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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."
I'm sure there's a torrent somewhere...
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
You're as anonymous as your credit card details allow you to be. How are you supposed to pay for something web-based without handing over your details?
Furthermore, couldn't the courts just request THB hand over a list of paying customers if it were pertinent to a case?
ilovegeorgebush
You're supposed to do it anonymously, noob.
Oh, wait...
ilovegeorgebush
How do you maintain that you're not expressly in the business of circumventing copyright law (as they did in the recent trial) when you offer a paid service that really has no other function?
Your statement is akin to saying that you must be guilty of something, since you refuse to let law enforcement search through your house whenever they feel like it.
It has the function of maintaining your privacy. This is valuble for some people, not because they are breaking the law but because other people, corporations and governments have no business knowing who you are talking/mailing/communicating with in 99,99% of all cases.
Actually, no, it's nothing like that.
It's like being accused of being a drug dealer because people buy drugs off your site, and, in response, you offer a method for people to make private transactions.
If you say, "hey, look, I just provide a service, I'm not telling people how to use it" then you might be able to get away with being effectively a middleman in an illegal transaction.
But if your response is to provide a way of hiding those illegal transactions from law enforcement, you're much more likely to be nailed as an accomplice, especially when you're making money specifically off those hidden transactions.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
First, define drug paraphernalia.
Second, rolling paper, water bongs, etc. can be used with tobacco. By selling such items for use with tobacco, said items are not considered "drug paraphernalia" until they are used with marijuana. Thus, there is, in fact, a legal, logical use for such items.
A chef's knife is not a deadly weapon until it is used as such. Until it is used as such it is a kitchen tool.
A screwdriver or pry bar are not burglary tools until they are used to commit a burglary. Until they are, they are just tools.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
But will it also ensure copyright protections or protect IP holders' rights?
No, but why should it? many of us think that the current US copyright laws are unconstitutional, despite what SCOTUS says; Stanford Professor Lawrence Lessig, for one, who argued that current copyright is unconstitutionally long in front of the Supremes. He details the reasons he lost, and what he did wrong that caused him (and us) to lose in his (copyrighted) book Free Culture, available for sale at your local bookstore, free at your local public library, or free on his web site.
After all, they wouldn't want to be aiding and abeting a criminal operation, would they?
I have no problem with aiding and abetting a criminal operation when I buy pot. Drug laws should also be judged unconstitutional; they needed a constitutional amendment to outlaw the dangerous drug alcohol, why would they not need the same to outlaw the relatively benign marijuana? Where in the Constitution (besides the much abused "interstate commerce clause", which could have theoretically been used for alcohol) does Congress have the right to stop me from screwing up my life any way I wish?
Copyright infringement is still a crime in the western world.
Copyright infringement is largely a civil matter. And Pirate Bay doesn't limit itself to the western world; the internet is world wide.
Free Martian Whores!
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.
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.
You seem to be operating under the assumption that the only purpose for offering/using a VPN is to engage in copyright infringement.
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.
Yes, because overseas, anonymous VPN accounts are totally new and have never been used before for nefarious purposes...
Said, "It's just like dice but it's got more sides And it tells me who lives and who dies"
Years ago, the US Government opened up one of these Anonymous web surfing sites. There was no indication that it was the US Government. The let this run for considerable time. After a while, the truth came out in a proceeding. The US Government was using this Anonymous site to find people violating US law. Many people ended up in the tank.
If you send ALL your traffic to this VPN service, what makes you think you are safe? While PB may not log, what is to stop a government from forcing PB to place their own logging device inline?
After being a very quick and nice dialup service, Earthlink suffered a year of horrible response times, poor performance, and high drops. Then it quit, but not until after they lost a lot of subscribers. In a case it turned up that the US Government put these tracking devices inline between Earthlink and their backbone connections which was the cause of the slowdowns. The current crop, though, don't have this issue.
People need to think about these things.
Do you have some proof for these claims?
Why would anyone need to "cover their tracks when torrenting" unless he was doing something illegal?
Ah, careful there. You're coming dangerously close to arguing the old "mind of I search your car/house, what do you have to hide?"...
Remove the torrent-laced, copyright-riddled emotion from this for a moment. It's about offering users a service to stay anonymous while using the web. The concept is certainly not new (care for a fresh onion on your browser burger?), this one just happens to be offered by a fairly popular website. Something tells me if Google were to offer the same thing, we wouldn't be talking about people hiding Gmail content.
I'd expect it's like how bongs and other drug paraphernalia is legal in most areas while any logical use for the items is not. Running a business centered around providing your customers with all the tools necessary to break the law (even when it's obvious that this is your intention) isn't illegal so long as you yourself are not breaking any law.
Tell that to Tommy Chong. He may disagree with you on that one...
Not that I agree with what happened to him (I think it is despicable), but that's the U.S. Government for you.
Hopefully TPB will be okay because the VPN can be used to bypass censorship on the net (or least can be advertised as being as such) -- if you happen to have your Torrents running through it, oh well, shit happens...also they are not in the USA...
Beware of Sleestak
Dammit, I knew my company was up to something. Always making me use vpn to log into work. I'm reporting them for copyright infringement.
Bear in mind the "You shouldn't be hiding anything if you're innocent" mindset leads to a lot of privacy invasions.
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.
EVERYONE has something to hide. Not to say it would be illegal, but how about credit cards? Or something even a little more trivial, how about the way you like to have sex? Let's say you were talking to your wife over the internet about the way you like to have sex. Is it illegal? No. "Not tasteful?" According to who? And is it potentially embarrassing? Depending on what specifically you're talking about, maybe. Especially if it were revealed to your work or maybe your insurance company. Here you thought you were just talking about the great night you were gonna have with your wife and someone has 'eavesdropped' on that conversation and has twisted it to be a weapon against you. Yeah, that's extreme, but just one of those things that 'could happen' if we (the people) don't try to fight the little things.
"The best way to accelerate a Macintosh is at 9.8m/sec^2" -Marcus Dolengo
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?
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
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.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
The difference is TPB is not an American company. They're not bound by American laws and money. What has permitted TPB to exist in the first place is their country's relaxed copyright laws (vs the U.S.).
They've also been operating the world's largest public tracker for YEARS, longer than anyone else. They are largely responsible for the success of BitTorrent as a protocol, by making it freely accessible to anyone and everyone without discrimination. It doesn't matter whether you're a kid in a basement, or a big business or artist joining the movement, TPB is there and you can make use of its service.
Say what you will about the copyright issue, there's no hiding the fact that a large portion of their site is used for software piracy, but it is leading people to ponder and discuss these issues, which is more than any MAFIAA drone has ever accomplished with greedy lawsuits and gag orders.
There is no question at all that copyright infringement is a crime, and TPB's founders don't argue that point at all. What they're fighting is the current implementation of copyright law, which they consider over-reaching and extortive. It is their highly-effective form of civil disobedience, and they've extended an invitation to the entire BitTorrent community to join the cause.
The fact that they can stand trial and actually put up a good fight, should be at least partial proof that what they are doing has some legitimacy. If you really want to fight piracy, go beat up the guy selling DVDRs on the street corner... that guy's just in it for himself.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
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.
>>>It's like being accused of being a drug dealer because people buy drugs off your site, and, in response, you offer a method for people to make private transactions.
Well to stretch an analogy to near breaking point..... Piratebay doesn't sell drugs. They just provide the address(es) for the corner where you can obtain them, which is not illegal. Neither is it illegal to sell users a trenchcoat and hat to help hide their identity.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Virtual Pirate Network, ijaaaaaaarrrr
Oh come on, everyone was thinking it.
..as if "Pirate Bay" wasn't enough of an outright confession.
So if I name my blog "I like to steal things" I'm obviously a thief? A name is not a confession.
If sharing files, even ones "protected" under copyright is considered legal in their country (some countries have pretty liberal interpretations of "fair use" and "fair dealing"), then the name is tongue and cheek not a confession of guilt.
"If you are going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill
3 guys distributing linux distros does not justify tens of millions leeching copyrighted content from the rest of us.
You're right. They should at least seed a bit!
No tyrant thrives when every subject says no.