The Pirate Bay Sails To a New Home

the monolith writes "Back in August, the company supplying bandwidth to The Pirate Bay was forced to disconnect them. Quoting TorrentFreak: '"It took just 20 minutes before the Hollywood companies telephoned the new host who took over operation of The Pirate Bay," commented Patrik from the ISP which had been indirectly supplying bandwidth to TPB. Despite initially putting on a brave face and standing strong, Patrik's company continued to feel the heat. It is not a large outfit and doesn't have the resources to fight the entertainment industry and its threats. Last night, Patrik could hold off no longer after receiving mounting threats from the entertainment industries, which culminated in threats of a court summons. Having come this far, there is little doubt that IFPI and the MPAA would litigate if necessary. ... On the heels of several rumors today, Patrik said he could confirm news of the move, saying that he believes The Pirate Bay is now hosted in Ukraine.'"

Comments

Google Purges Pirate Bay?

[D Ninja]

What happened to the article "Google purges Pirate Bay from search results?"

It's listed on the front page of Slashdot, but when I click the link, I can't get to it. I want to know what that is about, dang it.

Re:Google Purges Pirate Bay?

[straponego]

Interesting. I'd thought Google's revenue streams centered around providing the most accurate and relevant search results. Looks like they've punted on that. So there are opportunities for new search providers after all.

In fact, this could go a long way to explaining why they haven't gotten serious about semantic search, which would be the next giant leap in relevance. it's because they'd rather give you pseudo-relevant (but profitable) answers first. This is why when you're searching for reviews on a product, you get sales crap instead. And it also explains why the count the whole page, even navigation/spam crap, as relevant, rather than grouping articles/sections/comments as logical units.

Re:Google Purges Pirate Bay?

[Ronald Dumsfeld]

Google is an advertising company. Not anything else. Not the technology tinkerer it works to portray itself as.

I'm sure I don't need to explain further.

host the servers in antigua

[circletimessquare]

they are invulnerable:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/21/business/worldbusiness/21iht-wto.html

PARIS -- In an unusual ruling Friday at the World Trade Organization, the tiny Caribbean nation of Antigua won the right to violate copyright protections on goods like films and music from the United States - worth up to $21 million - as part of a dispute between the two countries over online gambling.

The award comes after a WTO decision that Washington had wrongly blocked online gaming operators on the island from the American market at the same time it permitted online wagering on horse racing.

Antigua and Barbuda had claimed annual damages of $3.44 billion. That makes the relatively small amount awarded Friday, $21 million, something of a setback for Antigua, which had been struggling to preserve its booming gambling industry. The United States had claimed that its behavior had caused only $500,000 damage to the Antiguan economy.

Yet the ruling is significant in that it grants a rare form of compensation: the right of one country, in this case, Antigua, to violate intellectual property laws of another - the United States - by allowing them to distribute copies of American music, movie and software products, among other items.

i mean of course its all bullshit. the concept of intellectual property makes no moral, financial, logical, or philosophical sense in the internet age. but i guess we have to wait a few years for the vanguard of ignorant dinosaurs to die off

Re:The Powers that Be

[turing_m]

So if you value your country's sovereignty in the least, consider the threat real. Many want to eliminate The Pirate Bay's every chance of asylum.

I think it's relatively unlikely that there won't be some sort of movement by those with power to counter the lack of control caused by the internet. We are seeing that now. It would not surprise me if the media mafia kept up the full court press until every last country folds. They have plenty of money and power.

OTOH, their enemies are getting something they formerly paid for, for nothing. Not much money to fight with there. Do they have any allies with an income stream? ISPs are a natural ally - they are not stupid. Without media downloads, porn is the only thing really driving large cap high bandwidth accounts. Sure, a lot of people download a lot of porn, but I'm sure the ISPs would be giving up a large chunk of income if the MPAA were able to shut down torrents of movie downloads.

If the MPAA were to succeed with shutting down torrenting, it's not even the end of technological improvement. We just head towards some sort of darknet. But I suppose that the longer torrents are fairly easy to find and download, the more people come to expect media for free, the more entrenched is the file sharing culture, and the more potential Bram Cohens there will be to code up technological solutions in their spare time. So I suppose this delaying action does serve a purpose.

If the MPAA could even defeat that somehow, cost/GB keeps dropping and local transfer rates keep increasing. We'd have a scene kind of like a souped up version of 1980s tape copying. Except you'd be able to copy the entire year's output of the entertainment industry in a few hours. The only real problem then is converting the media to a DRM free digital version and assembling it in one place.