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Pirate Bay To Offer VPN For $7 a Month
Death Metal sends along an Ars Technica piece about The Pirate Bay's plans for a virtual private network service to help ensure its users' privacy. "The Pirate Bay is planning to launch a paid VPN service for users looking to cover their tracks when torrenting. The new service will be called IPREDator, named after the Swedish Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED) that will go into effect in April. IPREDator is currently in private beta and is expected to go public next week for €5 per month. ... IPREDator's website says that it won't store any traffic data, as its entire goal is to help people stay anonymous on the web. Without any data to hand over, copyright owners won't be able to find individuals to target. ... The question remains, however, if any significant portion of The Pirate Bay's users will decide to fork over 5 Euro per month solely to remain anonymous. It seems more likely that the majority either won't care, or will simply start looking for lesser-known torrent trackers to use."
Yea, so? If there are no traffic records, all they would know is that those people pay for a service, not that they actually used it to download anything.
It's not illegal to pay someone for a secure connection, and since damages in most cases are attached to download records, they would have nothing to stand on really.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
While it's a sure thing that such a thing would be used for people buying drugs, seriously, I would expect this to also widen that drugdealer's market to include more than just drug buyers. A useful tool is a useful tool.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Yes, but really, if they only have your name and address, they can't search your home/sieze your system simply for having a vpn account with TPB. You are not violating any laws to have that account, therefore probable cause *shouldn't* work on the simple grounds that millions of people around the world use/connect to vpns all the time. Now IANAL by any means, and who knows what sort of strong-arm/sneaky tactics could be used... but simply having a vpn with TPB shouldn't be enough cause to gain a warrant.
You're not all for an anonymous web really are you?
There are many ways to hide tracks already that are more effective than this offering (Tor, Open wireless access points, anonymous proxies and so on).
Organisations that have significant risk from being hacked either improve their security or get the hell of the Internet.
Hotspot Shield is free with ads.
:q!
I wouldn't even argue this issue, but instead reject the premise out of hand, since it is not "a paid service that really has no other function". There are other functions for VPN other than copyright infringement
First, assuming you trust TPB (which is your choice) there are security benefits to encrypting traffic through their VPN. It means that if you're on an untrusted Internet connection, you can encrypt your otherwise unencrypted traffic through this tunnel. So if I hop onto a WiFi network without being sure whether the person running that network is trying to capture my traffic for some reason, the VPN blocks that.
Of course, on the other side of the issue, you have to trust TPB to not be spying on you, and what happens when that traffic leave TBP is a different issue.
Further, there are lots of reasons to want to anonymize Internet traffic. Only a subset of those reasons are illegal, and only a subset of those are illegal copyright infringement. But still, there are legal reasons to what to be anonymous. For example, political or industrial whistleblowers who want to avoid retaliation. Or, on the slightly less noble (though still legal) side of things, there's not wanting your ISP to have a record of your porn-viewing habits.
Regardless, I don't think TPB would claim to have no part of circumventing copyright law anyway. Maybe I'm wrong, but I thought their argument was just that they weren't the ones violating copyright, but were only providing an open forum (so to speak) that was sometimes used for copyright violations. There are actually trackers for legal torrents on TPB too. You could definitely argue that offering a place for users to exchange torrents and a service to anonymize traffic are as morally/legally neutral as the Internet itself, and that what users choose to do with those services is a different matter.
It's from the trial. One of the TPB admins did a survey of a portion of the torrents they had and went through and categorized which he considered legitimate traffic and which wasn't. 80% were legitimate.
For being on the receiving end of *AA complaints (Local ISP), I can tell you that they don't care how old the movie is.
Mind the frickin' laser...