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Danish ISP Tele2 Challenges Pirate Bay Blockade
krasmussen writes "After Monday's injunction on Danish ISP Tele2 to block access to The Pirate Bay, the company has now decided to take the case further in court. 'We do not like being put in a role where we as ISP have to regulate people's freedom of speech' says Nicholai Pfeiffer, regulatory manager i Telenor, which owns Tele2. However, because the current ruling against Tele2 still stands, the customers are not going to regain access to The Pirate Bay at the moment."
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Although I'm sure the ISP is more about protecting their bottom line as opposed to protecting freedom of speech. I'm still often left in awe at some of the actions European citizens and governments take to protect users rights as opposed to rolling over at the beck and call of the entertainment history or government here in the US. Kudos to them!
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
this should spur development of new tools to evade firewalls and stop
the advance of filtering of our packets. going to court to stop these
types of problems will only end in the users circumventing the fix time
and time again.
ah http://www.prospector.cz/Free-Internet-services/Web-proxy/ , without you I would be torrent-less...that is of course if I lived there. Fortunately I live in Canada the Tortuga of the internet, where the torrents flow like water and our government is still afraid of its people.
-Ours is the wisdom of Solomon, the magic of Merlyn, the fall of Icaris.
An ISP that isn't Anti-P2P? Does anyone have a contact in hell to see what's going on down there? I guess that leaves a bit of hope for the future...
Unlike AT&T or some other American counterparts which apparently give the government access to listen and block with a smile.
I hope this ban gets lifted. The RIAA and their cronies have done too much damage to the economy already. Personally, I haven't bought any RIAA-affiliated music since 2002 and I have a lot of songs, go to Indiefeed or something similar for real 'free' music and then sponsor those artists.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Too bad the network admin, just can't pull his finger out of the firewall.
The article mentions that a meeting has been held but no decision on whether to appeal the court order.
Until the whack a mole pops up elsewhere. What an exercise in futility. "Introducing the new Cisco Pandoras Box Lock Router."
Just to clear up the confusion in some of the comments:
The court did not order Tele2 to do any packet filtering. Tele2 will only have to remove piratebay.org from their DNS servers.
So no need for proxies or firewall circumvention tools this time.
Fighting this new law is not only important to the people of Denmark, but also to the rest of the European Union. European politicians tend to agree on many issues and it takes only one country to influence the rest.
Full Tilt
This isnt't the first time Tele2 does this.
Doing the entire allofmp3.com episode, Tele2 was the first to filter out allofmp3.com, and the rest soon followed.
Tele2 was picked for that reason, some speculate. Tele2 does it, everyone else follows out of fear.
Now Tele2 just won't stand for it, since Pirate Bay never got convicted like allofmp3.com did.
I think it's a good move on Tele2 to reject this first hand. There is no conviction against Pirate Bay. Pirate Bay has not been convicted of breaking the law, so Tele2 should NOT be forced to deny access to it.
On that note, it's only a DNS block, not any kind of content filtering.
Use a different DNS server or static route and it will circumvent it.
(opendns.org ftw)
- Don't do what I do, it's probably not healthy nor safe. -
Just use a different DNS server. I started using OpenDNS a while ago because the DNS servers at my school were quite unreliable.
I would put a link on my website titled "want to know why you can't connect to thepiratebay.org?" that links to a brief explanation of the situation as well as a link to a proxy and a description of how to use it. :)
Weaksauce as they say...
For the first time ever I'm actually proud of being from denmark...way to go tele2!
No kitty, this is my pot pie!
The other ISPs in the Danish market though do not seem to be willing to play along (yes, I just linked to a Danish article. No, I'm not translating the WHOLE THING!):
The top part goes something like:
ISPs Ignore Bailiff's Ban on thepiratebay.org - Frustrated ISPs are continuing to hold the door to thepiratebay.org open, even if the bailiffs court has asked Tele2 to close down access.
So, what with most of the ISPs digging their heels in it doesn't look quite so cut and dried yet.
The Banjo Players Must Die!
The Fogderetten (court) of Fredriksberg decided on Tuesday the 29/1 that Danish Internet provider Tele 2 must block their customers from accessing The Pirate Bay.
While the reasoning and contents of the verdict has not reached the public yet, the consequences are already clear: Danish Internet users have been censored and cannot visit the world's largest bittorrent tracker - The Pirate Bay. With this Denmark joins the company of Turkey and China, the two and only other countries in the world that blocks their citizens from accessing the site.
The case was brought to the court by the IFPI who had previously successfully used the same strategy with regards to the Russian music site AllofMP3. The IFPI is fighting a desperate struggle to keep control over how music is distributed, and The Pirate Bay has been a thorn in their eye for a long time.
On this page you can learn how to circumvent the block. We do not want to let the recording industry decide what information we as Internet users have access to.
P.S. I did not use a lot of time on this translation, it might have some typos and errors. Also I'm Norwegian and not Danish so please excuse any mistakes.
Glad to see they didn't try to bribe anyone. Two kroner just doesn't buy as much for them as it does for the average danish consumer.
Oh, I saw this episode of Lettermen! I believe the list was titled "Things AT&T will never say".
You certainly wouldn't see this in an American ISP. They're too busy bending over to the government yelling, Thank You Sir May I Have Another!
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
I am no pirate myself ... but ...
.ORG domain in Denmark: 20 USD
.ORG domain name resembling BOTH "The Pirate Bay" and the Marketing Manager of IFPI in Denmark, "Jesper Bay": PRICELESS!
:-D
Buying a
Buying a
(see http://thejesperbay.org/)
- Jesper
My security clearance is so high I have to kill myself if I remember I have it...
They won't censor the Mohamed Cartoons that Muslims find offensive, but they'll go out of their way to censor a BitTorrent web site?
They support free speech when it mocks religion, but they don't support free speech when it comes to BitTorrent. Hypocrisy at its finest.
Don't give me that "they only block it because it violates copyright laws" because on The Pirate Bay there is open source materials and files in the public domain and shareware as well that are 100% legal. They are called legal torrents. Legal torrents are much more than just Linux ISOs, many music artists release open source OGG and MP3 files for free as well under an open source license. Michael David Crawford is one such musical artist that has had his works silenced by fascist laws and actions against BitTorrent sites. In fact he even lists many other music artists just like him who also share their music for free on BitTorrent and that is the real reason that recording companies are shutting down BitTorrent web sites, to silence the competition and sabotage their efforts to release free and alternative music by independent open source musical artists and force everyone to buy commercial CDs instead.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
What rubbish! The Danish government has no responsibility for what the press does in a free country. As long as the press is not in violation of Danish law they're free to publish what they want.
And if you didn't read the facts it was the IFPI that brought the [Pirate Bay] case to court. That's not the Danish government either - so you are way out of line.
You are totally and utterly wrong. If the majority of files on the Pirate Bay were legal it would perhaps be a different matter. But the vast majority of files on The Pirate Bay are illegal and violate copyright laws in many or most countries. So the few legal torrents available don't change things at all.
If you sell pirated and legal CDs out of the trunk of your car - you are still guilty of selling illegal copies.
As a Dane, let me say that this is stupid (the ruling, not your generalization). "We" won't go out of our way to censor BitTorrent; in fact many of us will go out of our way to *not* censor it. I bet that Jesper has no deeper understanding of what BitTorrent is than "it's that thing the pirates use".
I also believed that the papers (and, more recently, Wikipedia) should be able to show pictures of religious symbols. If the "infidels" (their words) can't take it and start burning embassies, who's being narrowminded then?
"Good news, everyone!"
I'm sorry but you do realize the courts never bother with actual IP adresses? They just issue a general directive that requires the ISP to block access regardless of what it takes or if it's even possible.
The courts don't have to bother with such mundane issues as the time and money it will take to block a moving target. They will just fine the ISP if they don't take enough action in the eyes of the court. The target can move, the ISP will suffer increased costs - but the users will still find their site.
Kjære nabo, is this when I tell you that Tele2 in Denmark is a division of Norwegian Telenor? ;)
Excuse me, but what Parallel Universe do you live in? Is it nice there? Because one thing is for sure here: European politicians do not agree on many things at all. I wonder what made you write that? There's not a single issue that doesn't come across differently in every European country. Take the War in Iraq, the EU CAP, the EU itself, religion and religious issues such as abortion, ethnic discrimination, immigration, European integration, NATO organisation and so on.
No, it's not important to the people of Europe. Any verdicts in Denmark will have practically zero value outside. If it was decided upon in the Court of First Instance perhaps. This case will not change anything in Europe in general.
Well, since you asked, yes, you would probably be guilty here in my country, Norway.
Danish and Norwegian law is quite similar, and we also happen to be subjects of the same EU laws.
A few years ago we had a case against a simple linking site called napster.no. No files were ever stored on the server. Just simple links to other sites where the material was. Not only did they find the person behind it guilty - it went all the way to the Supreme Court.
The point however was that regardless of what your views are on The Pirate Bay if the Danish courts rule that they are violating copyright laws (or other laws) they have the right to take away access to the site. Also did I mention that both in Denmark and Norway we have a government prescribed child pornography censorship and filtering system? All the major ISPs volunteered to join it.
Google does the same thing. Would they be guilty?
Maybe the Pirate Bay needs to find a way to include a whole bunch of other stuff in their indexes (witha checkbox to remove those results on queried results if the user would like) - then any similar laws wouldn't be able to affect them without affecting Google and every other search engine - and who's going to put an onerous burden on them?
You think this is the first such action? What do you call taking down Oink? Or Tv-links.co.uk? That happened in the UK a few months ago by the way. Or Sweden attacking ThePirateBay? This is not a new or innovative form of policy.
I think it's you who's not looking at it from the right angle. Europe and the EU is like the Eurovision Song Contest - everyone agrees within the regional subgroups, but are at odds with the rest of Europe.
Sorry, but that's not true. In all the different countries in Europe there have been any number of cases. I especially find a ruling from my own country very interesting. Napster.no was convicted of simply linking to external sites where illegal MP3 files were stored. Or how about the French ruling on Nazi memorabilia on Ebay? There are loads of other cases.
No, I am not saying that people cannot be affected by reading about it. But it has no effect on the legal systems of the different countries. The EU has not harmonized all the different legal systems and courts of Europe. We are still too far away from each other for it to easily cross borders. It's split along historical lines from the Northern European states, Roman Law to Common Law in the UK. There's a huge variety that does not accept foreign verdicts easily. Politicians on the other hand are receptive.
The reason the EU exists is a well known historical fact. A forced marriage. Now, you might agree on a few things - yet it has proven increasingly difficult to agree on new and important issues such as the Constitution. A few trade laws are not as hard to pass. How about the proposed North African-Mediterranean area Sarkozy wants? Or allowing Turkey into the fold? A European President?
I am actually quite in favor of a federal European Union - but at the moment it's just a dream. You/we are really not that united yet.
Come on, it was just a joke! :)
Of course, the fact that the company is Norwegian owned doesn't change much, but the management does what it's owners want. So I suppose Telenor might want Tele2 Denmark to appeal the verdict to sell more. Or it could be the management decided on their own they had to fight it so they don't loose customers. All the same, I was just joking.
And before that short period of the Swedish-Norwegian Union we spent 400-500 years with Denmark :D
Yes, it does, doesn't it? And the government didn't act in either case.
And there have been cases in Scandinavia where even just linking has been enough to close you down. I would not rule it out even if you claim to be "just" a search engine.
Did you intentionally read that the wrong way? Because the sentence clearly says the IFPI is not a part of the Danish government. The courts are part of the Danish state, but they don't act on their own. The party that brought the case to the court is who's responsible for the issue.
Sorry, I am Norwegian, it's not my government.
I'm new here (riiiiiiight!). What's the official /. stance on TPB ? Pro or Con ?
On one hand, what they're doing is technically illegal, and they're fully aware of it. On the other hand, they're doing it for a very good reason: to test, provoke and popularize the concept of free speech and of course, to bring grand attention to the evils of modern copyright law (Thank^H^H^H^H^HFUCK YOU Sonny Bono!)
Personally, I like The Piraty Bay's attitude and I support their cause. The fact that they have a real life political party that's got quite a bit of traction (for a niche party), that just makes it even more respectable to my eyes. In today's reality of court abuses and rampant corruption, an outfit like Piratbyran is a much needed counterbalance to corporate terrorism.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
"Maybe the Pirate Bay needs to find a way to include a whole bunch of other stuff in their indexes (witha checkbox to remove those results on queried results if the user would like) - then any similar laws wouldn't be able to affect them without affecting Google and every other search engine - and who's going to put an onerous burden on them?"
Such a tactic would depend on finding a court that didn't understand the difference between Google and a site set up for the purpose of promoting, facilitating and encouraging piracy. I know that we all like to joke about stupid judges and stupid prosecutors, but you need to take a pragmatic view here: if you can easily understand the difference, expect the court to understand, as well.
The original Napster tried the "we're just a search engine" defense. Grokster went the safe-harbor route as well. The courts didn't buy it in either case, yet this bit of history is apparently unknown to many Slashdotters. If TPB were operating in the US, it would be a legal slam dunk. It's safe to be cynical here and expect the laws of the EU nations to follow.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
Oh, btw, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundstrom has gotten charge of about $200'000 in fines and of two years jail. The prosecutor is asking for extremely harsh punishment, the reasoning is that TPB has big advertisement income.
The charge is "conspiracy and help for copyright infringement" (i know, my legalese-english is not very good).
This is only the opening Salvo... This thing is far from over.
Even Sweden will eventually fold to the political pressure, just like "secret" Swiss bank accounts eventually became not so secret. There is such a huge amount of money riding on this that eventually its going to happen, it just is, it is inevitable.
I mean enjoy the ride as long as you can, but like any other carnival ride, it eventually ends. Thats just the way it is. You or I might not like it, but thats long and short of it.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
>They do not directly and on purpose have links to infringing material.
Ehh, what do you mean by "directly"? Why do you claim it is directly in one case but not the other? How do you get to the "on purpose"? In one case the site is automatically going arround looking for files and index them if they find them (one have to actually take specific actions to op-out). In the other case, the ones with the files has to tell the site to index it. (Yes I know one can go to google and tell them as well.) The only thing ending up there is what others put there. That is the main difference.
>Oh, btw, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundstrom has
>gotten charge of about $200'000 in fines and of two years jail.
No, you can't get both a fine and jail in Sweden, you get one or the other. The $200,000 is a pacyback of what the prosecutor claim is the sum they gained on the crime. The "two year in jail" is also just the maximum possible listed sentence for the crime. It is not what they have been "charged" with. Since the trial has not started, the prosecutor has actually not said anything about what sentence he will ask from the court. It can be jail (of varying time) but it can also be a fine. We don't know yet.
>The prosecutor is asking for extremely harsh punishment, the reasoning is that
>TPB has big advertisement income.
So no, he is not asking for anything extreme at all. He hasn't even asked anything at all. The sum of money is what he claims is their gain (I know it is not the proper word but can't figure out a better one) which he claim he can prove. it is not a punishment or sentence though.
> The prosecutor is asking for extremely harsh punishment, the reasoning is that TPB has big advertisement income.
Hurray for Tele2 to standup!
:) It takes a lot of guts for a business to fight for this, every spend on the courts is away from their profitability directly, while the benefits in profitability are indirect and cannot be calculated, meanwhile, a good-faith-do-no-evil CEO recognizes something like this has priceless value, and it's a must to fight against censorship.
:)
Now, i wonder do they sell anything i could as a foreigner buy so they get my support ^^
No censorship ty!
Hurray for Tele2!
Pulsed Media Seedboxes
When enough standard torrents like this are shut down and enough people are affected people will instead start using encrypted, anonymous services which aren't so hard to shut down.
Yes P2P as we know it now will likely end up being dealt a heavy blow, but then people will move on to something else. This simply isn't a war that can be won without cutting access to entire types of data stream at the ISP simultaneously destroying lots of valid business applications at the same time.
It's futile to try and fight this without also damaging citizens rights, legitimate business applications and combined hence the entire economy of that particular country.
There is indeed a lot of money being poured into fighting piracy, and enough for governments to accept the bribes and so forth right now however there is a tipping point at which the damage to citizens rights and the economy will make a particular goverment so unpopular they wont be able to take bribes from anyone. The cost of fighting the war on piracy will be so much higher than actually winning it would ever be so no, you're wrong, it's simply not a fight that can ever be win. It's very similar to Vietnam and Iraq - winning battles is easy with their resources, but winning the war is impossible without somehow winning over the hearts and minds of the people, that's something you can't ever achieve whilst simultaneously suing them and eroding their rights.
The recording/movie industries have shown they're incapable of changing their ways, as such they can never win this war.
Telenor doesn't own Tele2, they are Tele2's main competitor... Unless you mean that they 'pwn' Tele2, in which case it is arguably true.
the complaint against p2p operators generally and Pirate Bay in particular is that the main use of these systems is to defeat copyright protections,-- an illegal activity.
anyone should know better than to participate in an illegal activity in any way. it doesn't matter if you are directly benefiting or not, if you are involved in one way or another you are likely to be prosecuted.
I have yet to see a complaint anyplace about anyone publishing their own Op Ed ( except in totalitarian states ) so let's quit trying to confuse criminal activities with freedom of speech.
The saddest thing, and the biggest problem in this case is the fact that only The Pirate Bays voice is used as the opposition. And the real important issues have absolutely nothing to do with P2P filesharing, software piracy, or copyright.
The most important issues are these:
1.) Should private organizations (such as IFPI) be in a position where they can censor the webpages of another party (such as a private citizen) simply because they dislike the information distributed there?
No court has made any ruling concerning the actual legality of the content hosted on The Pirate Bay. So how could the site be censored, when nobody has evaluated the legal status of the content?
2.) Enforcing the law is typically something we let the authorities do. In this particular case, the enforcement has been bestowed upon the ISP (who is very unhappy with that role).
Is it acceptable to society as a whole, that a private organization (such as IFPI) can demand that other private organizations (such as an ISP) enforce a specific law or ruling? And what are the long-term consequences of allowing (or forcing) private companies to enforce laws when this task is normally something only the authorities should do?
3.) Can this practice be used in other media or means of communication that the internet?
If The Pirate Bay opens a massive "customer call-center" with 300 phoners worldwide, so P2P end users could just make a phone call and get information on a desired torrent, could the telecommunication companies then be forced to "censor" their phone lines?
If The Pirate Bay started to print lists of torrents on paper and publish them as books, could the printing companies be forced to stop printing the books?
Think it over. Because normally practices such as these are only common in China (and similar dictatorships).
- Jesper
My security clearance is so high I have to kill myself if I remember I have it...
You seem to misunderstand the meaning of principles. They're called that because they're considered to be of the utmost importance -- i.e., when you would rather go to jail than violate your principles. Tele2 are not "sticking to their principles"; they're going along with what the law tells them to do, even if they think it's wrong.
what copyright law protects is the right of the copyright owner to control the manufacture and distribution of copies of the copyrighted material.
Case: if I write an essay and post it to the Web I have published it by that means and anyone who wants to read it is welcome to do so.
In fact anyone who likes the essay and wants to provide a hyper-link to my essay is welcome to do that,-- same as providing an ISBN reference number to a book.
what you are NOT welcome to do is to down-load my essay and republish it on your own web site: that is a copyright violation -- the reason being that when you put my essay on your site I can no longer control the manufacture and distribution of copies of that essay. In other words I can't delete the essay from my web site thus making it un-available to the audience.
Case: when you load copyright music onto a P2P share directory you have trespassed the copyright owner's copyright: you have taken from the copyright owner his ability to regulate the production and distribution of copies of his copyright material. and that is a violation of copyright law.
Case: where Pirate Bay et.al. is off base is that they are deliberately indexing material they know to be copyright protected and illegally distributed and in doing this they are facilitating an illegal activity*. Google et.al. does no such thing: they index material that copyright owners have intentionally published to the web.
if you can't or won't understand the difference you best get a lawyer cuz ya gonna need one.
*Case: if you allowed car thieves to use your property to chop up and sell parts from stolen cars you are involved in the crime -- even though you didn't steal a care or sell stolen parts.
get your hats on straight kids, and pull up your pants before you get into real trouble.
Where do you cross the line and become involved in an illegal activity?
-- if you post copyright material that you do not own to a public share such as a web site or p2p share folder you are definitely across the line: you have illegally copied someone else' material and then published it.
-- too, if you involve yourself in someone else' illegal activities you are across the line. Pirate Bay et. al. deliberately assist in copyright violations and even sought advertising revenue for those efforts.
not good, kids, you need to straighten up or you will end up in front of a judge
Replace "press" with "search engine" in that and it applies quite well the Pirate Bay. Yes it does. It applies better than you understand. The government has nothing to do with neither the press nor the court. And if you didn't read the facts it was the IFPI that brought the [Pirate Bay] case to court. That's not the Danish government either
The court isn't the Danish government? Let me surprise you, Mr Idiot. The answer is: No.
The court is the court, and completely separated from the government, which has no right to control what the courts do or don't do. - so you are way out of line.
No, your government is being hypocritical. But really, all governments are hypocritical. This is a relatively small inconsistancy on the scale of government hypocrisy. First of all, "your government" means the Norweigan government, since the user 'andersh' said he was Norweigan.
Secondly, the government is not hypocritical in this case, since it has nothing to do with either case.
You really seem to have no idea how a free country works. It's just extremely sad a comment like yours can get +4 Interesting.