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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."
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.
They're not even doing that, this is a DNS level block. A few sub domains pointing to 83.140.176.146 should enlighten the Danish judiciary.
You mean sometime like DHT which is the peer to peer distributed tracker? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_tracker#Trackerless_torrents
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).
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.
TPB will have to change their end first. currently, the site redirects you to http://thepiratebay.org/ if you go to their site without thepiratebay.org in the host, e.g. : http://83.140.176.146
you'll have to put thepiratebay.org in your hosts file until they change it.
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.
No, it can't. Both your post and the one I originally replied to show a lack of understanding of how BitTorrent works. There are 2 layers of indirection, the tracker and the .torrent file, and they are separate.
.torrent file is a file containing all the necessary metadata about a torrent. Names of files, hashes, and how to contact the trackers for that torrent.
.torrent file. All this tells you is how to contact the trackers. It does not contain sufficient information to actually contact peers and download the torrent.
.torrent file, can actually be used by clients to contact peers for download. As such, its level of facilitation in the download and sharing process is much higher.
.torrent and a tracker are necessary for BitTorrent to function. Sites providing searching or caching, like Google, can provide the .torrent -- they cannot provide the tracker. Simply having a cached .torrent file provided by Google, if the trackers it references are shut down, would do you no good.
The actual file (or rather, chunk) copies are held by peers, and transferred only between peers. In order to be able to get chunks, though, you need to know who the peers are, so that you can communicate with them.
The identities of those peers are provided by a tracker. Trackers are the equivalent of BitTorrent servers -- a client contacts them and, using the BitTorrent protocol, they inform the client of how to contact other peers.
A
An indexing site, or Google, can readily provide you the
A tracker, given a
Both a
(PEX and such complicate matters.)
Solution: DHT. Works nicely - a bit slower, but you still can join the swarm.
:-)
So they just need to meet one peer that know TPB torrents. Say, on a tracker distributing Linux... Then peer exchange and DHT will take care of the problem. Mission downloaded
The moon is not fully subjugated. I demand a second assault wave preceded by a massive nuclear bombardment.
Hosting trackers is the primary function of TPB; they're one of the most common and reliable tracker hosts. I'm also fairly certain their search feature only includes torrents for which TPB is the tracker. They don't host any of the actual contents, though; you won't see a TPB server acting as a seed. They merely act as coordinators, collecting and redistributing lists of the IP addresses and stats of the various clients participating in the torrent.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
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.
Google is a very general search engine, it hosts nothing.
.torrent files are just files that contain a link, just like google serves up.)
Um sure they do, they host dynamically generated html files filled with links.
TPB is very specific, they host torrents and make no bones about it.
So the pirate bay hosts files that contain links? Gee, where have I seen that before?
Google is essentially a query driven directory where (the majority of) results point externally to the site.
And TPB is essentially a query driven directory where 100% of the results point externally. (remember, the hosted
The purpose and intent of search engines and sites like TPB are very, very different.
But their actual execution, is pretty much identical.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Actually, the current case isn't against Tele2, but DMT2 (who I've never heard of). I think that the reason that IFPI have gone for DMT2 (and in the previous case about AllOfMP3.com) is that they're a very small ISP that are more likely to give up rather than try to throw money at a fight that's a waste from their cost-benefit view. If they went for some of the bigger ISPs like TDC or Telenor, they'd probably actually have a fight on their hands, because if Telenor started bleeding customers on this, it'd probably be a lot more than DMT2 stands to lose, and more than a proper legal fight would cost.
Anyway, I'm using OpenDNS and TPB is working fine for me, and I think I'll go there now and start downloading and sharing all the most popular torrents on my ph4t p1p3 - can you say multimegaupload? Hells to the yeah.