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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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