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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."
..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
This guy http://tpbeng.blogspot.com/ is translating local news to english.
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.
Well, for the record, 2006_05_31.pdf.
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.
A .torrent isn't copyrighted and linking to copyrighted material isn't either.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
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!