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Pirate Bay Down; Police Raids Across Europe
Stoobalou contributes a link to this story at Thinq.co.uk, from which he excerpts: "Torrent-tracking site The Pirate Bay is currently unavailable as reports come in of co-ordinated police raids against file sharers across Europe. Police in up to 14 countries carried out raids against suspected file-sharing servers this morning. According to file-sharing news site TorrentFreak, the bulk of police action seems to have taken place in Sweden. Swedish Internet service provider ISP, which hosts both The Pirate Bay and whistle-blowing site WikiLeaks, earlier denied rumours of a police raid, saying that officers had visited them to ask questions over two suspect IP addresses, and that no computers or other goods had been seized."
Now that governments across the globe are mobilizing armed men to eliminate file sharers, the world will be a perfect place. Certainly there is nothing worse than file sharing going on if this is their priority.
I can't believe that filesharing is given such a high priority by governments in Europe. The entertainment industry must have a VERY strong lobbying organization to pull that off. It's a pity that rape victims and other sufferers from really bad crimes are not as well organized and don't have such deep pockets as the entertainment industry.
-- Cheers!
The action, targeting the so-called 'Warez Scene', is said to have been in planning for two years, and is believed to have taken place at the request of Belgian authorities."
Ya, good luck with that. In the meantime new servers will come online and all the bits will be put back in order. This time, they will probably be put up in countries that won't answer the phone. Good job, 2 years of planning and I'm sure a heroic police effort, executing the warrants, will be undone in a matter of weeks. Welcome to the digital age.
poof!: prostitution will disappear
close down pirate bay... poof!: piracy disappears
right, right?
regardless of your stand on media piracy or prostitution, simply from a law enforcement point of view that assumes these "vices" are simply something illegal to be fought: i don't understand why you want to shut the hubs down
its not like shutting down craigslist or pirate bay is going to make piracy or prostitution go away. instead, you allow craigslist and pirate bay to continue, and you do your law enforcement job, and monitor the hubs. like shooting fish in a barrel: just respond to what's there. but without craigslist or the pirate bay, these "problems" are harder to catch and monitor
its almost as if law enforcement wants to drive these problems back underground again so they don't have to deal with them. out of sight, out of mind
which shows you the ambivalency with which modern society views stuff like piracy or prostitution: they are on the cusp of acceptability. its not like murder or rape, where the illegality of the actions are obvious and therefore the mandate and willpower to punish perps is 100%. instead, with stuff like prostitution and piracy, the willpower wanes, the commitment lapses, because the immorality of the actions is not clearcut
such that the law enforcement campaigns consist less of going after perpetrators, but just making them go underground and disappear from prominent view
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
That the police are enforcers for corporate overmasters rather then the people....
"Simultaneous raids are also said to have been carried out in The Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Germany, Great Britain, the Czech Republic and Hungary."
Sweden (1904), Netherlands (1912), Belgium (1887), Norway (1896), Germany (1887), Great Britain (1887), Czech Republic (1993), and Hungary (1904) have all signed the Berne Convention among other agreements.
Sweden may have fairly loose laws when it comes to "sharing" protected work, but it also has international obligations that may seem more burdensome now than they did back in 1904.
I wonder if ACTA will have similar unforeseen consequences in one hundred years as today's act of file transmission and duplication was likely not considered back in the day of ink and presses.
Don't you see that "Economic Growth" must be expressed in money, and that if people don't pay for it, but still consume it, it's not "growth", for the simple reason that we cannot measure it?
I mean... duh.
That's like curing cancer for free, and not getting rich of it. That's not growth, and therefore not progress... If you aim to improve this world without earning money, you clearly have your priorities wrong.
Police and governments exist to maximize measurable profit.
I've been trying to get on Pirate Bay this morning and most times my connection either times out or I get an error page about connecting to a caching server and only after mashing the reload button many times do I actually get a page.
Then again this could just be the effect of everyone reading news stories about it being down and trying to "test" if the site is up, thus overloading and taking down the server for real. Hooray for self-fulfilling prophecy!
I tend to wonder when the pressure on normal people to get in line and shut up will go over the top and cause real action.
It's not just file-sharers. Anyone who simply wants to be left alone as they travel the net is subject to monitoring and, maybe, serious trouble.
How many meritless lawsuits will have to be filed, how many knocks on doors in the night must happen, before some package of technology comes into general use, a group of tools that creates a situation where ISPs see nothing but encrypted streams going this way and that, with no idea what's actually in them?
All the pieces exist. Some years ago, I would have predicted that we'd be to that point already.
But no. People just keep sending in the clear, writing all their important letters on the back of postcards unless the recipient forces them to put it in an envelope.
Is this weird? Or is my viewpoint skewed? I'd really like to know because I sure don't understand it.
It's a Symbiotic relationship. The Entertainment Industry (not artists, btw) and the governments need each other.
The industry distract the people from what the governments are doing (hint: pilfer)
So when the industry come knocking about competition to their eternal monopoly, the governments jump to help. You wouldn't want your smoke screen to clear up and have light shining on you...
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
I think you got almost all the truth. The key here is evidence: to prosecute a user for sharing copyrighted work is just a matter of finding evidence that a file was downloaded to X and that X was linked to you. Log files make this trivial. To convict someone accused of rape or pedophilia is much more difficult: evidence can be unreliable or murky, a lot is based on people's testimony and you don't always have DNA aka smoking gun. It's not that they don't go after them (they do), is that it's just too damn hard and it doesn't get a lot of publicity (understandably).
I rarely respond to comments. Also, don't ask for clarifications: a brain and Google are faster, believe me!
my use of the word "pirate" is with full knowledge of the discrepancy you refer to
we are after all talking about the PIRATE bay. we both know the guys who run that site know full well that the traditional meaning of piracy is a poor descriptor of what copyright infringement is, but they wear the epithet "pirate" with pride on the name of their site. when someone smears and insults you, a good tactic is to take that insult or epithet, and use it yourself with pride as a descriptor. therefore nullifying the supposed power of the negative word. a negative becomes a positive. so i proudly call myself a pirate, when i know the sharing media is nothing like swashbucklers and theft. in this way, words are always constantly shifting in meaning and implication in popular culture, and this eventually filters down to dictionary terminology years later
the same can be found in the gay rights movement: "queer" is now a word of pride. or even right here on slashdot: "nerd" and "geek" are words which were meant as insults but are now marks of honor. there are many sociological and political arenas where insults menat to smear, scapegoat, and prejudice are turned around and used as marks of pride
for example, lately i am trying to proudly refer to myself as a socialist, here in the usa. socialism in europe is just obvious common sense. but in the usa it takes on mythic ridiculous proportions of evil, by people who barely understand the concept (ever hear of library? a highway system? social security? hellooooo?). such that using the word, as a mark of pride and a self-descriptor, is almost revolutionary and controversial, here in the usa at least, when of course, according to a strict interpretation of the meaning of the word, its completely humdrum
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
In the world, USA is the only one net 'exporter' of audiovisual copyrights. That means that for any of the European governments, anyone who buys movies or music from USA just creates some trade deficit and harms the local economy - sure, there are treaties starting from Berne convention where they have agreed that they should protect copyrights, but keeping a practical mind in this economy means that it is in the country's best interests just to do the bare minimum instead of being effective.
Each teenager who downloads a Justin Bieber song instead of buying it means $1 gain for his country and $1 loss for USA, where the record studio execs would be spending their profits.
I salute you for resisting using all caps and maintaining a conversational tone, at least.
You're positing that all the world's problems are not only solvable, but easily solvable. I'm sorry to break this to you, but humanity is not omnipotent, we're barely competent. And yes, I am including those bad actors you accuse of creating war, disease and starvation in order to profit.
You mention some serious issues, but you're not helping to solve them by imagining a capitalist conspiracy of a mysterious "them" against the righteous "us". You're misdirecting your energies against ghosts and shadows instead of supporting what actually leads to progress: political activity, scientific research, charity and education.
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
maybe the part with affordable healthcare
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
According to Stephen Hawking, your computer imploded because of an uncontrolled feedback loop.
And yes, you're be able to know what happens in the future, simply wait until it's no longer the future.
Free Martian Whores!
Please take that shrilly devil spawn.
xoxo,
Canada
I always have this (baseless?) personal fear about potentially routing someone's illegal porn through such networks and that it will somehow come back to bite me even if I'm doing nothing wrong.
in the usa that qualifies as communism worse than north korea, or so the rightwing propaganda goes
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
yeah, but...
What if time-traveling Hitler had cancer, but it was cured for free, so he used harsh sarcasm on your grandmother?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
No. As soon as the accumulation of power though "competitive markets" hits a critical mark, the most powerful competitor drives everyone else out of the market. All competitive capitalism leads to monopolistic plutocracy, if unchecked by some other monolithic power, usually a governmental entity.
Standard Oil, Monsanto, Archer-Daniels Midland, Goldman Sachs, IBM, then Microsoft, AT&T, then AT&T again, take your pick.
Someone has to wield the power, and the goal of capitalism is to become king of the hill and wield it, usually by knifing one's competitors in the back. Not to "compete in a market" or any of these other "free market" dogmas you seem to espouse.
Eventually, capitalism fails. It becomes oligarchy. The entire system is designed to behave that way without some other, powerful monolithic entity to keep it in check.
No solution here, just pointing out the obvious. Capitalism is defective by design, and you really have to watch who is getting power from your purchases/dollar votes. Capitalism without a popular entity to keep it in check always becomes centrally controlled (boardroom controlled) despotism. Then your only vote is a share in the stock market.
That may be fine by you, but I don't believe I should have to buy my vote in a non-democratic system slanted to keep me in my place as an unhappy, disposable consumer.
--
Toro
When will the authorities realize that this thing relies on inherent features of the Internet, and that it cannot be prevented by force without taking down the 'net itself?
Look, hypothetical authority figure, encryption and digital signing and all the technology and math and science and engineering in the world can only protect communications between two trusted endpoints. In this context, "trust" means that both parties are trusted to only share the transacted information in a manner both sides deem appropriate.
In the pair {music company, customer}, the customer is not a trusted endpoint. Any information sent to that person cannot in principle be protected. On the other hand, the endpoints {customer, everyone else} is by definition trusted because neither party cares what the other does with the information being transacted, so all actions are trusted.
Do you see the problem now? Can you understand why spending millions more of the public's money chasing this phantom is a fundamental misunderstanding of technology? There's two ways to deal with this. Governments and corporations can: (a) continue tending toward more and more extreme actions in a futile attempt to control the information until they slide all the way over the fascist system that would be required to actually work, (b) recognize that we live in a free society where people's right to exchange information is worth protecting in spite of the fact that it can be abused. In this battle, we have a basic human right on one side of freedom to exchange information, and right to intellectual property on the other.
The right to IP is not a fundamental human right! That's not to say it's not worth protecting at all, but not at the cost of something much more important!
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.