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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!
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
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.
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.
Just because a gun maker makes a gun for general "sport" doesn't mean it shouldn't be held to gun laws. Even if the laws are for a gun that you know is just for killing someone.
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
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.
The question would be that of intent and purpose, I imagine.
First purpose:
Google is a very general search engine, it hosts nothing. The question of its cache is still up for debate, but things can and have been removed from it. Google can not arguably be considered responsible for what is linked to on its site, since it controls nothing outside of the google domain (unless explicitly noted.)
TPB is very specific, they host torrents and make no bones about it. They host trackers, which coordinate the transfers. They are in every way responsible for the torrents being uploaded, though it's the users that are actively violating the copyrights.
And intent:
Google is essentially a query driven directory where (the majority of) results point externally to the site. Google directs anyone to anything that matches the search term with no mind paid to the content, the author of the content or the poster of the content. Were you to remove the Google cache (the only part that arguably violates copyright,) Google would continue to function.
TPB is dedicated around the hosting and location of torrents. Were you to remove the tracker and delist torrents of material whose distribution via bittorrent was not permitted, TPB's usefulness would plummet massively. The same goes for pretty much any site like TPB.
The purpose and intent of search engines and sites like TPB are very, very different.
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.
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
Yes, but the order appears to block PirateBay. It's not a tracker (unless they do that as well), but rather a site that offers content-keywords-based search for torrents (more precisely trackers) that are stored at other locations. Since they don't host the trackers themselves but only provide links to them (unless they do both, in which case, I am wrong), their content (being purely web content) can be gotten from the Google cache.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
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.
I always wondered why folks didn't use other Internet technologies such as DNS to get around the "blocking" issue?
What's to prevent all the tracker information from being put into a master DNS server with a low TTL, and building up torrent search software which queries DNS?
You could store this into TXT records and query DNS to find the results;
"Thomas-Edison-The-Lost-Chord-1888" IN TXT a9cd93da939d9c9
The TXT being a unique code which again is looked up in DNS
a9cd93da939d9c9.subdomain.domain.toplevel
And the result is a list of IP's that are currently seeding the torrent,
and thus BT can subscribe to. I can do a dynamic DNS update to
add my client to the list of machines seeding the torrent.
So there is no HTTP traffic involved in this exchange. The DNS is
typically provided by the ISP, so caching would be in effect. So
you want TTLs to be low. The clients will be querying against the ISP's
DNS server. Dynamic DNS would be to the parent DNS server. The ISP could
blackhole the zone by putting in a dummy record, but that can be overcome
by using the root DNS servers or using any of the many open DNS servers.
Anyway, my thoughts on the subject. ICMP would be another protocol one could
potentially use to get around this too.
Most (all!) torrents I download from TPB don't set the private flag, so they can be "tracked" using the trackerless feature in the more intelligent clients. So a cached .torrent file will just do fine, it may take a bit longer to get the bits flowing but they will get there eventually.
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!
An ISP would just have to filter any DNS packet which contains a banned hostname. It doesn't really matter which DNS server you're using. As far as I know, encrypting a DNS request isn't very feasible.
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
Clients supporting the trackerless torrent feature can become ad-hoc trackers on demand and they can be found by other peers via the DHT protocol which is also part of the trackerless torrent scheme. DHT is essentially a search engine which can locate trackers/peers via the "hash" checksum of a given torrent.
A common trick for websites listing torrents is to identify such (potentially) trackerless torrents via a "magnet" url which is essentially an ASCI-friendly version of the torrent "hash" instead of a link to a .torrent file. That way even the .torrent file is stored in a distrubuted manner.