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Courts Force Danish ISP to Block Torrent Tracker
Pirate writes "A Danish court ruled in favor of the IFPI, and ordered the Danish ISP Tele2 to block all access to the popular BitTorrent tracker. The Pirate Bay, currently ranked 28th in the list of most visited sites in Denmark, is working on countermeasures."
Goodbye, direct access. Hello, proxy!
Google? Because google cache will have all the pertinent information anyway.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Sure, they're blocking traffic to that specific tracker, but that doesn't really fix the "issue". Torrent trackers are like hydras, cut off one, and two will grow back in its place. Focusing on TPB will not end piracy via torrents, just as shutting down the original nova didn't over a year ago, and all the other trackers that have been closed down in between.
How Jaded Are You?
"It's very frightening that IFPI can get through the courts with something like this. In Turkey and China its the state that decides what information the people can access and what should be censored. In Denmark its apparently the record industry,"
I think that sums it up quite nicely.
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If you're going to block one tracker, you have to block them all yes? What rank is Google? I can type in "insert torrent here" tor and get back a pretty solid list of torrents that way too...
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
"Working on countermeasures" - Hmm.... can't they just tell the users to use Tor?
"In Turkey and China its the state that decides what information the people can access and what should be censored. In Denmark its apparently the record industry." I think it's funny that in almost every case the people are not allowed to censor for themselves... apparently Record Industries and Governments know what the public should and should not see. Censored troll is ********.
It amazes me how much power the music and film industry can wield. If I recall, Sweden has a law against being pressured by outside interests? Maybe other countries should follow suit and pass their own similar laws before Hollywood becomes the law.
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
why not use a p2p approach for the tracker itself, with multiple entry nodes into the network? it's simple, elegant, resilient, robust, and powerful.
arrr! batten down the hatches me hearties, and prepare to receive boarders! arrr!
of course this suddenly renews a lot of interest in technological counter measures. its interesting that this is the second time the same ISP has been hit in a similar fashion after the AllOfMP3 debacle. I wonder how specific the ruling is? for example if they allowed a domain named "ElPirateBay" on another IP address that was not mentioned in the ruling would they be in the clear? This is, after all, a touch more specific then a blanket ban on all torrents which would of been impossible to get through the courts and hence probably much easier to circumvent.
Changing your DNS lookup to fx. opendns.org will solve the technical side of the censorship for now.
So the issue is really the on the censorship itself and where it ends.
If torrents are successfully outlawed, a new legal protocol will be widespread within 90 days.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
One kid was charged with DKK 200,000 (US$ 40,000) for putting links on his home page pointing to sites where you could download music unauthorized. He was never sentenced though, as he died before the case was closed, and the Danish RIAA at least had the decency not to charge his parents.
For another example, Google News is available in all Scandinavian languages, except Danish. During the bubble a similar Danish news aggregating service was shut down by the courts by a decision that could be taken as out ruling deep linking altogether.
The scary thing for me is that there see to be a strong degree of acceptance of this situation in the nerd community. There seem to be a huge gab between us and Sweden in this regard.
Denmark is also where Microsoft domination is most firm, and before that, the one market where OS/2 really penetrated. We love out corporate masters. Every action taken against corporate abuse seems to come through EU, never the Danish government (no matter their political composition).
It's time for one of Leif Ericson's descendants to claim North America as his ancestral land and send the *IAA back down to Hel.
First of all the court in question is "Fogedretten" which is I guess somewhat similar to a small claims court. A company can get an injunction against another if they believe the other part is doing something wrong, if the other company decides to roll over and play dead it ends there, else it can go all the way to supreme court.
IFPI decided to attack Tele2 again because they have a reputation of not fighting back, which is most likely the case here (court documents haven't been released yet) - TDC and Telia the main operators here in Denmark have stated they will not implement this unless they lose in court.
Also, the block will be a DNS level block, so it has zero effect since it will only be on Tele2 DNS servers and it wont take long for kids to figure that out.
If something in my contry in censored, will I not have the right and duty to know what exactly it is, so I can avoid unintended affiliation with the content?
If so, where should I search for information about ongoing internet censorship? I live in Denmark, and one (positive) example of censorship is country-wide block of access to certain child-pornography sites. Statistics are collected about failed attempts to access those sites, and probably IP-adresses as well. The same would probably be the case for terrorist-associated sites, and sites with the feared "Anarchist Cookbook".
Should I feel entitled to a list of blocked and/or monitored sites, so I can avoid accessing them unintentionally?
The copyright law protects ISPs in Denmark against something like this.
I want back a neutral ISP and as soon as I can no longer access TPB.org (A site I don't use very often and when I do I use it for legal purposes), and if I do use it to breach copyright, I am the one who should be prosecuted.
First of all there is no such thing as federal law in Denmark. The country is far too small, so all lawmaking is made on a national level, with a certain level of ad-hoc rule for county mayors and other local institutions.
Secondly the court does not make, only enforce law. All laws are made in the parliament. Those laws might be corrupt, but even though I dislike the current government, I do not think we should put it down to anything but either ideology or incompetence. You should note my country also has an infamous 'deep'-linking law, basically making it illegal to systematically link to the deeper parts of another website (making e.g. Google News illegal).
It's also important for musicians like myself, as well as to the musicians that are members of Jamendo, which distributes Creative Commons-licensed music via BitTorrent and eMule.
A struggling musian who distributes his work via HTTP can easily be bankrupted if one of his songs suddenly becomes a hit. P2P filesharing, via BitTorrent and other protocols, provides an affordable alternative.
In discussing P2P with other people, and especially with your legislators as well as your ISPs, it's important to stress the legal uses of it. Otherwise they will only see it as a source of lawbreaking and copyright infringment.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
will be the ones "dragging the anchor", so to speak...
What?
Say it with me: "If torrents are successfully outlawed, only outlaws will use torrents"
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
Ok, thanks for clarifying, but nothing you said changes the basic premise of what i was saying: toss the bastards out with force.
And before anyone accuses me of being a hypocrite, i think we should do the same here in the states.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
DHT was the first thing I thought of. I don't even use TPB but I torrent lots of Anime. DHT works well.
If you don't like what I write don't be a CS and mod it down. Refute it.
Yea I can't spell. So what is your point?
While not currently related, this should be one more reason for young well-educated Danes to come over and live in Malmö/Sweden - just across the bridge from Copenhagen/Denmark. We're already building what's basically danish neighbourhoods here!
;)
PS: And I might even sell you my apartment. It's pretty close to the subway station opening up in 2011 - for even faster travelling to Cph
it's in my head
As part of the Real ID act which itself was a hitchhiker attached to a budget bill: Waiving laws that interfere with construction of physical barriers at the borders It's not just that they're trying to build 1 wall. In that bill they received authorization to build walls anywhere they want without regard to any laws to the contrary.
At this point I don't know whether we should push or pull. Should we try to prevent and slow down the loss of the American Dream or should we attempt to accelerate the decay so we can get on with scrapping the whole stinking pile sooner?
http://ajbenjaminjrbeta.blogspot.com/2008/01/defending-your-homeland-from-homeland.html
They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.
Not entirely accurate - since the federal law equivalent in our case would probably be EC law. We have to conform to international treaties and such, so the question (long term) is where the EC is going on this - NOT where the danish parliament thinks it wants to go now.
I have spoken'eth.
Now I have an actual excuse to buy that secluded mountain-forest cottage and try out satellite internet.
I don't understand how they could get though a court with this either.
Danes may not be allowed to use TPB for anything "interesting", but are at liberty to do so at your own responsibility!!
http://www.folketinget.dk/pdf/constitution.pdf
77
Any person shall be at liberty to publish his ideas
in print, in writing, and in speech, subject to his
being held responsible in a court of law. Censor-
ship and other preventive measures shall never
again be introduced.
All they do is to block thepiratebay.org in their DNS servers.
Nothing prevents everyone from using OpenDNS instead. So it is very easy to work around the block.
Good thing trackers are small. This makes all kinds of counter-measures against blocking feasible.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Laws mean nothing until you're willing to enforce them. If just passing a law was all that was necessary, illegal immigration into the United States would have ended in 1986.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Hey, you - the least significant transparency bits in the image you just downloaded look suspiciously random!
slightly off topic, but how did he die? Was it suicide due to the legal action taken against him?
Also most calls to block p2p don't suggest just blocking the warez sites, but the protocols as a whole, for example what the RIAA/MPAA keep trying to get Universities to do.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
What about fair use? Imagine you're going to download a Scientology secret document exposing the cult's evil activity. You can't do it LEGALLY. This is just an example of legality != morality.
Another example. Let's suppose you're going to analyze the written works of a meditation guru that you suspect is a scammer. If you bought them from him, you'd be contributing to HIS cause. However, if you just download them you can get your work done.
Third example. Try before you buy. There's a new Anime that your friends recommended, and you wonder whether to buy it or not. But unless you watch a significant portion of it, you won't know if it's worth buying it... so you get a fansubbed version from the internet. Or what about a piece of music?
Reality isn't always black and white like media companies want us to believe. First of all, virtual works fall outside the bound of supply and demand, because it's extremely cheap to copy, since you can create additional copies out of thin air (or thin CD's for that matter). With the internet, you don't even need CD's. Therefore, infringing copyright cannot be assured to be stealing - specially if the downloader couldn't buy the item anyway.
And if the content that someone wants to LEGALLY PURCHASE isn't available on his third-world country and he'd have to spend twice the money on overseas shipping and handling, it's much easier to download from the pirate bay. And it wouldn't be stealing. Pirate works also help authors increase the exposure of their works.
And take into account the corporations' monopolic practices like price fixing, exclusivity contracts, selling by bundles to raise the prise, etc. All these things stiffle creativity and tend to produce extremely bad quality "artworks".
Imagine if there were no pirate copies of movies. We'd be forced to purchase tickets for Battlefield Earth or some other blockbuster failures, but guess what, there's no refund for non-enjoyment. Even if the movie sucked, you couldn't get your money back.
In your innocence you seem to think that all money paid goes to the artists. In your dreams. Most money really goes to a bunch of middlemen who exploit the artists. (Hint: Why do you think the writers' guild is on strike?). And let's not forget about Trent Reznor of NIN, who is very vocal about his support for people pirating ("stealing") his works. ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mm6rc7hcFE ). This makes you ask yourself, who is REALLY trampling on people's rights? Is it really the pirates, or the corporate giants? And for every LEGAL purchase of RIAA-produced music, you give money to the same bastards who sue random people JUST BECAUSE THEY CAN.
Just because the MAJORITY of the works there are copyrighted doesn't mean that all are. The Pirate Bay - and all bittorrent trackers, for that matter - is also used to distribute authorized works like Linux distributions, free (and legal) copies of Paulo Coelho's works, open documentation (like Open Source Software manuals), homemade videos, hacker guides (whether using them is legal or not, is outside this scope), fair use works like AMV Hell, doujinshi, webcomics (which are available online for free, anyway).
Here are just some examples of AUTHORIZED content found in the Pirate Bay:
h
"Secondly the court does not make, only enforce law. "
No, that is wrong. The court interpret the law, and therefore partly define it.
The EU law says that the rights of copyright owners should be protected as long as it's not a privacy issue or way too unpractical (which would clearly allow file-sharing). But the Danish court read the law wrong. It has happened before, just look at the constitution that said that all men were equal, but children, slaves and women were obviously not "men".
I be sensin' a great disturbance in the sea. -Brownbeard Kenobi
> slightly off topic, but how did he die?
All that was mentioned in the press was that his death was "not related to the suit".
Not sure how they could conclude that, with such certainty.
This is becoming a trend in Europe. 3 of the 5 major internet providers in Italy block TPB and have bandwidth shaping. One of them is ironicly Tele2.
The problem is not that you wish to implement a solution with no real effect.
The problem is that you are asked to enforce such a solution in the first place.
In other news, a number of other Danish ISPs openly refuse to block that url, which is more The Right Thing than agreeing to do something which happens to be useless.
"Good news, everyone!"
No, that is wrong. The court interpret the law, and therefore partly define it.
The EU law says that the rights of copyright owners should be protected as long as it's not a privacy issue or way too unpractical (which would clearly allow file-sharing). But the Danish court read the law wrong. It has happened before, just look at the constitution that said that all men were equal, but children, slaves and women were obviously not "men".
Funny you should mention constitutions since ours (I'm a Dane) in no uncertain term prohibits censorship or other preventive measures on speech.
So, in principle, while you can still go to jail for shouting 'Fire' in a crowded theater in Copenhagen, no-one has a right to try to stop you!
Well, that just exemplifies that it's almost impossible and that all laws depend on how they are interpret.
Of course a theatre can put up a sign with "Be quiet or face risk of being thrown out or even fined.". And of course one can be accused of causing disturbance by shouting "FIRE!". And of course all that is totally OK if there really is a fire.
What a court have to do is to look at the intentions of the law. If it's obvious to society in general that slaves, women and children have no rights, then a court will judge according to that unless it's quite clear that the legislators meant something else.
So in this issue it's extremely important that you Danes speak up to change the definitions regarding file-sharing, privacy and censorship in Denmark, because a court will judge according to the standards of the current society. Some polls shows that about 70%-90% of the Internet users in Sweden think that sharing is OK, and that makes it totally impossible for a court to judge that sharing is stealing.