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The Pirate Bay Sinks And Swims
mikael_j writes "This morning the German ISP that had been hosting The Pirate Bay's website and search engine shut the site down. A few hours later the website was back up, this time with hosting provided by the Swedish Pirate Party, which issued a press release (in Swedish) explaining why they have chosen to host The Pirate Bay."
Courtesy of Engström, pirate MEP: http://christianengstrom.wordpress.com/2010/05/18/the-swedish-pirate-party-delivers-bandwidth-to-the-pirate-bay/
They never asked for money as other torrent sites did for legal costs. They have managed to make it against all odds. Props to TPB!
The pirate bay is down/up so often is it worth reporting everytime? If it was going to go down for an extended period then yes, but its barely been 24hrs.
I don't always download torrents, but when I do, I reach for Demonoid.
Stay downloading, my friends.
Living With a Nerd
This is actually a fairly smart political move.
With the swedish elections coming up in August, they are sure to gain some much needed notoriety.
Also, they are in a different position to fight the inevitable legal battle. Since they are a political party, they don't have to put economic interests first, but are actually expected to take the fight to the bitter end. If they end up losing, and go bankrupt in the process, at least they've stood up for what they believe in.
Either way, we're up for some good drama. Stay tuned.
Important stuff
If the money funneled into legal departments to hunt pirates were instead funneled into marketing and development of competitive alternatives we'd have next to no piracy.
Instead, the money that the lawyers don't pocket goes to implemention of fascist-grade DRM and to greed inspired practices such as pay-for DLC which is a massive turn off. If i want to have a game continously bleed me for cash i'd play an MMORPG(which i do; eve online, but they atleast have the sense of providing expansions for free(and quite often) so the bleeding is smooth)
From TF translation:
"The Pirate Party delivers bandwidth to the home page and the search engine The Pirate Bay, while the tracker and the torrent files that were previously on the page are now hosted elsewhere. These were never affected by the German court decision."
buy all the legislators in as many countries as you want. hire as many lawyers as you want. you're working against tens of millions of technically astute, media hungry and most importantly, POOR teenagers
there's nothing you can do: you lose. obfuscation, encryption, obscurity, steganography, darknets, p2p, proxies... we win, assholes. you will not preserve your dead economic model. the economic model of free media on the internet will be foisted on you. adapt, or die. end of fucking story. deal with it
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
TPB going down isn't even that big a deal anymore, since they shut down the tracker and went full DHT. At this point, you can pretty much get by with something like IsoHunt. All we need for torrents anymore are search engines. Having someone actually run a tracker has become completely unnecessary.
But it does lots of good PR for TPB to keep getting brought down, then popping up a couple hours later. Makes the authorities pursuing them look utterly incompetent.
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the moment they put up an international donation page, they would get flooded with money. remember obama's campaign and how he floated on $5 donations as opposed to clinton and won.
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Unfortunately, The Pirate Parties (including the Swedish one) are now the party to go to for a lot of reasonable views on many issues. Not just copyright, but other IP issues and even some non-IP issues. We should be worried by the fact that even some people who are massively in favor of copyright reform (such as myself) are not happy with The Pirate Bay and think that at minimum a lot of what Pirate Bay does is unethical. Having one of the Pirate parties directly associated in this way already reinforces perceived connections between the Pirate parties and outright software piracy to an extent that really isn't helpful.
Here's the page from the Swedish Pirate Party's homepage, run through Google Translate: "Golden Pirate"
On their web site under the link titled donations. http://www.piratpartiet.se/donate
I don't know how trustworthy the swedish legal system is, but here in Austria, most judges are political puppets who would be pressurized into sinking the PP together with TPB simply because it's politically opportune and because they can (a good example is the current trial against legal animal rights activism where anyone can see how unfair such a political trial can be: tierschutzprozess.at). It's a glorious move on behalf of the PP for sure, but it'll be an uphill battle and the heroes only win reliably in movies.
But hey, if you don't fight, you can't win...
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
its a game of cut off the head of the hydra
all the old school distributors are doing is breeding more industrial strength, impossible to detect distribution network
really! why not hide it is as tiny http form posts and or gets? how do you deep packet inspect that?
and why not download slow? for the majority of teenagers, iron man 2 in 5 days rather than $20 is perfectly fine
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
they gave songs away for free for decades: the radio
they gave shows away for free for decades: broadcast television
and before either, there WAS no recorded music or images. yet we still had shakespeare and mozart
art is not dying, creativity will never die, in fact, those who truly love art are not motivated by the almighty buck, they are motivated by love of the art. they'll waste millions to make art, and we'll benefit from it. meanwhile, art made for profit, the usual mindless pop movies and music, will we miss them?
and finally, if you give away your songs for free, what really happens? well, for 0.01% (the rest stay poor, JUST LIKE BEFORE THE INTERNET) you get famous. then you make millions from concert gigs, advertising endorsements, personalized content... in other words, you'll still make $ from art, only via ANCILLARY REVENUES
so sorry chicken little, the sky is not falling
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The Pirate Bay has even issued a statement, written in lolcats, to explain this move :
http://thepiratebay.org/blog/179
:
AS U MITE HAS READ OR NOTICD, PEEPS ONCE AGAIN R TRYIN 2 SHUT US DOWN. DIS WILL NOT SUCCED, LOL. OURS RLY NICE WEBHOST WUZ THREATEND WIF RLY HUGE FINE, SO WE DECIDD 2 MOOV TEH SIET SO DAT THEY DIDNT GOT INTO TROUBLE, LOL. TEH DECISHUN 2 MOOV WUZ TAKEN BY US, TEH PIRATE BAY, LOL.
TEH PIRATE BAY IZ AN UNSINKABLE SHIP. IT WILL SAIL TEH INTERWEBS 4 AS LONG AS WE WANTS IT 2. REMEMBR DAT, K THX.
TPB, ONLY IN IT 4 TEH LULZ SINCE 2003
The year is 2010. This is a political official statement.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
I just imagine if the torrent standard would support adding files to the share, we could simply host a torrent with torrents and update it. This way searching for a torrent will be searching in the torrent's files and selectively download it. calling it vtorrent or something would distinguish it from normal torrents.
I know DHT exists, and several other protocols to decentralize, however this way there would be a way to distribute even further.
This would not kill the need of a tracker and some hierarchy to define who can add files, but certainly would decentralize by another factor. However clients would have to implement search features to cope with this new kind of file first of course.
Once plugged in into the tracker network, all decentralized methods would take effect, resulting in a subnet not relying completely on an ever present tracker.
Does something similar exist?
Since when do pirates ask for your money?
That conviction only ruled that the tracker was illegal. The Pirate Party is only hosting the TPB home page and the search engine, they don't host any torrent-files nor do they have a tracker anymore.
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
TPB is just a place to download torrent files. That's not how the MPAA "catches" you; they act as a normal client, connect to other peers and log their IP addresses.
There's nothing you can do, besides setting up a private tracker where everyone is trusted, or using a anonymising proxy like IPREDator.
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what they believe is what the future of society believes. if you don't understand that this is a fight over the habits and beliefs of teenagers, you don't understand the fight at all
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Your analogy is poor. For a start, their entire position is that the search results (i.e. "the gun selling") isn't illegal. So it's like saying that *LEGAL* gun selling doesn't increase the number of gunshot victims.
Despite being anti-gun and living in a low-gun country, I'd have to say that's not such a bold assertion. Yes, LEGAL arms are sometimes used to kill people, but a vastly more significant portion of gun-crime happens with ILLEGAL guns. Especially in my country where legal arms are incredibly rare... I know one person who has a specialist gun collector's license out of all my friends and acquaintances.
A better analogy would be that it's like saying that people who mention a bootsale (yard sale) where they know pirate DVD's are for sale are somehow complicit if you then decide to go to that sale and buy some.
every mp3 is completely free and ad-less. because the mp3 IS the advertisement... for the concert gig where you sell tickets, for the musician who will endorse your product, for ALL SORTS OF ANCILLARY REVENUE STREAMS
"Where is that money going to come from?"
gee, i dunno, i didn't know your average guitar and laptop with free software was a major investment. especially considering the teenager holding that guitar and pushing record on that laptop is mainly doing it to get in girl's pants, like very other wannabe musician in history. but gee i'm sorry, i didn't want to brust your bubble: as we all know its IMPOSSIBLE to make art without money first, that moeny is the only motivation. and art motivated by money is always the highest quality that everyone desires, not at all shallow vapid and empty. yup, yup
the world is not ending son. only the distribution model that the internet killed. get used to it
so what is your alternative distribution model? control the internet?
good luck!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I could swear that the Library of Congress is trying to preserve all the information that you say is being lost.
Isn't that part of their purpose? http://www.loc.gov/about
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
why do believe you need money to make art? why do you confuse a DISTRIBUTION MODEL with an essential passion of mankind?
and how did mozart and shakespeare function? patronage, that's how
and why do you NEED an ancillary dvd market to support crap movies? as you say, avatar made bazillions... in the movie theater! can the world survive without direct-to-dvd crap?! pfffffft
musicians will make millions... at concert gigs
sure, only 0.01% of them
JUST LIKE IN THE PRE-INTERNET ERA
but with the long tail (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Tail) greater quantization of the market due to more efficient distribution (the internet) means the world is not a binary existence between signing a contract (and making millions) or making nothing. instead, all those starving musicians... some will make $100s, some $1,000s, %10,000s, $100,000s... where before the capricious opinions of record company execs decided your fate between nothing and millions. and even THEN made you sign contracts where they got the lion share of $ anyways. in fact, artists will be RICHER because even though there is less money in play on just concert gigs and other ancillaries, they get the money DIRECT, not 10% of what some record exec rams down your throat due to holding all the power. now, on the internet, YOU, the audience decides who will make $$$, not some asshole snorting blow off a hooker's ass. its a far more efficient, egalitarian model. the artist is freer, the audience has more cultural riches... and the old school media conglomerate dies. let me find my tiny violin somewhere...
you fail to think the issue through. you only grasp part of the issues you talk about. just think all of your concerns through. you will see for yourself: THERE IS NO PROBLEM (unless you are an old school distributor). the sky is not falling chicken little. the world has survived far greater shocks to social and legal convention due to technological progress. open your brittle mind, see the better future for what it is
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The Pirate Party is spreading across the globe, and in spite of a corporate war against culture, it is not going away anytime soon. These issues are not easy, and when they are eventually resolved they will not satisfy everyone, but unless all the players come to the table, all that remains for the average citizen of the world is to play the role of pirate. A role given to them by the buggy whip salesmen of the last century who will not allow their business model to grow.
http://www.pirateparty.ca
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