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Torrentspy Disables Searching For US IPs
dr_strang writes "Torrent indexing site Torrentspy.com appears to have disabled torrent searches for IPs that originate in the United States. Instead of a results page, users are directed to this page, which states: 'Torrentspy Acts to Protect Privacy. Sorry, but because you are located in the USA you cannot use the search features of the Torrentspy.com website. Torrentspy's decision to stop accepting US visitors was NOT compelled by any Court but rather an uncertain legal climate in the US regarding user privacy and an apparent tension between US and European Union privacy laws."
Did someone say tor?
Non-US proxy usage skyrockets globally.
That would potentially be fantastic. If we can make Congress understand that excessive copyright and patent regimes put the U.S. at a technological / competitive disadvantage, that's part of the war in getting change.
Of course, Congress might be just as likely to respond in some insane, drunken, counter-productive way as well, which is why I used the word "problematic" above.
Get real. Just because you add the word "freedom" to the start of a sentence doesn't mean you are describing a real freedom. US users are not being blocked because the US is "too free." They are being blocked because US laws meant to protect copyright holders may require logging and disclosure of logs. This is in conflict with privacy policies.
There is a disagreement here about what "rights" are more important (ease of tracking legal violators vs. privacy). To characterize US laws in this instance as being about "freedom" is disingenuous.
The Congress shall have Power . . . To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Author and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries; The pretense of this right is to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts not to protect a failed and obsolete business model.
A libertarian shat on my carpet once. Claimed the free market would sort it out. -Ford Prefect(8777)
Do you get several failed requests before a successful one? The tor exit node would have to be outside the US, so I imagine there must be many failed queries for every success.
Thanks to a cultural obsession with (fighting) child porn in the US, I would expect just the opposite - No sane American would allow exit connections unless they had high enough 3rd party traffic to claim basically no control over or knowledge of the vast majority of the content (ie, an ISP, and they rarely give anything away).
And if the real feds don't ruin you, Dateline will, regardless of the actual facts. I can just about hear the announcement: "Up next, the newest threat to your children: We put 250 megs of fake child porn on a website, and found we could retrieve it anonymously with a new program for terrorists called Tor. We've hunted down, had fired, and forwarded evidence to the DA about the beast running this smut ring, known perversely as 'Exit Node'.
Buildings with security guards are rarely robbed or broken into. A naive building owner may say, "you know, there haven't been any break-ins in years - I'm wasting my money paying the security guards to guard this place!" when in fact it was the deterrent of the security guard that prevented the break-in in the first place. Civil liberties (such as privacy safeguards) are a bit like security guards - the fact that you have them means you probably don't need them, but if you get rid of them, you'll want them back in a big hurry.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
Well, many European nations have an explicit right to privacy. Which is different from the US (yes there is a constitutional right to privacy but it is implicit, which means it tends to be unenforced in rulings). While the government has more leeway than private companies they are mostly subject to similar rules (i.e. they can't simply share information between, say the IRS and welfare, you need an explicit law to allow it.)
Simple: automatically release works to the public domain after a limited time of protection. That's the way it originally was supposed to be: an artist is encouraged to create a work because they have a time-limited protected period to make money from it, and the expiration of that protection encourages the artist to continue creating. Now, an artist can sit on one successful work and make a lifetime of money from it.