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.
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.
Yeah. But onion routing is only one way of foiling traffic-analysis. Downloading to a shared machine (with many users) that deliberately does not keep logs, and then transfering from that machine to your own using an encrypted protocol also works. It does mean transfering the content twice -- first to the shared machine, and then from there to your own machine, but that isn't a very large price to pay. But true, onion-routing is practical. And gets more practical as bandwith grows more than the content grows. I've got the lowest speed offered by my ISP. 10Mbps symetrical. At that speed, downloading an album of music compressed to say 192Kbps takes on the order of half a minute. If it would instead take 5 minutes, but be untracable, that wouldn't be a huge price to pay at all. Yes it's an order of magnitude more, who cares, it's still 5 minutes. Even larger stuff, say something which is 1GB large. At line-speed that is 10 minutes. If it took an hour, but was untracable, again that'd be a reasonable enough trade-off. And I'm being conservative here. You don't need to bounce the average packet trough 10 nodes to give plausible deniability. I doubt it's going to be possible to convict someone for something that it is, for example, 25% likely he is actually guilty of. (which would require bouncing packets trough on the average 3 dummy-nodes.)
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.
But TPB doesn't host any actual files, just the torrent. So if the only people downloading Bob's torrents are people that he specifically invites, then why would he be putting it up on TPB at all. Since he is hosting the torrent, couldn't he just email the tracker to all the people who he wants to send the file to, or simply send them a URL to some password protected web directory so they could download the torrent file? Seems like a lot of extra risk to take, putting something like that up on a public site, when you just want to share it within a small group.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
What he said is that forcing file sharing to go underground is going to accelerate the development of tools that make said file sharing harder to trace. If child porn is the government's larger concern as they claim it is, then they should recognize that those same tools will be used by those priority targets which will make catching them tougher. It is true, but not a good argument.
As far as your misconceptions about freedoms...the fact that some people abuse something is by no means a legitimate argument against freedom of speech. That is about the dumbest thing that I've ever heard. Not that any of it matters in this case since no one country owns the internet. TPB doesn't break any laws in their country and you don't have any more right to try and push your laws on them than they have to push their laws on you. You don't have to like it, but you should respect it.
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]
Have you asked those 10% how moany of them have actually learned of your program through illicit distributions? Don't be so quick to disregard that a large portion of those who download actually choose to support good software.
Hell, even though I hardly ever use some software, e.g. K!TV, I've sent more than one of your licenses' worth to both because I want them to develop further. I can't remember last time I used K!TV. Or Damn Small Linux, same story.
Hell, if it wasn't for evil nasty pirating, I wouldn't have any albums by Willard Grant Conspiracy (love that guy's voice) or for that matter, The Postal Service's only album.
Sure, I might be an exception to the rule, but rather than seeing 100'000 pirate downloads as 100'000 lost customers (never gonna happen), consider it 100'000 pitches to prospective customers where you don't have to actively do anything that you would not have done anyway (i.e., clean up your code, add new features, change colours every few iterations). (anon because I've moderated)
You yourself admit that it has helped you weed out the junk in your movie purchases. And the studios still get your money for the good stuff. If this means that the movie studios and the record labels don't get to make any money off of stuff people don't want to watch/listen to, all the better.
Bottom line, if they are making quality art, people will pay for it (assuming they don't alienate their customers by having a couple of their "John Doe" lawsuits brought to the attention of the general public)
The creator of this post (Jacob Smith) hereby releases it, and all of his other posts, into the public domain.
In the beginning, there was Napster. Napster and other "p2p" sites weren't really peer-to-peer. they were "facilitated peer-to-peer" or peer-to-server-to-peer. In this environment, it was relatively easy to get the IP address of an infringer, all you had to do was check the server logs. Then the RIAA, MPAA, and associates began cracking down on this "p2p" traffic and suing the living crap out of every one they caught (or thought they caught) infringing.
So, many (the more cautious) began using torrents. Torrents are truly p2p (with the exception of the server hosting the trackers, which is just a direct download, no sharing involved) and so, much harder to track, but not impossible.
Now, for the Pirate Bay's argument:
"If you continue to persecute bittorrent sites, it will lead to the development of even more anonymous, (encrypted, node-hopping) networks, where it will be harder to find someone when a real crime (e.g. kiddie porn distribution) is committed." What part of their logic actually makes sense to you? All of it. Anonymity either encourages the breaking of the law or it does not, you cannot have it both ways, just because you want free music. Anonymity is a tool, to be used for bad or good according to its user. It can be used to protect kiddie porn dealers just as easily as it can be used to protect free speech. In this case, the free speech happens to be, "Hey, I don't agree at all with your silly copyright laws! So pbtthh on you!"
The point of the statment was, If you force us pirates (arrgg) to develop and use even more anonymous means to our end, then don't blame us when the pedophiles do the same.
The creator of this post (Jacob Smith) hereby releases it, and all of his other posts, into the public domain.
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.
I downloaded the song "I Want Candy" by Bow Wow Wow the other day.
This is not a lost sale. I would never buy the CD the song is on. In fact, you CAN'T buy this CD in the country that I am in. It simply doesn't exist here. And, even if it was, I wouldn't buy it. Basically, it's a good song that I'll listen to on random play. But, pay for the whole CD? Nope.
On the other hand, I saw a video on YouTube by a band named "Clutch" the other day. I downloaded another song of theirs off the internet. And now, all of their CDs are now on my wishlist for my next B-Day. I'd buy the CDs myself, but they don't exist in the country that I live in.
Kinda adds a whole new wrinkle to the situation when someone wants to pay money for the CDs, but can't because the CDs haven't been released in a particular country.
In my case, my only choices are to
1) never buy, and never listen
2) wait until someone buys for me, and not listen until then
3) download now, and wait until some buys for me
Am I a thief?