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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."
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
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.
They have removed lots of stuff. They aren't exactly trumpeting that particular fact in their public grandstanding, though.
: thepiratebay.org/user/achim106/+http://thepirateba y.org/user/achim106/&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1 for instance.
Try comparing http://thepiratebay.org/user/achim106/ and
http://209.85.129.104/search?q=cache:B5kqltngQjcJ
I tried submitting a more balanced third-party article about this earlier, but apparently it's not interesting to Slashdot unless it's spin.
And now many people will soon realize that they just searched google for child pron.
I admire your courageous efforts to go out on a limb and commit yourself to such a controversial stance.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.