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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."
Remember that this is Sweden, not USA we talking about, in here the police doesn't have any more leeway when it comes to laws than normal citicens. (Ever so often we get to read about wich high up police officer got how big traffic tickets etc [the fines are based on income rather than being a fixed sum]).
So please try to remember that not every contry works the same as America (and I'm really happy that it's so, frankly America and the American mentality scares me.)
There have been numerous articles showing both sides of the story, often in the same newspaper.
The swedish national TV station (funded by every household with a TV) ran a story based on an informant, basicly saying that the minister of justice was running errands for the white house. Ordering the takedown of the pirate bay even though prosecutors had already looked into it and found that they couldn't justify a takedown. The minister of justice and his departments actions are currently being investigated.
There have been an online poll showing that about 87% think that music copying is ok. Most people also think that music piracy would go down significantly if a music CD had a resonable price.
Oddly there have been no mention what people think of actual programs and games being copied. So as far as the masses are concerned they think TPB is used only to copy music and movies.
I would like there to be an article around the fact that if TPB is found guilty of assisting copyright violations. Where do you draw the line? What about google or any other search engine? What about community sites, several cases of rape and pedophilia has been caused by connections made on such sites, are they assisting these crimes as well?
Lots of people are outraged that the police already low resources are being wasted on copyright violations when people don't want to go alone at night out of fear of rape / muggings.
All in all I think the media coverage have been better than expected.
According to the Swedish news coverage, there is some legitimate doubts as to whether it was a legitimate investigation or not. Their laws don't make linking to infingements an illegality. As such, since The Pirate Bay didn't host anything that is illegal per Swedish law. 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.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Oh come on ... the video from the surveillance cameras shows they took their sweet time checking out the server racks. They didn't have to take all the hardware they took (and who the fuck needs to wear camo on a raid of a server room anyway?).
The warrant was for seizing the servers hosting TPB; any seizure exceeding that was outside the scope of the warrant, and that's why they (the police and the minister of justice) are in the crapper - taking something that's outside the scope of the warrant is theft. That they covered the security cameras with garbage bags partway through just makes them look guiltier.
So - either:
- the police couldn't properly identify the hardware in question, in which case they were incompetent, and should have called in someone with more expertise, or
- they could, but over-reached.
- they purposefully grabbed more than they were entitled to, hoping for a backlash against TPB for causing the inconvenience
Those are the only options. How much you want to bet it was #3, seeing as politicians and the **AA were involved? This is a very public cluster-fuck, and someone will have to pay, both politically and financially.