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

Won't Be Censored?

[niceone]

The linked article says:

I want to point out that still to this day, the police has not given us one single hint on what content on the site has been containing child porn - and the things we have filtered out has been proven not to be child porn either.

(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.)

Re:Won't Be Censored?

[TapeCutter]

Perhaps: "have not been removed" means "filtered before added".

Re:Won't Be Censored?

[Goaway]

They have removed lots of stuff. They aren't exactly trumpeting that particular fact in their public grandstanding, though.

Try comparing http://thepiratebay.org/user/achim106/ and
http://209.85.129.104/search?q=cache:B5kqltngQjcJ: thepiratebay.org/user/achim106/+http://thepirateba y.org/user/achim106/&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1 for instance.

I tried submitting a more balanced third-party article about this earlier, but apparently it's not interesting to Slashdot unless it's spin.

Re:Won't Be Censored?

[Anonymous Coward]

And now many people will soon realize that they just searched google for child pron.

Re:Won't Be Censored?

[Goaway]

Several different user accounts have mysteriously disappeared, within hours of this story hitting the net. No, I don't think that's a coincidence. The Pirate Bay admins themselves have complained that they had to guess at which files to remove because they got no communication from the police.

(The Police and The Pirate Bay both claim they were unable to contact the other.)

Re:Won't Be Censored?

[computational super]

I admire your courageous efforts to go out on a limb and commit yourself to such a controversial stance.

Re:Won't Be Censored?

[1u3hr]

Which sounds to me like they did remove something, and maybe even that if there was child porn they would remove that too

According to some comments in the blog, their admins checked a lot of torrrents some had claimed to be CP. They didn't find any of that, but did find other crap, like viruses, falsely labelled files, duplicates, etc and so they did remove those.

I have to say if one did want to trade CP, you would be competely insane to do it via a publc torrent indexing site. As far as I can see, the worst anyone has found is child models -- young kids wearing clothes, posing in a way some might find provocative, but no more so than in a JC Penney catalog. Sure, some are using it for sexaul gratification, but you could say the same about zucchinis and no one tries to ban them.

Re:Won't Be Censored?

[Oktober Sunset]

and vice versa.

All about saving face...

[WIAKywbfatw]

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.

No surprise...

[tygerstripes]

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.

No deletions?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:No deletions?

[Rakshasa Taisab]

TPB seems to have has many times more child porn uploaded on their site the past few days, than all the years they've been operating. So whomever it was that decided to put TPB on that list, has in fact _increased_ the distribution of child porn.

Re:No deletions?

[Opportunist]

Not trying to create a new conspiracy, but maybe just had to create a crime to match the report...

Read the linked article

[Opportunist]

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?).

Re:Read the linked article

[Eivind]

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.)

Re:Read the linked article

[Opportunist]

I know it's becoming common to reduce every argument to the bottom line and ignore the reasoning behind it, but do you think it's possible, at least here on /., to remain in the good tradition of actual discussion (akin to the philosophers of the days of yore, not Oprah and Springer)? If you don't like my argument, you're invited to counter it with an argument. Yelling WROOOOONG is none.

It doesn't make sharing copyrighted material legal. I don't claim that it does, nor do I want to argue in favor of copyright infringements. All I want to argue is that, knowing human nature, this is the logic consequence. What is more likely? That people stop using P2P to share files they shouldn't, or that they will adapt and evade the tracing mechanisms? Keep in mind that it does not require any knowledge of tracing and avoiding it, all it takes is to download a tool that does it for you. Quite similar to the way P2P already works. How many of the people using P2P tools have the foggiest clue how they work?

And since people will do whatever necessary to avoid being tracable, this development will lead towards more privacy for those that actually do commit a crime. When you push ordinary people in the vicinity of real criminals, they will aid those criminals, simply by being indistinguishable from them.

So if you want to take my argument apart, please do. I enjoy a good discussion, and yes, I'm aware of the most obvious counter argument, that it's the people's fault if they're helping the criminals by using better encryption and better obfuscation. The question remains whether they'd do it if they weren't pushed to do it. Because, as said above, people will not heed a law they don't support. They will do whatever necessary to evade it, but they will not bow to it.

associations with child porn

[MrSpiff]

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.

from the article:

[cliffski]

"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".

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.

Re:from the article:

[Hydian]

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". You completely missed what he did say in your efforts to rush forward with what you wanted him to say.

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.

Re:from the article:

[ultranova]

its a pathetic moral defence to say "I'm not actually physically hosting the bytes in this case", its a bit like saying "I just told them how to bypass the locks, I didn't actually physically break in, officer"

Yeah, it would be just as wrong as publishing an article about .

TPB exists so that geeks can get hollywood movies for free, while its owners rake in advertising cash. It's a business model based upon copyright infringement and leeching.

I assure you, I haven't been tempted to download Hollywood movies or RIAA music for ages. I can't imagine why anyone would be.

Re:from the article:

[arkhan_jg]

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. All the 'good' things you mentioned are almost certainly copyrighted too you know. Who gets to decide what is 'good' infringing material, and what is 'bad' infringing material? Defending free speech means defending all of it, even those things that you disagree with personally.

Ah, but leeching free copies of spiderman 3 isn't free speech at all! I hear you say. Which just goes to show what a good job the media industry have done.

Remember, copyright is a two-way deal. I suspend my free speech right to diseminate copies of public domain material for a period of exclusivity for creating copies by the original author. For 14 years, if I remember rightly. All so that ever greater amounts of creative works enter the public domain, for the benefit of all - our shared culture to grow ever richer, for derivative works to grow, for the education and entertainment of all. All works will enter the public domain, because the stories and ideas and shared culture that people create from also come from the public domain.

Fast forward a couple of hundred years. Copyright isn't a deal any more. It's 'intellectual property'. Ideas, stories, music all of it. Locked up in digital vaults, defended by infinitely-extending copyright duration. Huge amounts of material should be in the public domain by now, and yet none of it is. Some musicians in the UK are complaining that their 'property' is about to expire after 50 years. Well, the deal was even less generous when they created the works, yet they want to extend the duration of the copyrights again, and again, and again after the fact.

Well you know what? Stuff them. They had a deal. and they broke it, over and over again. I have a right to make backup copies, I have a right to share these materials with my friends and I have a right watch it in any damn way I please. The law may not recognise these rights, but any law which criminalises 60-70% of the population (and if you include trivial violations like media shifting, it's damn near 100%) is a bad law, and should be repealed. There are alternative ways to encourage and fund creative works, and get them into the public domain - lets explore that.

You argue my views, and the exercise of them is illegal, and should be prevented by people like TPB. How is that any different than making illegal and banning 'proper' free speech like whistleblowers? They feel that all speech is to be protected, even copyright violations, as copyright law is broken, just as laws protecting corporations from whistleblowers or banning political speech are broken.

They trivialise the entire argument into "my human rights to get free hollywood movies". The human rights underlying the whole copyright argument - free speech, privacy, anonymity, corporate mal-influence over the political process, restriction of the public domain, DRM etc etc are pretty important too. Defending the pirate bay is a way to bring the whole thing into the open, and perhaps reform the political and legal landscape to benefit the public and the artists rather than all the money and influence being with corporate middlemen who add nothing to the exchange, only pervert the system for their monetary benefit.

Re:Some stuff was removed

[Digital Vomit]

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.

Re:Is this an argument over method or over result?

[Tuoqui]

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!

Re:one don't smartass childporn

[trashbat]

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 nonce sense.

Fixed that for you ;-)

Re:Yay!!! TPB is legal in Sweden..

[smallfries]

I downloaded the song "I Want Candy" by Bow Wow Wow the other day.

Now I understand why there is a post anonymously option on slashdot...

wish we could confidently stand behind US laws...

[moxley]

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.