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."

Comments

Re:Won't Be Censored?

[niceone]

Heh, well I guess it's the Slashdot headline I didn't understand! I guess it means "won't be on the censored list". But the summary also says "the Pirate Bay states that no files have been removed", but the linked article makes it sound like they did.

Or something :)

Re:from the article:

[Anonymous Coward]

Piratbyrån does NOT represent the Pirate Party of Sweden, nor is it The Pirate Bay.

PiratByrån - NGO.
Pirate Party - Political Party.
The Pirate Bay - Bittorrent tracker search engine.

All run by different people. Obviously, they have overlapping interests, but so does your local recycling center, the green party and greenpeace.

Some info about the filter

[tpwch]

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.

Re:associations with child porn

[MrSpiff]

quoting one of TPB's admins, brokep, from his blog (http://blog.brokep.com/2007/07/06/swedish-police- will-censor-the-pirate-bay/):

To make things perfectly clear - we don't host any content. And I have never seen child porn on the bay. Our moderators work on all the reports we receive from the public and they contact ECPAT or other organisations if they found suspicious stuff. The police has never contacted us in any aspect regarding child porn!

Re:from the article:

[lilomar]

Ok, as embarrassing as it is, I just realized that I actually did need to turn off adblock. /me slaps forehead. (O.o)

My point about them needing the money for the servers still stands though.

Top 100?

[Xenographic]

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).

Re:Won't Be Censored?

[Oktober Sunset]

and vice versa.