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."

Comments

Might Actually be GOOD for the Movie Industry

[A. B3ttik]

Suppose this takes off and TPB starts raking in cash.

This shows that even Pirates are willing to fork over money and pay for the products if the service is good enough and the price is low enough.

Netflix already has similar Pay-for-Unlimited-Access plans between $8 and $20... and if TPB is successful, I predict that more distributors will move to this service model.

Imagine Blockbuster or Amazon or iTunes saying: "Take whatever you want. Movies, music, ANYTHING. $20/month." They'd make a fortune. Hell, if you threw games in there, I'd personally pay like $100/month.

Lesser Known Torrent Trackers

[manekineko2]

The question remains, however, if any significant portion of The Pirate Bay's users will decide to fork over 5 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.

I don't get this blurb from the headline. Seems to me like this service wouldn't be mainly targeted at users accessing torrent trackers. This is anonymity for the Internet in general, and torrent trackers are only one small part of that.

Furthermore, I'm not familiar with any case so far that is based on turning over the logs from a website to get the users. I don't think that would present a strong enough case that someone is sharing, which is what they've been getting people on. Instead, they've been snooping the actual upload traffic from people by requesting downloads based on everything I've been seeing.

Re:Why is it needed?

[Hatta]

Then you change the laws, not break them. It is not civil disobedience. It is simple criminality.

Henry David Thoreau would disagree:

As for adopting the ways which the State has provided for remedying the evil, I know not of such ways. They take too much time, and a man's life will be gone. I have other affairs to attend to. I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad. A man has not everything to do, but something; and because he cannot do everything, it is not necessary that he should do something wrong. It is not my business to be petitioning the Governor or the Legislature any more than it is theirs to petition me; and if they should not hear my petition, what should I do then? But in this case the State has provided no way; its very Constitution is the evil. This may seem to be harsh and stubborn and unconciliatory; but it is to treat with the utmost kindness and consideration the only spirit that can appreciate or deserves it.

Civil Disobedience, 1849

Asking for trouble (technical, not legal)

[Andy Dodd]

The whole point of P2P is to use the bandwidth of each client as a server in addition. This relies on a network being distributed without a central bottleneck.

VPNing in to TPB will introduce just such a bottleneck, killing performance. Or have they figured out a way to do point-to-point VPNing between all registered users?

What VPN technology are they using? How does it work?

Re:Asking for trouble (technical, not legal)

[MikeBabcock]

Actually, being a connector agent allowing P2P IPSec would be a very helpful service.

"Give me a peer"
"Peer a.b.c.d is available and has IPSec"
"Hello a.b.c.d, do you have a cert?"
"Yes, here it is."
"Oh good, its signed by TPB."

The DNS method of key deployment isn't trustworthy, but central trusted certs are a good option.

Re:Hmmmmm.

[Colonel Korn]

Seriously, what is the sole purpose of Pirate Bay?

Share Linux distros or share copyrighted material?

You can yell "can be used for legal purposes" or "cannot be proven" or whatnot until your face is blue, but will not change the truth.

It turns out there's no "sole purpose" of TPB. 80% of their torrents are legal, but probably the majority of traffic is not. To some people the most important purpose of TPB is to force a showdown that might help to change unjust laws.

Re:Hmmmmm.

[dontmakemethink]

Does your company facilitate copyright infringement? It's not called the Shareware Bay y'know. By offering VPN they are no longer passive facilitators, but active ones. They've even named the service as a parody of an IP protection directive, expressing their clear intent, as if "Pirate Bay" wasn't enough of an outright confession.

And it doesn't have to be a flagrant violation of criminal code, if it's close enough the BSA, RIAA, and MPIAA will simply throw enough money into a civil suit to make it unprofitable and deter anyone else from offering torrents and VPN. That's why the RIAA makes so many contradictory statements in different lawsuits, they're just saying whatever $10M in legal will buy them to scare people away from piracy that's cost them $10B over the last 10 years.

Even if they're certain they're not breaking any law, it'll still cost PB >$200k in legal to defend against an IP infringement claim of that magnitude, and even if they win and are awarded legal costs, that's a pretty big loan they're forced to give their lawyers for about two years. No question, the MAFIAA will go after you with complete knowledge that they have no case whatsoever. Torrents + VPN == an arguable case + a precedent the MAFIAA cannot afford to go unchallenged.

PB can't win this one though, won't surprise me if they get shut down entirely. If they hadn't been so flagrant about it, maybe, but it's pretty much like a gun shop called "Cop Killer's Paradise" in a city with the highest fatal shootings of officers. They not only facilitate illegal activity that is clearly abundant, they promote it.