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.
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.
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.
"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
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
Many people believe that concepts like copyright are doing severe harm to the progress of human culture, arts, science, and civilization as a whole. Anyone can see the damaging effects of intellectual property laws firsthand in this dawn of the Information Age. Sharing movies, books, etc. is only one aspect of this fight which must be fought...and won. That you can't see beyond the issue of mere "movie piracy" (which has a negligible to zero effect on movie sales anyway) makes it little wonder that this seems like a silly ideal to fight for.
The free flow of information could be saving lives and making the world a better place for everyone if it were allowed.
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
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 you are saying that we should treat the guy sharing a bootlegged copy of Spiderman 3 as if they were peddling child porn?
...
All joking aside, and as much as I dislike pedophiles. I have to say the exact same standards for someone sharing a copy of some movie should be the same standards we use to prosecute pedophiles.
Which is to say that you should not be able to convict someone based on an IP address alone. The police when dealing with those who peddle and share child porn often have to go through alot. The timeline is typically something like this.
Pedo gets caught talking to a 10 year old girl IRL by their parents. (skip this if its potential sting operation by a legal entity)
Parents contact FBI (see above)
FBI agent pretends to be 10 year old girl.
Pedo eventually tells FBI Agent posing at 10 year old girl to come meet them at X-location.
FBI gets warrant to show to ISP getting themselves the physical house address to the IP address corresponding.
FBI gets warrant to search the premesis based on evidence in last step.
FBI raids the house when they see the people are home and seize all the computer equipment and arrest everyone inside.
Which is a far cry away from the RIAA/MPAA model
Get IP Address
Issue DMCA order to ISP to get them to try and cough up the name/address of the person who owns the account
Extort money from said person (We know that you were sharing music/movies! Here take our offer of $3000 so we can go away and pretend this never happened)
Profit!
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
+2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
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?
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.
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
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.
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).