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."
> TPB stated that they do not hold such links, and if any are reported they are immediately investigated and removed.
Those statements are not logically cohesive. If you run a tracker indexing hundreds of thousands of torrents, you have no idea whether or not you index any child porn torrents. You might know that you delete any that are reported as child porn, but if Bob puts up a torrent of an encrypted RAR called "my holiday snaps", or even a something in the clear that is named innocuously enough, it's probably not going to be downloaded by anyone except the people Bob invites to, so the chances of it being reported if it is nefarious are fairly slim. After all, TPB can't download things to check can they? That would copyright infringment ^_^
I have nothing against what TPB does, but I do think such blanket denials are silly.
Well, The Pirate Bay did remove a bunch of borderline child porn torrents before this announcements.
And?