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The Pirate Bay Is Back Online
Many readers have submitted news that The Pirate Bay is back online, operating for now as "The Police Bay." Writes one anonymous submitter: "Pirate Bay got new hardware, moved the servers abroad and used recent backups. So the only bad side-effect of this police raid is that hundreds of clients of the ISP PRQ still have not got their servers back from the police. When the police did the raid on Wednesday, they took Pirate Bay from Bankgirot's secure server room. Then they also took all the servers in PRQ colocation facility STH3, effectively disabling a lot of small companies. The connection between PRQ and TPB? - Same owners, nothing more, this is beginning to become a huge scandal in Sweden with coverage on TV and all newspapers 4 days in a row."
From the IRC channel, it sounds like the new servers are located in the Netherlands with hot backups running in Ukraine. The MPAA just got rocked. If it wasn't so damn early, I'd drink to this news...
..is available at YouTube. For some reason the police covered the cameras with plastic bags halfway through.
There will be demonstrations in Sweden's largest cities this afternoon, condeming the actions of the Swedish police and department of justice in this matter. It is being co-organized by the Pirate Party, and the youth organizations of several mainstream parties from across the political spectrum.
In Stockholm it starts at 15:00 on Mynttorget (right by parlament). That is in 15 minutes so hurry!
In Gothenburg a demonstration will start at 16:30 on Gustav Adolfs Torg.
Representatives from two major political parties in Sweden, Folkpartiet and Vänsterpartiet have filed formal complaints against the Minister of Justice and members of his staff.
This has increased the general publics awareness of The Pirate Bay and probably increased the number of p2p users.
A very nice shot in the foot for the Swedish Justice Dept., the police and our very "customer friendly" **AA organisations.
# ~: no sigs today
They're mostly correct about what they write. Several editorials also point out that this fight _cannot_ be won by the music, film and software industries. They must adapt.
it's in my head
This guy http://tpbeng.blogspot.com/ is translating local news to english.
Judging from a traceroute, the servers seem now to be hosted in The Netherlands.
I'm a bit surprised, when the admins of TPB said in Swedish media that they will relocate abroad, I actually thought that they would move outside the EU.
Let's see how the Dutch officials will react to this; how long TPB will stay up before they try to take it down again.
In Chaosradio International #009 one of the maintainers of TPB called "Peter" mentions traffic data and server capability of TPB and also comments on the Pirate Bay induced traffic on the Swedish part of the internet. According to Peter, each of the Pirate Bay high end servers handles about 20000 connections per second. This kind of packet flow once brought the main router of one of the biggest Swedish internet service providers to its knees. The traffic volume to and from the Pirate Bay actually isn't very high, just a couple of gigabits per second. The induced traffic between the peers allegedly reaches 50% of the total Swedish internet traffic. Swedes can get 1Gbps connections to their homes and don't have to pay an arm and a leg for it. 100Mbps is quite common.
The interview also covers the political environment and the internet culture of Sweden, and of course the raid.
Virtually all major swedish newspapers (http://www.aftonbladet.se , http://www.dn.se/ http://www.expressen.se/ http://www.svd.se/ are leading with the "Pirate War" and news that Pirate Bay is back online.
Media coverage have so far been very good, concentrating on the mismanaged raid, suffering of other hosted servers and the fact that the raid was not in line with the popular will.
Swedish state television have also done a news report connecting US lobbying and the swedish minister of justice to the raid, which is seen as extremly bad. Several other politicians and the justice ombudsman have started investigation into the legality of the raid.
You are right, this scandal is getting serious media coverage in Sweden. Here are short quotes translated from Swedish Dagensindustri "it's like trying to eradicate dandelions" Aftonbladet "The media conglomerates have no chance against the youth" Dagens Nyheter "The Net-Pirates have won" Svenska Dagbladet "Net-Pirates have won" These are from our major newspapers and posted hurriedly from my MacBook while walking in a demonstration against this abuse of power by the police and **AA lackeys.
# ~: no sigs today
Well, for the record, 2006_05_31.pdf.
The law.
And historical lessons, they show Dutch police first collects evidence with the aid of good old 'dd'.
Meaning generaly they leave the computers, servers and desktops, running untill at a later time the collected evidence could be used to actually shut down the operation being investigated.
'Just' a complaint from a private party is not enough to get an immediate shut down.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Listen to the interview. According to one of their admins, they don't keep logs. He specifically mentions that they aren't stupid like that.
BZZT! Wrong!
In Sweden, you have even less rights than in the US. In the US, you have Miranda rights, proper search warrants (that have to be shown to the suspect), standars of admission for evidence (i.e. illegally obtained evidence is not admissible in court), you name it. In Sweden? None of these.
Go check out http://www.avslaget.se/ and find out just how many rights you have as an innocent suspect.
Mininova, Demonoid and a bunch of other huge sites are located in NL and the RIAA/MPAA cabal has been trying for ages to take them down. It just hasn't worked. The Pirate Bay will reopen its servers in Sweden as soon as the equipment is returned post-investigation. Judging from the public outcry against the long arm of the **IAs, it shouldn't be too long before The Pirate Bay has servers in three different countries.
A .torrent isn't copyrighted and linking to copyrighted material isn't either.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
$40 for a shirt that might attract unwanted attention, even :) ;)
(Google for uses of the lambda symbol
Contributory infringement has to be direct, not indirect. Pointing someone to a computer that has a chunk of a file is indirect. Giving them that chunk is direct.
The difference is important - otherwise, your electical company, your landlord if you rent/your bank if you have a mortgage, the company that made your computer, the chair you sit your ass in to type, and the boss who pays your salary so yo can afford all the shiny toys, would all be guilty of contributing to infringement, since without them you wouldn't be able to infringe the copyright. Oh, and the government as well, since they regulate the telecom industry and provide the environment that allows you to do all these things.
Piratbyrån is a different organization (lobbying org.), albeit with similar goals.
You can't vote for Piratbyrån, they are not running. You can vote for Piratpartiet, and you should!
The US has laws explicitly addressing "contributory infringement", where one assists others engaging in copyright infringement but doesn't do so themselves. Sweden doesn't. EOM.
A torrent file is basically an "assembly instruction manual" for data file(s). Just as it's not illegal to distribute instructions for building a bomb or a gun, it is also not illegal to distribute instructions on how to create a data file. Actually building (or using) a bomb might or might not be illegal, but merely delivering the instructions on how to build it is definitely not illegal (at least in the U.S., so far). Just so with torrents: hosting the torrent files, distributing them, downloading them, that's all legal. Actually using the torrent file to "build" the data file(s) it represents is what is illegal, if the file(s) being (re)built are copyrighted.
If you want to start a website that does nothing but provide instructions on how to build bombs, you can do it. Even if every single person who downloads those instructions uses them to build a bomb and tries to blow up a packed church on Sunday.
What country are you from, giorgiofr (887762)? I imagine you are American. So your understanding of copyright law in a foreign country an ocean removed from you is suspect at best.
There is no connection between shooting to kill someone with a gun and copying a file on a computer, unless your goal is to enflame. Your straw-man arguments do no good here.
The police raid of TPB (at the direction of the United States) is widely believed to have been illegal under the laws of the country in which the raid took place. Attempting to applying U.S. legal theory to the situation does not magically change the jurisdiction. Why does the United States and some of its citizens believe respecting the sovereignty of nations is optional?
I'm not expert on Swedish law, but if it's anything like Finnish I'd say there's no need to worry.
They are most likely investigating charges against the three detained persons. Thus, they are supposed to find evidence related to the charges against these people. If they find anything else, it is not a reason to push copyright infringment charges against anytone else. I don't think they even could do it with coincidental discovery related to other case.
See, copyright infringiment atleast here in Finland is not a felony, but a "Asianomistajarikos" (something in which the plaintiff must make a specific accusation and an officially request an investigation against some entity).
Thus, to get tracker statistics from piratebay, the plaintiff should request an investigation, investigators should have suspicion that TPB is holding relevant records against the offender, ask for subpoena and then get the records from TPB. I don't think they could get a warrant to confiscate the servers for such purpose anyway. Unless TPB was to refuse to surrender the records.
PS. IANAL, but interested in the law, especially "Pakkotoimilaki". (Law which mandates processes for arresting, house/person searches, fingerprinting, DNA filing, confiscation and so on.)
Bot Assisted Blogging
They don't have free speech, either: making disparaging remarks about minority groups is illegal. For example, a pastor in Sweden said that "all gays are a cancer on society." Got fined/imprisoned (i forget which).
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
thepiratebay.com in the statment? I was under the impression TPB is an .org.
For more information, contact:
MPAA Los Angeles
Kori Bernards or Elizabeth Kaltman
(818) 995-6600
MPAA Washington, D.C.
John Feehery or Gayle Osterberg
(202) 293-1966
I'm pretty sure there's a .com that redirects to the .org too :)
Now, it gets even better than this. According to people over there the national police happen to keep whingeing about not having enough manpower, etc. to enforce problems like drug trafficing, etc. and little gets done about real problems- but they can muster 50(!) people to "bust" a place that doesn't do anything illegal per their laws as a result of pressure being put on them from MPAA and others in the US. It's my understanding that there's a lot of people pissed about it over there right now.
:-p
Agreed, I'm a Swede and there are problems with police shortage in many cities here. Ours would basically celebrate if we got as few as 10-20 more our way to, you know, handle abuse and rape and drug cases.
To make matters worse, the Swedish police have also earlier said they aren't intending to prioritize these cases too much, which made a lot of sense given the overall situation. Then this happens, where they get 50 officers to arrest 3 people and clean 1 server hall. If it weren't for the serious matters here, I'd start trying to come up with "how many Swedish police officers does it take to screw in a lightbulb", but I'm to annoyed to be in the mood right now.
Anyway, thankfully, the case with piracy involved hasn't scared away politicians, and a political party member has contacted the Parliamentary Ombudsman part for these reasons, part for others in this controversial move (like not granting lawyer defense for one of the arrested, but still for another), and it remains to be seen whether any actions will be taken against Thomas Bodström.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Pictures from the piracy demonstration
Piratdemo1.jpg
Piratdemo2.jpg
Piratdemo3.jpg
Piratdemo4.jpg
Piratdemo5.jpg
Piratdemo6.jpg
Actually he was found innocent in the swedish supreme court(Högsta domstolen- HD).
The reason of holding the speach in the first place was to get it to HD so he could test the laws regaring the relationship of free speach, freedom of religion and laws against hate crimes.
Just saying it like it are.
http://tpbeng.blogspot.com/
look for "The Pirate Bay to be spread over six countries":
I'm sorry, but pretty much everything in your post is wrong.
Contributory infringement has to be direct, not indirect.
No, contributory infringement is inherently indirect infringement, also known as secondary liability. Maybe you're getting confused by the fact that there must be an underlying direct infringement which is contributed to.
Napster, for example, was found liable for contributory infringement because they were aware of infringements on their system (having been expressly told about them by copyright holders) but nevertheless continued to materially assist the users who were directly infringers. All Napster did was to provide a technology and and index of links, remember.
They're not alone. It's actually not that uncommon to see linking result in liability.
Pointing someone to a computer that has a chunk of a file is indirect. Giving them that chunk is direct.
Also your example fails, because giving someone a file will not be contributory infringement, it will be direct infringement, in the form of distribution.
The difference is important - otherwise, your electical company, your landlord if you rent/your bank if you have a mortgage, the company that made your computer, the chair you sit your ass in to type, and the boss who pays your salary so yo can afford all the shiny toys, would all be guilty of contributing to infringement, since without them you wouldn't be able to infringe the copyright. Oh, and the government as well, since they regulate the telecom industry and provide the environment that allows you to do all these things.
No, for two reasons. First, the law differentiates between factual causes and proximate causes. For example, let's imagine that A negligently runs a red light and hits B. B can sue A, but he can't sue A's mother. A's mother is certainly in the chain of factual causation: if she hadn't had A, A wouldn't have hit B. But she is too far removed from the car crash for liability to stand.
Second, one of the elements of contributory infringement is knowledge of the infringement at the time of the contribution. It is incredibly unlikely that any of those entities will have the slightest idea what you're doing at the time when you download something unlawfully. Therefore they're off the hook.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
The direct benifits (if any) from dragging one person through the courts and ruining thier life aren't worth the cost of doing it and criminal charges for filesharing clients seems quite unlikely.
so the only reason to take individual filesharers to court is as a scare tactic, it works to some extent but to have a significant effect on piracy they would really have to significantly increase the chances of getting into trouble.
breaking down the networks used for piracy on the other hand will make life harder for pirates who will have to keep finding new good networks and maybe some will give up in the process.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
The concept of contributor infringement is old, but the Napster case pretty much set the standard in the digital world. Basically if you intend to assist someone else in copyright infringmeet, you're guilty of it yourself. This at least is somewhat sensible.
If you made a mistake or something, you get a free chance to remove it (the "safe harbor"). Google will remove links if people make a dmca complaint.
OTOH, the 2600 case was about linking to a circumvesion device. Very orwellian.
One difference between US and Swedish law is that in Sweden even non-commercial copyright infringement is a crime, which means that it is covered by the general rules for being an accessory or an accomplice to crime (Brottsbalken 23:4). This was never conclusively tried by the Swedish Supreme Court in the so-called "BBS case" (NJA 1996 s. 79), where the sysop of a BBS was prosecuted for letting users illegally share software. The reason is that the prosecutor never claimed that the sysop was an accessory or accomplice to acts committed by his user, instead claiming that the sysop was illegally making the software available to the public by letting users download the software from his BBS. The court held that the sysop could not be convicted because there was no act actually performed by the sysop, and because the prosecution hadn't initially claimed he was an accomplice to someone elses copyright infringement the court was unable to consider that possibility due to Swedish trial rules (Rättegångsbalken 30:3, som innebär att domstolen bara kan döma för en gärning som innefattas av åklagarens gärningsbeskrivning).
Hence no one can be totally sure whether The Pirate Bay is legal in Sweden, because the legal precedent is not 100% clear. The question if intent should be very interesting here. While it should be evident that The Pirate Bay is set up with intent that people should be able to use it to commit crimes, the proprietors have no knowledge of what copyright infringement users are going to commit and no direct intent that those specific crimes will be committed.
The claim that Sweden doesn't have laws against "contributory infringement" is wrong, however.
Not sure what country you are from, but where I am from the police needs evidence. They can not just arrest the owner of the number. They can not even just call him and ask him to sell them some drugs.
In Belgium (where I am from) the cout has stated that it won't go after distributors who just share. It will only go after people who do copyright infrengements for money.
So what would happen is the following. **AA gives the IP to the police. The police brings it to the court and the court drops the case. As this brings unneeded work to the police, they would NOT be happy with it.
The local version of the **AA have tried to bring cases to court and where told to come back when money was exchanged. They also have tried to intimidate providers and some just informed their customers that they MIGHT be doing illegal and that that would be against the AUP. However as long as there is no courtcase, a provider can not give my information to SABAM (the local organisation) and they are not allowed to look wether I am sharing the latest SUSE torrent, a movie I made myself or the movie Daens.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Considering last weekend Google Video had a full copy (view and download) of "Fear and Loathing" I'd say they're tied. Hell, at one point it was number 35. I'm sure there was somekind of age-check-before-download (there has to be a single, cool word in German for that) to protect the children from such dangerous thoughts.
A cache of the page: http://64.233.179.104/search?q=cache:ZwUcUdtinKUJ: video.google.com/videoplay%3Fdocid%3D-572069601692 0047541+google-video%2Bfear-and+loathing&hl=en&gl= us&ct=clnk&cd=1&client=firefox
Shpxva' terng.
"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity but they've always worked for me" - HST
ThePirateBay Releases Version 2.0
June 2, 2005
Ummm Last I check it's 2006..
Oh yea then there's also this.
The sole purpose of pirate bay is to facilitate crime,
No. Their sole purpose is to host torrent files. Whether those are torrents of copyrighted works or public domain works is not something they consider, they host them either way. So your statement is inaccurate.
Google removes things from the cache, the pirate bay tells people to fuck off.
Well, duh. When its in google's cache, they are directly hosting it on their servers- that's a crime, no ambiguity included. Do you think they clear all pages of sites like TPB or www.torrentspy.com from their cache as well? Of course not, because they know its not illegal. In fact... hey look, a google cache of a page linking directly to a torrent file of a copyrighted work!