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."

Comments

Press release in english

[martenfjallstrom]

Courtesy of Engström, pirate MEP: http://christianengstrom.wordpress.com/2010/05/18/the-swedish-pirate-party-delivers-bandwidth-to-the-pirate-bay/

Re:Press release in english

[Moryath]

Obligatory "the more you tighten your grip, Tarkin..." reference.

As for the rest, well, we'll see. Copyright law all over the world is fucked up right now; the original idea, the contract that someone would have exclusive rights to their story so as to make money for a certain time, before being required to give it up for others to be inspired by (since they used the language and ideas of the commons and doubtless had their own inspirations from there), is all but lost. We've already reached the point where many works have died, never to be seen again, simply because some shithead stuck (for instance) the degrading original film negatives into a vault to become unusable while there were no other copies around.

Ideally, copyright terms should last no longer than patent terms, and registration should be mandatory before copyright can be enforced. Our current "everything is copyrighted by default including my fucking grocery list if I claim it's really a poem" regime is unsustainable and worthless.

Re:Press release in english

[WrongSizeGlass]

Clearly you've missed his point ;-) If the movies had been properly pirated they'd have been available to all comers on a site like, I dunno, The Pirate Bay. Pirating would have saved those movies rather than hurt them.

Re:Press release in english

[Ephemeriis]

How would shorter copyright terms solve that issue?

Well, if the copyright term was shorter, the copy in the vault may not have degraded by the time copyright expired. And then you could release that vault copy into the wild.

Copyright law didn't prevent someone else storing an archival copy until copyright expiration

Actually, it does.

Copyright law means that I can dictate who makes copies and under what conditions. So if the only copies I allow are low-quality, or severely edited, or DRM-encumbered, or self-destructing... Then there's no way anyone out there can store an archival copy.

Frankly, unless I'm handing out copies of my original filmstock with no DRM or anything like that, folks are going to have one hell of a time using any of their copies for archival purposes.

and you would still have no right to go and take those original negatives...

Generally speaking, you don't want the original negatives.

The original negatives for Avatar, for example, are just going to be a bunch of people running around in front of a green screen.

What you want is a clean, full copy of the work as it appeared for public consumption. Without any DRM or encryption or limitations. Without it being reformatted for fullscreen TVs or anything like that.

A good, clean, full copy that can then be used to master additional copies in various formats.

Generally speaking, this is not available.

Re:Press release in english

[Lumpy]

Do you realize how many movies and records from the early days are destroyed forever. There is a crapload of Chicago blues artists and awesome songs that will never be heard again because of Copyright law.

Honestly, Copyright does more harm than good if you look past the "money money gimmie gimmie" though pattern of the greedy and think of culture and history.

The rampant greed of today is no different than the burning of the library of Alexandria. Lots of information, literary works, and art are being DESTROYED for no reason other than plain old greed.

Re:Press release in english

[DiademBedfordshire]

Ideally, copyright terms should last no longer than patent terms, and registration should be mandatory before copyright can be enforced. Our current "everything is copyrighted by default including my fucking grocery list if I claim it's really a poem" regime is unsustainable and worthless.

and

A good, clean, full copy that can then be used to master additional copies in various formats.

Generally speaking, this is not available.

What if you had to apply for the copyrights to your work but in doing so you have to turn over a master to the copyright office and when the copyright expires the copyright office turns the master over into public domain,

Re:Press release in english

[ConfusedVorlon]

yup, shorter copyright per se wouldn't fix that issue.

but requiring people to register and store their material in order to get copyright could.

something along the lines of
1) you pay for an independent registered copyright storage facility to keep a copy
2) that gets you copyright for x years on the stored material
3) after x years, the hosted material goes public

with of course x = smallish number

Re:Press release in english

[BoberFett]

I don't know about you, but that kind of loss of history and culture gives me an awful sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. The original artists would probably feel the same way if they knew that the things they created vanished forever because some asshole in a 50th story office didn't want anybody to hear or see something they didn't pay for.

Re:Press release in english

[Svartalf]

As opposed to without copyright law where the works would be destroyed in exactly the same way, except this time conditional on them existing in the first place?

Really now... And I suppose the following:

The Mona Lisa
The Statue of David
Plumbing
The Steam Engine ...are all figments of everyone's imagination.

Vast portions of our art and history had NO Patent or Copyright "protection" to speak of and yet they were done. Your premise is, sadly, an old saw- and very, very much wrong.

Re:Press release in english

[hairyfeet]

Because somebody somewhere WILL find a way to make a copy, because they know that they will eventually find a way to make a few $$ off of it? It's like this idea I had when I was in school..."DOSBox...in a box" basically taking all these old obscure 80s and 90s DOS games and putting a prebuilt DOS emulator on a disc with a GUI frontend, so that like a Linux Live CD you could just slip the disc into any PC and be enjoying in minutes.

Me and another student had gotten it to a running mockup stage just to see if we could, but when we started trying to contact those that had made the old games we wanted to put on the disc we found a minefield where companies were gone, nobody knew WTF happened to the rights, and the few that responded acted like their game from 87 should be worth more than Crysis.

So instead of a nice little disc that would allow new generations to easily play what we old greybeards cut our teeth on, thanks to copyrights it is doubtful you'll even be able to find a single copy to play or a machine that'll play it by the time copyrights end on them. The combination of copyright musical chairs and greedy pigs that think "we'll do something with it...some day, maybe" and want as much or more than it cost new simply makes it an undoable idea.

These guys never go down...

[TrisexualPuppy]

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!

Re:These guys never go down...

[HopefulIntern]

Indeed, I am wearing my TPB t shirt today in support. Some of the younger managers here at work (I work for a major multinational IT co) are glaring at me :(

Re:These guys never go down...

[spleen_blender]

I was going to mod this interesting, but I decided you should just come down to my office, Andrew.

Re:These guys never go down...

[Any Web Loco]

Hi -

I'm one of the younger managers at a large multinational. Were you, a "hopefullintern", wearing a TPB t-shirt at my office I'd think twice about your professionalism.

What you do on your own time is your own business - but imho your support of TPB is probably best not demonstrated at your place of business, espcaially when you work for a major IT co!

Don't get me wrong - I support TPB and I've got the t-shirt too - but there's a time & a place.

Cheers,

awl

Re:These guys never go down...

[HopefulIntern]

Did I mention it is a company I have absolutely no desire to keep working for? I am not customer facing, so the dress code is virtually non-existent. People here wear Che Guevara shirts to work all the time. Maybe a shirt depicting a mass-murderer is more acceptable? It's a sick world.

Feh

[Pojut]

I don't always download torrents, but when I do, I reach for Demonoid.

Stay downloading, my friends.

Makes sense

[CHJacobsen]

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.

Learn the bloody lesson

[durrr]

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)

hey, traditional media distributors:

[circletimessquare]

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

Re:hey, traditional media distributors:

[zwei2stein]

No, we will not.

This is game of whack-a-mole. Those teenagers need to be able to access shared stuff. That access needs to be reasonably open if masses are to benefit from it and it is singple-point-of-failure. Whacking website or proxy is as easy as dropping packets to certain ip address. Obscurity means useleness for millions and win for media companies.

You still need to download data to your computer. No encryption or steganography gets around the fact that any reasonably fast download will be up on radar due to its size.

Obsuscation, Steganography and Encryption is not going to help much either. People of both ends of pipe need to know wtf is going on, and if you want something more than couple of people, it needs to be public.

Efficient sharing is open. Open means vulnurelable. They own pipes, and they own people who make laws about pipes. Best we can do without pipes is sneakernet.

True hope is that those millions will turn to adults and vote for change. Reality is that as they turn to adults, they will have different issues than free music or movies.

Re:hey, traditional media distributors:

[ZekoMal]

This scares me.

What we need to be doing, is killing the middle man. The RIAA, the MPAA, the greedy non-artist studios that do nothing but leech off of the artist.

Don't say "free as in beer media" is the future. Say that buying directly from the artist, at whatever price the artist dictates, is the future. That is the free you want.

Because if you make it so that artists can't make money at all, then you will kill creativity. Don't give me anecdotal evidence to the contrary, one artist here and there already sitting on millions or on another job do not count as success with 100% free art. At the end of the day, a lot of art takes years of 80 hour weeks to produce, and you can kiss non-D movies and non-flash games goodbye if everyone stopped paying the artists involved.

TBP and DHT

[gorzek]

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.

Re:TBP and DHT

[Anonymous Coward]

This one?

Re:News?

[mhelander]

True, but the news here is that TPB is now hosted by the Swedish Pirate Party.

Just delaying the inevitable

[soporific16]

The pol-lice state is coming
Doo dah
Doo dah

The pol-lice state is coming
Oh doo dah day.

Oh doo dah day
It's on its merry way

The pol-lice state is coming
Oh doo dah day.

Re:News?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it is. The German ISP which previously advertised the Pirate Bay ASN ("provided access to the Pirate Bay servers") was forced with an injunction to cut access. This is noteworthy because they had filed a "Schutzschrift", which is supposed to give the target of an injunction a chance to be heard before the injunction. The injunction was granted without giving the ISP a chance for defense. That is only acceptable if the matter is urgent, which it clearly is not.

Bankrupt ? HAHAHAHAHAAH

[unity100]

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.

Re:Bankrupt ? HAHAHAHAHAAH

[richie2000]

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.

http://www.piratpartiet.se/donate

I'm not sure how I feel about this

[JoshuaZ]

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.

Re:I'm not sure how I feel about this

[Yvanhoe]

You have to take into account the fact that the Swedish party pirate came into being because of a single event : TPB being chased out of Sweden without any debate about copyright laws in the internet era. This is a way to force the door. As I understand it, the PP position could be : "What TPB is doing is clearly problematic, just as is the fact to just try to shut it down without debate. Let's talk about this now."

Re:All good and well,

[kthreadd]

On their web site under the link titled donations. http://www.piratpartiet.se/donate

or it could be stupid ...

[Lazy Jones]

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...

which is bullshit

[circletimessquare]

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

Re:which is bullshit

[marco.antonio.costa]

I agree with the parent. I'm almost coming to believe that artists getting paid is a bigger threat to creativity and art.

I mean, lets face it: if there was copyright in the late 18th century, Beethoven would've written 3 symphonies, 9 piano sonatas and lived off the royalties till he died of cirrosis some 10 years earlier than he did.

A LOLcats declaration

[Yvanhoe]

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.