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."

Comments

Re:Past Due!

[radtea]

So, if we could figure out a way to prove that terrorism, hunger, poverty, AIDS, or whatever injustice hurts the corporate bottom line, we'd see action being taken to clear it up in no time?

Close, but "hurting the bottom line" isn't enough because the Right is no more interested in money than the Left is interested in social justice. Both are interested in exactly one thing: power.

Capitalists get power from making money, but power--unlike profit--is a zero-sum game. This means that capitalists are willing to forego profits if that is necessary to prevent other people from gaining power.

That is, capitalists hate free-riders far more than they love money, so they are more than willing to lose customers to AIDS because curing AIDS for free would mean that someone else might also profit from those customers, and that would reduce the capitalist's feeling of power.

If wiping out hunger, poverty AIDS or terrorism would actually make someone money, then yes, it would be done very rapidly, the way slavery went out of style the moment it became more profitable to have consumer goods for sale to paid workers who could be controlled almost as well as slaves by debt.

Unfortunately, capitalists have learned that genuinely fixing problems is rarely the way to maximize their power. Far better to sell a more-or-less ineffective "solution" like the security-industrial complex's "War on Terror" or drug cocktails for AIDS or subsidized "food aid" for povery and hunger. Insert your corporation into one of those cash torrents and you will be in a position of power for decades to come.

Re:What ?

[PopeRatzo]

As they were already shutdown last year (and after announcing the intent to do so) this is hardly news.

I guess the "news" part is that the Unified World Corporate Government has launched another public relations attack against TPB.

Like the recent wikileaks attack, we will soon have a few rounds of "news" stories about how The Pirate Bay supports terrorism and child pornography and how the principle people behind The Pirate Bay and The Pirate Party are really horrible people, probably rapists or child molesters.

There will be raids on their personal property where their homes and property will be "accidentally" damaged and their cellular phones and televisions and their kids' computer equipment will be "seized" as evidence.

But filesharing will continue, because it's still about the best marketing tool the entertainment industry has.

Now move along, there will be no congregating here.