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New Threats Against Pirate Bay Owners
angry tapir writes "The Pirate Bay should be closed, and if it isn't, two of the founders will each have to pay a fine of 500,000 Swedish kronor (US$71,500), according to a verdict in the Stockholm District Court. This time it's Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg who are in the court's crosshairs. They have been forced to shut down the site or pay the fine. The court has stated that the site will have to remain closed unless Neij and Warg are exonerated on another similar case they're involved in, which is now on appeal."
There is still isohunt, mininova, demonoid and torrentreactor, all based in countries with different jurisdictions. Atop of that, there is still rapidshare, mediafire, and let's not forget the ol' IRC channels. I wouldn't want to be in the shoes of The Pirate Bay, torrent greppers or the torrent trackers, though.
What will we do without THE ONLY TORRENT TRACKER?
And we don't even have an alternate tracker that tracks every TPB torrent! If only someone had made OpenBitTorrent.com in time!
wow you're really not good at this.
You were probably some sort of "reverse trolling re-troll trolled" or something just now.
Sweden stayed neutral during WW2, but have caved to the *AA type mofos. Therefore *AA mofos = worse than the nazis? Indeed, it is to ponder.
Time zone converter
At least they tried.
In April, Fredrik Neij , Gottfrid Svartholm Warg , Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström were found guilty of being accessories to crimes against copyright law
Poor copyright law, he didn't get out of the hospital for 2 weeks. I don't think he'll ever be the same.
Yeah, this is the real first post. The rest of these were by pre-first post losers.
The Next Big Tracker: a Tor hidden service? Yes, peer-to-peer over Tor is bad manners. If you're just talking about the tracker, the bandwidth requirements are reasonable.
there is OneSwarm ,the p2p/f2f client
"I don't pitch OpenSUSE Linux to my friends, i let Microsoft do it for me
TPB guys moved the site and themselves to the Netherlands. Unless it is some EU mandate that people sued in one country are sued in all of them, I don't see how this court has any jurisdiction over any of what they are ruling on.
Maybe the problem is that so many companies out there can fail because of a free internet. Then again, i wonder what other business models would fail because of a similar "free" something. Medicine? Voting? Any ideas?
...one must pay the piper.
Sell thepiratebay.com to an ad agency, and those guys would not have any problem repaying that fine...
- fibrewire
The court has stated that the site will have to remain closed unless Neij and Warg are exonerated on another similar case they're involved in, which is now on appeal."
Can the court do that? Ordering a website to remain closed until a case is resolved is like a death sentence for websites. Could you imagine how the internet would look if Myspace, Facebook and Twitter was down whenever they were involved in a court case?
The crux of The Pirate Bay's existence is that it is not explicitly illegal under Swedish law to do what they do. We know what torrent technology is and how it works and how it is used. There is no need to go into that. The pirate bay tracks, indexes and serves up torrent file. It is not copyrighted data or information.
The new spin is that they have been convicted of being an accessory to copyright infringement but there is no specific instance of copyright infringement having been associated with the charge. It seems to me that you would first have to prove an offence occurred before someone can be charged with being an accessory to an offence. Can someone be charged with accessory to murder without proof that a murder took place? I understand there is a general and accepted fact that The Pirate Bay does indeed contribute to copyright infringement, but in a court of law where proof and evidence are important, it seems pretty dangerous to convict someone on established presumptions rather than fact based on evidence and that there should be an original offence, based on fact based evidence, to associate with an accessory charge.
Sweden showed that they have integrity of their judicial process by not charging TPB with copyright infringement as their laws do not identify their activities as copyright infringement. Good. But charging them as an accessory to an unidentified offence is a departure from that judicial integrity.
I worry for the rule of law when people can be charged with crimes in this way.
It's hilarious these people think going after top sites will change anything. The only people enjoying all of this is the lawyers making huge bankrolls during the court process.
When/if pirate bay goes down another 10 torrent sites will rise up to take the reigns. You can't stop it and never will. They should have learned that from Napster.
Also known as "trick-trolling"
A discussion belonging more to the kingdom of Al Capone ...
"Hey son, That's some nice media collection you got your PC, would be a shame, ya know? if something happened to it, such nice media collection... ya know?"
"... Oh, Country western music, we should have brought shotguns for this!"
".. would break my heart!"
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
I know you guys like using extra letters in your words, but I'm still not sure "peadeos" is the right spelling, unless it's a brand of stereo equipment I haven't heard of.
Aha, along the lines of "You just got tricktrolled!" or "You just lost the game."
Wait what?
How can they order it closed?
i thought it was a matter of public record that TPB was owned by a company in the Antilles?
and that this company has unknown owners? (most likely the 4 swedes, but they'd still have to prove it first?)
How can a Swedish court order a private person to close a foreign companys property, that's not hosted in Sweden?
~men are from earth. women are from earth. deal with it.~
But such a think is useful, and they are used for it. Like a year ago when the new Ubuntu came out their tracker got crushed by the load. However, the torrent was posted on TPB, and it had no troubles handling it.
While I realize this isn't their major market, it is something that they are actually used for.
Imagine if a torrent could contain dynamic content, like a web page.
You download the torrent, the content has say thepiratebay.org indexed, somehow the creater of the official torrent can modify the files pointed to by the torrent, and thus make the piratebay itself distributed. Synchronization might be tricky...
Maybe it wouldnt work, but in any case, i look forward to seeing what great new technology all this enforcement brings us.
If you consider the correct analogies...
East India Company
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company
"Though the Company was becoming increasingly bold and ambitious in putting down resisting states, it was getting clearer day by day that the Company was incapable of governing the vast expanse of the captured territories"
No, but we certainly have the right to download torrents, which are legal in themselves! They aren't copyrighted material; they are pointers to copyrighted material!
Watching a geek self-destruct in the courtroom is one of life's most innocent pleasures.
You have a BT client installed.
You click on a link - and the infringing file arrives piece by piece to be assembled within your computer.
No other action on your part is anticipated or required.
That is all anyone needs to know. The interior mechanics of the system are irrelevant.
A country (or union of weak bitches, I mean countries) that does not lick American assholes clean and bend over to spread their cheeks for the corporations that truly run the American Empire.
Cuba
Venezuela
North Korea
etc etc
Run the servers from those locations while continuing to tell the American Empire to kiss your true freedom loving ass and to go fuck themselves with their worshiped near worthless dollar. Problem solved and game/set/match. TPB is shutdown within the EU-AmericanAssKissing boundaries and TPB lives on untouchable. Fucktard worthless lawyers, hopefully someday soon you will all just be put to the People's guillotine.
I just downloaded 7 CD's at about $1.25 per CD from soundsbox.com. Apparantly businesses like Soundsbox operate from Russia, but are legal there, since they pay royalties to the local version of RIAA, named SIOM I think.
The SIOM (or whatever their name is) apparently tried to pay these royalties to the RIAA, but they refused, probably because that would mean agreeing with the practice of Soundsbox.com. BTW there are many businesses like Soundsbox.com, some as cheap as $0.09 per song.
I think it is legal for me in Netherlands to buy music from them, and possibly even legal in the US. Someone care to comment on that?
Since copyright laws are different in Russia (and other countries), these companies can operate legally in their jurisdiction. This has landed Russia in hot water with the world trade organisation, but I think they don't care much about that. Anyway, at that level all kinds of politics come into play, and Russia may decide to use it as economic warfare against the USA. Allowing music and movies to be bought for very little from Russia, without paying anything back to the big companies, could effectivily destroy that entire industry. Games like this are played with oil, weapons, political support for issues in the security council etc. The Western media (and software) industry is vulnerable to be used as in a global game.
Anyway, I think it is legal for me to buy from these companies. Also I get to download what I want (not a fake file), for little, fast, no broken downloads. From a huge database with a wide variety of choice. Why should I still download via torrent sites when companies like these are around? With the risks, the hassle of searching, the uninvited porn, the slow/unreliable downloads?
RIAA has already lost; they should negotiate a deal with the major torrent sites now, work out a way to work with them, not against them. The RIAA cannot fight Russia, or other countries who are unfriendly against the US, of which there are many...
From TorrentFreak's article:
Ex-Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde, who appears to be excluded from the decision, is notably annoyed, noting that neither the founders nor the site are located in Sweden. He argues that the Swedish court has no jurisdiction in this case.
“It means nothing,” Peter told TorrentFreak, adding that it is bothersome that they have to invest time in cases like this.
“The Stockholm City Court is located in Stockholm. Stockholm is in Sweden. Swedish borders apply. Frederick and Godfrid live outside Sweden, even outside the EU. The Pirate Bay is outside the EU,” he told SR earlier today.
“How then can the Stockholm District Court, Sweden, get to decide that people abroad must not work on a site in another country?”
I have heard they and/or the site's servers are based in a former nuke bunker in the Netherlands, but I have also heard that they are now based in the Ukraine... Peter's comment seems to point to the latter, I guess. Moving to the Netherlands (and BREIN) seemed like a dumb idea, IMO.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
TPB stop showing their files, but the torrents are still working perfectly.
TPB is one of the best trackers you could connect to.
I hope they don't close down. I'm sure they will dodge everything the governments throw at them.
Ere many generations pass, our machinery will be driven by a power obtainable at any point of the universe. - Nikola Tes
Torrenting and downloading is by and large an expression of civil disobedience in reaction to the complete lockdown the entertainment mafia has on the industry. Fifteen bucks for a fracking CD ? Forty for a DVD? Right.
The corporate control of who gets to be distributed is nearly absolute - wonder why there's so little good music and new artists being put out by the major labels? Wonder why FM radio sucks?
We all know it.
I'm just saying it.
----- In Your Cubicle No One Can Hear You Scream...
Nobody has a right to illegally download copyrighted materials.
It's bad enough that copyright law restricts what can be said, written, and pictured, but restricting what can heard, read, and viewed is just way over the top. No business model is worth preserving that requires individuals to surrender such basic human freedoms.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
They're not failing due to a 'free' (as in speech-like) internet, but due to the 'free' (as in beer) copying of binary data.
If you could -copy- medicine so that you have a perfect copy of that medicine, and the person with the original keeps his, you bet that medicine companies would feel the hurt. See also Brazil's stance of happily ignoring patents and manufacturing medicine locally at a fraction of the cost (no R&D and advertising costs to recuperate goes a long way).
The same applies to food, clothing, cars, etc.
The only immediate restriction that would fall unto the above is that these are actual physical goods - and no element has yet been created out of a vacuum by scientists. Even transforming one element into another (alchemy, but way cooler) takes prohibitive amounts of energy and thus money. So you need a supply of base elements for the device - a star trek-style replicator if you will - to make the copies with. That would then be the last great industry.. the collection and distribution of the raw elements. But given that anybody in that industry can already replicate food, housing materials, etc. even they needn't necessarily be 'paid' in any way.
Under who's law, if their servers and business is in India, then the Swedes have no rights to force them to, especially, if TPB have been moving their servers, non stop...who's to say which country it's in now...
I really hate the government trying to make an example out of the guys that are not responsible at all for something so big,
yet the government really does not realize they should shut down the internet in order to stop piracy!!!
There is a similar accepted spelling "Paedophilia" but, yes, you're right, his stereo equipment isn't heard of.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
You have the right to remain a slave. Anything you do to not be a slave can and will be used to enslave you. You have the right to have your freedom incrementally taken from you. If you cannot afford freedom, no-one is going to give it to you. Do you understand we are right?
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
On the contrary, "funny" is dangerous to your karma. A +5 funny doesn't improve your karma at all, but often when one tries to be humorous the joke is interpreted as a troll or flamebait. Some people have no sense of humor. In fact, you can tell the people who aren't karma whores by looking at their achievements page. If they have "the comedian" thay've said something hilarious enough to get a +5 funny. You just don't do that if you worry about karma.
Anonymous posts are not good for your karma. But instead of posting humorously, post interestingly, incightfully, or informatively.
Free Martian Whores!
I was not aware you had a basic human right to make as many digital copies of photos or video or audio as you like and distribute them to whomever you wish. Nor was I aware that you had the right to possess material which exists in contravention of the law. Please, tell me where this basic human right is codified and on what basis it is established.
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
You're right that there's no reason to pirate music. I don't even need some Russian store for that: I can buy a CD and it will Just Work.
That thinking doesn't apply to video, though. Un-DRMed movies aren't for sale at any price. For the last decade, that hasn't mattered much, because I can go buy a DVD, violate DMCA in my own home (no witnesses; I will never get caught) to decrypt it, and watch it. But HD TVs are cheap now, so DVDs are less attractive. I am willing to break the law to watch BluRays, but I'm not willing to install WINE and buy Slysoft's player, which doesn't even work for sure with all movies. Until BluRay get cracked to the point where mplayer and xine can handle all of them, piracy is the only thing the movie companies have to offer. Let the pirates worry about all of BluRay's problems. The pirates seem to be ok with that, maybe even enjoy it. I don't have the time. I just want a file that works, and the pirates are the only ones who offer it.
I just love how all the Metallica fans derided the pop "hair metal" bands, but ultimately Metalica showed themselves as the ultimate "hair metal" band, i.e. they lost all their talent when they cut off their hair!
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
You forgot in Europe the prices are much higher.
Last I checked, Sweden was not in the States.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Well, I didn't know Gary Glitter was an illegal downloader. Get him!
"But this one goes to 11!"
They had to close it years ago. It is too late to contain the damage. But still, better late than never.
QTriangle Infotech Best web design, Web Hosting and Domain Registration
I was not aware you had a basic human right to make as many digital copies of photos or video or audio as you like and distribute them to whomever you wish. Nor was I aware that you had the right to possess material which exists in contravention of the law. Please, tell me where this basic human right is codified and on what basis it is established.
I was not aware he referred to any such right. I thought he was referring to basic human freedom, which is what copyright limits. I believe it is codified under 'the right to liberty' because any restrictions on that right without fair consideration are an infringement.
Why is everyone finding against TPB simultaneously all of a sudden? I understood there had been changes in Swedish law but there was also a verdict from a Dutch court recently so ... what gives? Years of little activity then suddenly courts are falling over themselves to rule on it? The courts can only hear cases that are brought to them, of course - but why all these separate cases at the same time?
Can't they just change the name from "The Pirate Bay" to "The Good Friends of Copyright Holders Who Would Never Even Think of Condoning downloading of Copyrighted Materials Bay", and then carry on business as usual? Isn't "closing" a domain and changing the registered domain name the same thing? Large corporations undergo name changes to obscure their sleazy reputation all the time -- why can't the Pirate Bay?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
heck, lsd and psilocybin should be legal (not addictive even though highly inebriating)
nicotine is highly addictive, but its not inebriating, so that should stay legal
but there are some drugs: heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, that are so addictive and so inebriating (you can't hold a coherent job or coherent relationship as an addict, unlike, say, a nicotine addict) that casual exposure to them represents more of a devastating threat to the lives of individuals and society than all of the negative side effects of a drug war
its about weighing positives and negatives. with alcohol and marijuana, the positives and negatives obviously balance out on the side of legalization. but the highly addicting+highly inebriating substances do so much damage in their own right, the negatives of declaring them illegal are less negative overall
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Torrenting and downloading is by and large an expression of civil disobedience in reaction to the complete lockdown the entertainment mafia has on the industry.
Civil disobedience as an act of protest does not involve trying to dodge the punishment prescribed by the legal system - indeed, the very point of it is largely to suffer from the laws you deem unjust while attracting public attention, so that your suffering gathers sympathy for your cause.
Downloading a bunch of files from TPB isn't civil disobedience in that sense unless you're willing to go to trial, and not argue on that trial that you didn't do it, but only that the law as it stands is wrong.
Let the failtards keep going after the Bay. It's like they have no idea about the other 10,000,000,000 ways to get free stuff.
If enough things became 'free' there would be a change in the methods creating artificial scarcity to in order to keep costs high.
I think it was the book "Forever Peace" (probably many more) that talked about a world with Nano-Forges. Throw dirt in it, and out comes whatever you want. Gold, diamonds, a new car, etc..
Instead of everyone in the world having everything they wanted, governments gave everyone ration cards. Free, but a limited amount. You could ask for anything you wanted, and different things cost different amounts of ration cards. The Nano-Forges could only produce so much, so fast, as limited by the government.
Now if everyone had their own personal Nano-Forge, I'm sure that the free market/governments/somebody would limit something else. Perhaps the electricity they use, or a law to put a regulator on them, or or or.
I hope something like Nano-Forges happens in my lifetime. That would be very interesting watching how things turned out. What if the 'blueprint' of something was the only way to control if a nano forge could make something. Say the blueprint for a mercedes car was 'leaked' onto the internet and everyone in built one over night in their personal nano forges. How would mercedes respond? Heh.
The site that hosts the largest array of links to illegal downloads is Google. So why do they get away with it and TPB does not?
Simple.
Google are not morons enough to name themselves something like the PIRATE bay.
If you pay close attention, yes a court in Sweden says "shutdown or pay huge fines"....problem: TPB doesn't reside in Sweden, nor do those ruled against. Result: Yeah, whatever.....business as usual.
Copyright does not restrict what you can create. It restricts what you can copy that someone else created.
You can create all day long. You can even copy to some extent for personal uses. You can't copy it and distribute it as if it were your own creation.
Get some perspective.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
about great men. i'm sure after struggling with their demons, they would agree with my position: that had they never been exposed to these hard core drugs, their lives would have been even brighter. simple exposure is the deciding factor. limiting exposure is the only way to minimize the damage
i can tell you about great race care drivers i know who can drive 120 mph all day long and never get into an accident. therefore should the speed limit be raised to 120 mph?
for the vast majorty, cocaine, meth, and heroin represent shackles, chains, that completely destroy their ability to function in jobs or relationships. and all that is required for the destruction by these drugs to commence on more lives is to make them easier to access. yes, some people can handle hard core drugs, and some cannot. for those who cannot, simple societal restriction is the only way to preserve the integrity of their lives. in spite of every side effect of the war on drugs that you can demonstrate to me, and that i agree with, the MOST addictive AND MOST inebirating hardcore drugs must remain illegal to minimize individual and societal damage
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Yet, instead of making it legal, they've stiffened the penalties for it (and virtually all crimes) over the years.
Obviously we suffer the tyranny of a vocal minority of do-gooders. Moral authoritarianism is despicable, IMHO. That's because one should be humble about telling others how to live. Even the bible says so (take that Christian-right):
Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, 'Brother, let me take the speck out of your eye,' when you yourself fail to see the plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye. -- Luke 6:41-42
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Where is the right to liberty codified?
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
With a name like Inglourius Basterds, I wouldn't go within a mile of the theater. Tarantino lost it a long time ago, if indeed he ever did have 'it', and I never liked his crappy movies anyway. From Dusk To Dawn was good only because he gets his head blown off in that one. What a dick.
I do agree with you about the balance of power, and hope my iPredator VPN stays on even after this court case is done...
Ask Me About... The 80's!
Voting? You mean like a "free" election?
GROUPAMA was caught in a software PIRACY case of $200 million and has made an unofficial affidavit (claiming that it was not guilty) to divert Police investigators from the evidences officially collected one month ago at a different office.
In its affidavit, GROUPAMA argued that bank secrecy entitled it to limit the scope of Police investigations to a building that was not the place where evidences about the infraction were officially collected.
After the fraud was discovered and denounced by the victim, as GROUPAMA managed to have the General Prosecutor of Paris to state that Police was 'right' to ignore the criminal file and focus only on the irrelevant information provided by GROUPAMA itself, there is room for serious doubts in the way that affair was conducted.
As a matter of facts, FINAMA and GROUPAMA have reported false information to the markets regarding their own accounts (where the fraud describbed below has never been reported).
This unfortunate event is more than likely to compromize the confidence ratings of French (bank and insurance) regulated markets on the proven basis that the numbers cannot be trusted.
All the details, including the General Prosecutor reply, Police investigation file and the unofficial affidavit cooked by GROUPAMA have been made publicly available:
http://remoteanything.com/archives/groupama.pdf
Sure they did. So whenever the dorky kid in school brought in something really cool for Show-And-Tell, I'd grab it from him and share it with everybody else. (I always threw it back to him when I was done.)
My parents also taught me to ignore dorky kids who crouch in the corner crying.
My world is good.
By your logic, it's time we start outlawing Usenet.
You requested a file. You received a file.
The mechanics of the process expose you to the rights holder. It will make his burden of proof easier or harder.
But that is its only legal significance.
It was your choice to use a legal means of communication for an illegal purpose. You are on trial. Not Usenet. Not IRC. Not AIM.
My world is good.
Grow up child. Pretty much everybody on the planet shares. Your pretense that they don't and your scummy attempt to associate it with something nasty and unrelated is just sad.
---
Modern marketing - a great substitute for a quality product.
Sharing is when you give something of yourself. You mis-state the spirit of taking as if it is the spirit of giving.
At the root of every case of illegal content sharing is a breach of contract. To that you turn a blind eye.
It's not sharing. It's leaching.
Self-denial is a higher form. Less material. Steeped in respect. And now that you're "grown up" as you are, you're unlikely to find much value in that.
<child