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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.
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.
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.