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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.
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.