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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?
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.
Too bad the network admin, just can't pull his finger out of the firewall.
ERROR: Unable to load page. www.ThePirateBay.com (Arrr) has been blocked by court injunction for your own protection. We are unable to provide you access to this wonderfull service at criminally low prices!
If you object to this injunction, please write your state representative to have the law changed at:
Jack "The price is right!" Representation
12345 Pork Barrel Depot
Washington, DC 20004
If only they'd handle it this way, in the US of A.
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
They did say duke nuke'em's coming...
Just use a different DNS server. I started using OpenDNS a while ago because the DNS servers at my school were quite unreliable.
Fairly common in Europe (or at least Spain), where there's a lot of competition among ISP's (some places are still subject to some monopoly, but they're an over(under?)whelming minority). Not being able to use P2P reduces users' satisfaction, and leads to saying "byebye" and choosing another carrier.
My 0.02 cents
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.
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.
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.
If you sell pirated and legal CDs out of the trunk of your car - you are still guilty of selling illegal copies.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
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.
In that case, when do we see Google banned (specifically, Google cache)? And the Wayback Machine while we're at it?
I'm not saying it to pick a fight, but it stands to reason that Google's cache and archive.org can be modified easily enough by anyone with the right know-how (basically, you just modify the site that either one is caching). Will the IFPI demand their removal next?
The whole Child Porn thing is IMHO a red herring. Child Pornography is direct evidence of a criminal act (namely, the sexual abuse of a minor), and blocking such things is done in deference to the victims, not because it's liable to bring civil charges. TPB, even if all it ever did was IP violation, contains zero evidence of any crime (IP and copyright violations are civil acts, not criminal ones - it only becomes criminal when you try to sell the copies).
In this case, we're talking about a court bending over backwards to satisfy the civil demands of a cartel, and in the process do two things:
1) create bad precedents, and
2) perform collateral blockage (I think the legal term is "estoppel"?) against legitimate distributors who use/rely on that particular torrent tracker.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I did say probably because it would have to proved in a court of law. Not everything is as clear cut as you or I would like it. Even if I am a lawyer.
I only mentioned it to give you some insight into the way our countries work. It's certainly not done out of deference - it's simply censorship regardless. No court ever ruled the sites on the list are illegal. "First they came for..."
Sorry, that's only in the US. European law can be very different to what you are accustomed to.
Again that's not really true according to the example I just told you about (napster.no). Even linking is considering illegal here now. Not that I personally agree with it. They have yet to challenge access to The Pirate Bay here in Norway, but they have a law firm working on it.
Nope, that's not the way the Scandinavian Civil Law system works. The way precedents work in the Anglo-American Common Law system is not applicable here. It's not really a significant ruling, it's not even a High Court ruling. It can easily be overruled and interpreted away by the higher courts.
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?
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!