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

This Would Have Happened Earlier...

[RobotRunAmok]

...had the EU produced Entertainment Industry content of their own worth pirating. But it was predominantly "Yankee Corporatist" wallets which stood to suffer, so high on European law enforcement agendas it was not. Hey, I love Dr. Who as much as the next guy, but I'm just saying the way it is...

Re:Past Due!

[ScentCone]

Certainly there is nothing worse than file sharing going on if this is their priority.

And as we all know, it's impossible for law enforcement agencies to do more than one thing at a time. That's why they stop arresting drunk drivers whenever they hear about a case of domestic violence, or have to give up investigations of child trafficking or currency countfeiting whenever there's been a bank robbery across town.

Now that governments across the globe are mobilizing armed men to eliminate file sharers, the world will be a perfect place

How is that bit of childish sophistry any different than saying, "Now that businesses and loose affiliations of people all across the globe have formed organizations and web sites built specifically to enable ripping things off, the world will be a perfect place" ... huh? What's the part that gets you so upset ... that a country's laws are being enforced? If so, then your problem is with the laws enacted by the legislators in those countries, not with the fact that law enforcement officers doing a difficult job happen to be armed as part of their office. If your problem is that the officers are armed, and not with the fact that they're enforcing the law, then make a better case for the fact that officers executing warrants never walk into situations where someone crazy might try to hurt them.

Or are you mostly just pissed because it seems fewer people than you'd like agree with you about the positive aspects of institutions built around, and publicly celebrating the ripping off of creative people? I suppose this is where you say that authors, musicians, performers, film makers, photographers, actors and all the rest have no choice but to work for The Man, and thus you're doing them a favor by ripping them off, right? That the world is a better place when some 12 year old gets to make an entertainment slave out of their favorite musician?

Or should we stick wiht your original logic, and wonder why anyone should be allowed to enjoy music (ripped off or otherwise) when there's a single unhappy person in the world, or a single mosquito biting a quadraplegic somewhere? After all, we can only focus on one thing at a time, right?