Slashdot Mirror
The Pirate Bay Won't Be Censored
Naycon writes "In the end it looks like the Swedish police dropped the Pirate Bay from the list of sites filtered for containing child porn. The update of the filter, which is scheduled for later this week, won't contain the Swedish file-sharing giant. The police say that the reason for this change is that the torrent containing the porn has been removed. But the Pirate Bay states that no files have been removed. Was this just a cheap trick by the Swedish police to battle file-sharing? The link contains a statement from the Pirate Bay; several Swedish newspaper are also running the story." In a related story, reader paulraps writes "Sweden's Justice Department is backing a new proposal that would enable copyright holders to find out the identities of people illegally sharing their material on the Internet."
(my emphasis)
Which sounds to me like they did remove something, and maybe even that if there was child porn they would remove that too. I'm not saying that's good or bad, just the Slashdot headline seems inaccurate. (Unless the article doesn't mean what I think.)
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
By referring to a file that was supposedly removed the Swedish police can say that they did their job correctly and remove the black mark they put next to The Pirate Bay's name without having to backtrack or publicly apologise in any way.
This is pretty standard practice with police everywhere nowadays: the politics of policing seems to be more important than actual policing.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
This was all bull from the start.
To put it in perspective: the supposed issue was that thePirateBay held links to child-porn, which is illegal in Sweden (there are forms of content that are illegal, but only some to which it is illegal to simply link). The government was proposing to have most of the major Swedish ISPs blacklist the site for having such links.
TPB stated that they do not hold such links, and if any are reported they are immediately investigated and removed. Since it is a forum on which anyone can post links to content, this is the most active policy it is possible to enforce. Therefore there are no grounds for blacklisting.
Most people suspect this was just a muscle-flexing on the part of the Swedish government - possibly under pressure from US and other governments, and ultimately from the MPAA, RIAA and other non-US affiliated organisations - and that it would come to nothing. They were just saying "Yes, you know our laws and do not flout them, but don't push it".
And in this case, it seems that this is indeed what happened. They have shown that they're not afraid to exercise a little force to keep ThePirateBay in line (albeit unnecessarily, in my opinion), and I daresay they've not harmed their cause at all in this regard. TPB is actually pretty strict and even-handed anyway, but this may have meant to serve as a bit of a warning from the Govt to anyone looking for inappropriate material: If you're after kiddy porn, TPB is not the place to look, and nor is Sweden.
I've simplified a little, and coloured heavily with my own opinion, but I just wanted to present a little more background for those who don't really give a fuck about all this but will insist on commenting anyway.
Thank you, goodnight.
Meta will eat itself
Except in the TPB blog, people posted links to questionable torrents, and some of them went dead soon after. I didn't verify the contents of these torrents, but some stuff was removed for sure. Like all torrents by this user:
http://thepiratebay.org/user/debruin/ (Nothing to see there now..since it was removed, but I am certain there was stuff there earlier.)
I guess if one were inclined to give both parties the benefit of the doubt, it might be a matter of what is seen as child porn. The police thought it was, TBP didn't, but deleted things anyway at the request of some users.
Corruption is EVERYWHERE. One can even suggest that it might be in human nature. HOWEVER, I'm no way liking censorship but to defend the swedish police, I have to say those encounters that I have had with our police been very nice. I doubt there is musth corruption in swedish police but corruption at political level. Swedish police is not like american police. They are usually very nice people and not thugs. I do like our police force. I'm originally from Iran so I know what a bad cop is, and swedish police are not bad. Although rotten eggs can be found anywhere.
Mr. Andersson put it quite directly, and straight to the point: Bending over to the recording industry will do more harm than good in the long run.
Right now, it's quite possible to follow the trail of data. P2P links directly from source to destination. With data retention and easier access to user data, users will switch to tools that reroute the traffic through multiple nodes from source to destination, so following it becomes near impossible.
Currently, people don't use it. Simple reason: It increases traffic by a multiple, depending on the number of hosts you route it through, it can three, four or tenfold. And thus the data throughput is lower. So following the trail of "really" criminal data is quite possible for the police. Should someone (ab)use a P2P network to transfer data that doesn't only infringe copyright but actually contains something that would interest a general attorney (not only because of lobbying of certain interest groups but because it is the G.A.'s biz, because it DOES actually affect every citizen if a crime of this kind if committed), it's fairly easily possible to find source and destination.
If now file sharing is criminalized, people will quickly pick up obfuscation mechanisms to protect themselves against the recording industry. And thus will protect invariably those that use those channels to distribute data that can be used for (or is by its very nature) a crime. Not only against certain interest groups and minorities, but against the majority of people on this planet.
In other words, the RIAA is helping pedophiles and terrorists all over the planet (hey, why should terrorhype and thinkofthechildren only be used by the adversaries of privacy?).
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
childporn is a to sensitive topic to be brushed away with the usual smartass piratebay routine. I's just as good to duck when they start tossing childporn over the battlefield, even if it's nonsence.
It's often argued that the method of tracking torrent sharers is evil. For a number of reasons - the 'library principle', personal privacy, the uncertainty of which computer is the torrent client, and the uncertainty of which user is making use of the computer. These are all criticisms as to method.
But let's say this was for something quite different - let's say it was surveillance in order to.. monitor the sharing of child porn and catch offenders. Would exactly the same _method_ criticisms apply?
I have the cynical suspicion that the _method_ criticisms regarding monitoring torrent sharers are actually vicarious motives for _end_ criticisms, as they do not seem to apply in other cases where they equally much should.
it has also been suggested in various swedish blogs that the reason for this could be to label the pirate bay and file sharing in general as a dirty business and to scare people away from it by associating it with child porn. representatives of the danish antipiracy movement has stated that child porn is actually a good tool for fighting piracy (source http://forum.piratpartiet.se/Topic79221-15-5.aspx# bm79282), if service providers agree to filter child porn and help prosecute those who distribute it (as is the case for most providers in sweden today), it will be a much smaller step to do the same for copyrighted material.
sorry, but not very.
Pining for the fjords
And in this case, it seems that this is indeed what happened. They have shown that they're not afraid to exercise a little force to keep ThePirateBay in line (albeit unnecessarily, in my opinion), and I daresay they've not harmed their cause at all in this regard. TPB is actually pretty strict and even-handed anyway, but this may have meant to serve as a bit of a warning from the Govt to anyone looking for inappropriate material: If you're after kiddy porn, TPB is not the place to look, and nor is Sweden. Let's dispel one urban myth, what TPB does isn't exactly legal in Sweden and, contrary to popular opinion, neither is copyright violation. The Swedes passed new antipiracy legislation just a few years ago. TPB has been living in a legal limbo in Sweden that is apparently created by the fact that Swedish courts have not yet ruled on the legality of bittorent trackers like TPB who facilitate copyright violations. I suppose that even if TPB's operation is ever completely outlawed in Sweden they will still be able to operate from facilities in places like Russia and Europe's wild, wild East but that will still not move their bittorrent tracking firmly into the realm of what is legal in most countries unless they make an effort to filter out torrents that point to unlicensed copies of copyrighted material (if that is even practically possible and not that they'd be inclined to do so if it was). TPB is pretty deliberately facilitating copyright violations and they are not afraid to flaunt it but that doesn't mean that the Swedish police are completely unjustified in raiding them, that TPB isn't hurting anybody's business with what they do or that having a service like this available to you is some one of your basic human rights. If you are going to download and consume software and multimedia products, without paying for the privilege, products that other people worked hard to create and depend upon to feed their families at least be honest about what you are.
"The aim of the proposal is to facilitate efforts to clamp down on illegal file-sharing. This in turn is expected to stimulate the development of lawful alternatives for the spread of music and movies over the internet, according to a statement from the Justice Department.
Tobias Andersson, press spokesman for lobby organization Piratbyrån, was critical of the move.
"This is completely crazy," he said, before adding that "it is time to stop pampering the record industry".
"The danger here is that it will speed up the development of anonymous file-sharing programmes that make it technically more difficult to trace somebody's internet use. These kinds of services can also be exploited by people involved in criminal activities, such as paedophiles".
============
Okaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyyy. So the guy from the 'pirate party' is now trying to defend a website full of copyrighted material because "to attack our freedom to share copies of spiderman 3, is to encourage paedophiles".
This is truly pathetic, and goes to show the lengths some people will go to in order to keep on getting music, movies and other stuff for free. If the pirate bay really gave a damn about free speech, they would remove *all* copyrighted material, and merely use the site to host information that genuinely should be protected, like leaked documents from whistleblowers, information that governments want suppressed, political opinions far outside the mainstream etc etc. The fact is, maybe 0.01% of stuff on TPB will fall into a 'geneuine protected speech' category, the rest is just copyrighted stuff people want to leech.
By doing this, ironically, they are totally undermining the legitimate argument for the protection of a free, uncensored web, and peoples right to publish information of a sensitive nature. If you put some civil right activist in a courtroom arguing that its essential that TPB exists because it is a defence of free speech, he will just be totally crushed by an opposition lawyer who hands the judge a PC and shows him the top 500 torrents on TPB.
If you care about privacy, freedom of information and censroship, defending people like TPB is entirely the wrong way to do it. They trivialise the entire argument into "my human rights to get free hollywood movies".
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
From Goaway's comment on the most recent pirate bay article:e piratebay.org/user/achim106/&sourceid=mozilla2&ie= utf-8&oe=utf-8
http://thepiratebay.org/user/achim106/
When I checked it there was nothing there so I looked in the cache http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A//th
If you read through the previous slashdot article there are some now gone torrents that google cache shows.
The pathetic thing about the pirate bay in general is they're doing immature things that aren't worth risking your freedom for. People are meant to risk their lives and freedom for ideals worth protecting, not the freedom to download copies of the latest far from essential Hollywood trash without paying for it.
I'm guessing the admins would be arrested the moment they set foot in a lot of countries so it's a shame they chose this for a cause to fill the voids in their lives.
First, a couple of points:
1. Piratbyrån != Pirate Party, ok?
2. "Think of the children"-arguments do indeed sucks.
3. The Pirate Bay is not full of copyrighted material. It's a torrent tracker, ok?
But Piratbyrån does not, AFAIK, use freedom of speech to defend piracy. They are saying that
todays copyright law, e.g. monopolization of culture, only serves to enrichen the industry at the expense of others.
I do not know how fighting for a reformation (or elimination) of copyright law relates *directly* to the battle against censorship and the defense of privacy.
However the defense of the Pirate Bay does not cheapen the argument for freedom of information, why should some information be not-free just because you don't like it? Isn't that censorship of a sorts?
In a swedish newspaper they stated that they hadn't removed anything. Guess both sides are lying here.
Anyway, here is some info about the filter:
The filter is not mandatory in anyway. Its voluntary for the ISPs to implement it, and I'd estimate that about half of the swedish ISPs does it. Its also just a simple DNS filter, so its easy to get around by using another dns server, or running your own.
What is interesting in here is the fact that the agreement between the ISPs and the police states that neither party can show the list to anyone except a few technicians needed to implement the list. That kind of worries me, since they won't even show us what is censored. I think it may even be illegal, since Swedish freedom of press law says that you can't stop anyone from publishing anything, you can only take action against them after it has been published and spread if they are spreading illegal content, this is just because they want the people to be able to see what it is they want to censor, to make sure it can't get out of hand I suppose.
Posted by a Debian GNU/Linux user
A huge child pornography ring involving almost every senior member of the Swedish Police was discovered yesterday!
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
that TPB always deleted stuff from their areas, including KP. Just like AOL removes stuff like KP when some tosser puts it on AOL systems.
So why is it TPB is blacklisted for having temporarily KP on their machines but AOL isn't?
That's probably right, but perhaps there is a bit more to it. Perhaps it is in the interests of law enforcement agencies for there to be sites like The Pirate Bay in order to track, profile and investigate potential offenders. A bit like a 'raise the flag and shoot whoever salutes' trick. It wasn't, after all, their job to stop software piracy, copyright infringement or anything else other than child porn.
I would imagine it's actually rather difficult to infiltrate a group of individuals which does not meet in a public place, nor communicate using conventional methods. It's also difficult to form such a group without ever having communicated somewhere in public - but they'd do it if they were forced to. Therefore, it's not in their interests to push the activity too far underground.
Just an idea, anyway.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
So yes, let's be honest about what's going on here. It's downloading, that's all. Ok, this is funny... you are honestly trying to tell me that every single solitary person who downloads say, a computer game off TPB, or simply downloads a little, cheap-as-shit, (but often very useful) shareware programs off the net and then cracks the program with a patcher or a keygen from a TBP supplied torrent is also a person who would never buy that program if they couldn't illegally download and crack it? I have written a Shareware program which is in fairly widespread use. I estimate that less than 10% of the copies in circulation are legal. You are either trolling or your are honestly so stupid as to really expect me to believe that not a single one of the ~90% of my user base who pirates my software wouldn't shell out the 10 measly bucks it costs to get a license if they had no alternative? Quite frankly I am not at all satisfied with a social marketing effect that yields me one license sale for every 9 unlicensed installations. Why don't you come and join the rest of us who live in the real word where illegal downloads represent real revenue losses for the manufacturer of the program/multimedia-content in question and don't make an ass of your self in public by claiming pirate consumers are doing invaluable marketing work for those they are happily ripping off.
People were predicting over here this would be the excuse they'd use to take TPB down. Nice to see your government's scumbaggery is so predictable.
Liberty in your lifetime
We are said that file-sharing is killing the business of publishers so they may give up creating new content.
Following that logic, file-sharing child porn is something that everybody should do as it would make creating child porn economically unfeasible and would end it.
(Of course, I am just joking.)
Real life is overrated.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Repeat after me: TPB does not host copyrighted material, they only host the directory of where to get it. Maybe you should go after google next, because they index TPB. No? THEN SHUT THE FUCK UP, or, change your argument to not make you sound like an idiot.
I find this pretty sick... Isn't the point of having law enforcement do this because they are supposed to uphold certain legal standards? Sure, they may still not always do, but besides that. What if the copyright holder happens to be someone like Hell's Angels and they legally get your identity, a gang comes knocking on your door and kick the crap out of you? Of course, it's wrong to share copyrighted work without their permission, and it's also wrong to kick the crap out of someone in response, but it's a possibility they open for. They open for more about a "law in your own hands". I can't really see a reason a copyright holder should get hold of the identity of an offender? What exactly are they hoping to achieve with that? To more quickly get sorted with the legal work and suing people, without considering much about how this newfound information will be used by the copyright holder?
It's a similar case with pedophiles and publishing their identities. However, at least then they can prove directly harmful to their near environment. But in this case, it's on a different scale. About file sharing on the Internet. I don't see the same urgency to reveal identities with this crime. They need to weigh that urgency against the risks of people abusing this to sidestep law at all times. Two wrongs don't make a right...
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I think that the multinationals (music industry etc) and their US government lackeys will continue to do whatever they have to do until they shut TPB down.
If that means having someone post purported or real child porn to the site and then raiding TPB, that is what they'll do. There is no doubt in my mind that they will create a situation to enable them to take action if necessary. The criminal and corrupt elements within the US government (of which there are many, and they are the same ones who would be taking money from RIAA lobbyists both on and off the record) have learned that this is the most effective way to get things done when they want to, but can't because people's rights get in the way.
Usually they try intimidation, if you see the letters page on TPB you can see the many attempts at this; while their responses are not the most professional thing in the world, I find them very enjoyable to read because these corporate lawyers are so used to being able to scare people into submission. It's especially enjoyable to read the ones where there has been a back and forth going on and you see the lawyers get more exasperated - yes, they are juvenile at times, and seem to be asking for further confrontation - but enjoyable nonetheless. You can see them at the link below.
http://thepiratebay.org/legal
At least in Sweden they can say "this is our law, if members of our government or police or US companies don't like it, too bad because the law trumps their opinion." It used to be that in the United States we had a constitution that protected us from government abuse. Now we don't - and the small portions of it which have not been completely subverted are just ignored at the whim of the powerful.
with real problems in the world. These fucking twats are wasting everyone's time because people are downloading movies and music from the internet?
our congress is just a bunch of two dollar whores!
since when does the movie and music industry have so much clout in sweden?
They all need to eat a bit of their own shit!
They're using their grammar skills there.
I don't know if it's in the top 100, but the Comes v. Microsoft case materials were put in a torrent on TPB, and I believe it was my suggestion to put them there (someone on Groklaw said they'd preserved them and wanted to know what to do with them).
...APG (Anti Pirat Gruppen) is using child porn to shut down sites they can't close in any other way.
Stop with the hypocricy. Everyone copies. All copyright does is let a select few use violence to prevent others from copying. All it is is a monopoly grant enforced by violence (not consensual voluntary trade) which stifles innovation. It is economically and philosophically provable that copyright and patent protection does the exact opposite of the intention to promote and advance science and the arts.
/. There's some serious economic and philosophical intellectual advancement and upbrading occuring from the mass of competing comments which is enriching all who read them.
Without exception, every instance of patent and copyright protection hinders the advancement of science and art. And not only does it hinder the advancement of science and art, but those claiming violent enforcement to protect their intellectual creations are hypocritically ripping off the intellectual creations of others, IN ABSOLUTELY EVERY SINGLE INSTANCE of every copyright and patent grant.
We are decades and decades and decades less scientifically advanced, less culturally richer, precisely because of copyright and patent. Translation: more poor, more sicker, more dead people. More pollution too. Seriously take a look at the growth of the legal profession, which does nothing to materially improve lives, and is the result of a corrupt protection racket caused by violence begeting violence. All that energy which goes into preventing people from copying just means people have less quality stuff at a higher price because of government leaches.
By definition, consensual voluntary TRADE, *only* ever occurs because that which is received is valued more than that which is given away in exchange.
Next Constitutional Amendment: BAN all copyright and patents. The result would be an almost instantaneous humungous increase in the rate of technological and artistic advancement. It's as easy to see as merely looking at the plethora of freely available blogs and internet sites like
"From DNA to P2P, we are all Copycats now. Go Go Copycat Power! Copycat Powers activate! Form of, a Copycat." --monxrtr
"They have removed lots of stuff. "
So now the PirateBay has accept editorial responsiblity and remove offending material? I'm not sure they get to decide what they consider offending in the long run.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I have tried but I can't find the right post in the old thread, anyway someone linked to the torrents uploaded by a user on pirate bay and atleast according to the torrent names they seemed to contain child porn, however when I visited the url they where gone so I checked google cache and the page turned up with the names of the files. I'm pretty sure I made a post with the url to the google cache but I can't find it in the thread.