.htm#hddr_2