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

[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,

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...

[spleen_blender]

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

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.

Re:News?

[mhelander]

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

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.

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: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...

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

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

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.