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The Pirate Bay is Here to Stay?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the arrr-me-hearties dept.

vitaly.friedman wrote to mention a Wired article about The Pirate Bay, a file-sharing crewe out of Sweden that thumbs its nose at the MPAA just for kicks and has yet to be shut down. From the article: "The Pirate Bay's legal adviser, law student Mikael Viborg, said the site receives 1,000 to 2,000 HTTP requests per second on each of its four servers. That's bad news for the content industries, which have fired off letter after menacing letter to the site, only to see their threats posted on The Pirate Bay, together with mocking replies. Viborg said that no one has successfully indicted The Pirate Bay or sued its operators in Swedish courts. Attorneys for DreamWorks and Warner Bros., two companies among those that have issued take-down demands to the site, did not return calls for comment."

6 of 956 comments (clear)

  1. Gete your factes straighte by spyrochaete · · Score: 5, Informative

    The Pirate Bay isn't a "file sharing crewe", they're an open bittorrent tracker with a website. They're not a release group like Razor 1911 or The Humble Guys.

    From the site's about page:

    The Pirate Bay is the worlds largest bittorrent tracker. Bittorrent is a filesharing protocol that in a reliable way enables big and fast file transfers.

    ...

    The Pirate Bay was started by the swedish anti copyright organization Piratbyrån in the late 2003, but is since October 2004 separated and run by dedicated individuals. Using the site is free of charge, but since running it costs money, donations are very much appreciated.

  2. The EU will catch up by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    There is a nice directive-in-the-making called IPRED2 which criminalises copyright infringement.

  3. Not illegal by michrech · · Score: 5, Informative

    They aren't hosting any of the content. Only text files (as explained on their web page).

    It is not illegal (Again, according to their web page) to host files that *point* to the content. Untill that changes in their country, they will stay alive (also, so long as they can keep their bills paid, that would help... :) )

    --
    bork bork bork!
    1. Re:Not illegal by hkmwbz · · Score: 5, Informative
      "The information is made available in that form for the express purpose and with the express intent of facilitating theft."
      Theft? Even if they did give you instructions on how to get to the nearest CD shop and you chose to steal a CD, that wouldn't matter. Are you saying that giving people directions should be illegal? That's silly. TPB doesn't give you driving instructions anyway.

      Oh, you were talking about copyright infringement rather than actual theft (taking someone's belongings away from them), weren't you? Sorry, you got me all confused with your newspeak...

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      Clever signature text goes here.
  4. Re:How to be popular by Stavr0 · · Score: 5, Informative

    The sad part is that a large number of slashdotters will convince themselves that this type of thing is good despite the fact that the site is very clearly engaged in theft. For the umpteenth time, no. Not theft. Copyright violation, or 'piracy', the land-based kind, where nobody gets boarded, killed and thrown to the sharks. And at that, they are not engaged in 'piracy' either. They are at most 'enablers' or 'accomplices'.

  5. Perfectly legal in Sweden. by Trash · · Score: 5, Informative

    By Swedish this is perfectly legal. Some years ago a guy was sued for posting links to mp3's on his web page. And the Swedish court desided that it was nothing wrong with that. He didn't ditribute the mp3's only showing were they where. And the same thing is pirate bay doing now.

    Hope my english is better the Swede in the muppets show.