Slashdot Mirror
The Pirate Bay On Track To Be Banned In the UK?
redletterdave writes with this excerpt from the International Business Times about the fate of the Pirate Bay in the UK: "Swedish filesharing website The Pirate Bay may soon be blocked in the UK after a London judge ruled that the site breaches copyright laws on a large scale, and that both the platform and its users illegally share copyrighted material like movies and music. In addition to finding legal fault with The Pirate Bay and its users, the British Phonographic Industry also wants all British ISPs to block access to The Pirate Bay in the UK."
Global information exchange The Internet may soon be blocked in the UK after a London judge ruled that the system breaches copyright laws on a large scale, and that the platform's routers and end users illegally share copyrighted material like movies and music. In addition to finding legal fault with The Internet and its users, the British Phonographic Industry also wants all British ISPs to block access to The Internet in the UK.
Honestly, we need a "Streisand Effect" term for what happens when legislation merely prompts sites to use the encrypted areas of the internet.
Watch This!
Whack-a-mole.
"The more your tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."
1984. Thank you.
Tribler is the future of these things, and isn't really blockable.
The problem with the suit of armor - invented (yes, partly) as a response to the broadsword - is that it spurred the development of the rapier and epee.
Defense... offense... meet developers.
You know what's funny about the prevailing systems of government in this era? They're all about writing new laws, making new things illegal, regulating more and more of their citizen's lives and centralizing more and more power in the hands of a VERY few.
It never goes the other way. Ever.
How often do over reaching laws get repealed? How often does government say "hey we don't need to regulate this realm anymore because circumstances have changed"?
How often have you seen governments de-centralize things in order to make them more responsive to the needs of the citizens they serve?
How often does government shrink or even stop growing at exponential rates? How often have they become less involved when it was needed?
In fact, most governments call decreases in projected increases as "cuts".
If next year something happens that causes the government to no longer need (by their justification) to control the internet, you think they will cede control?
If you're not with Ron Paul and the Freedom movement, you're part of the problem.
Liberty.
I don't think you understand how bittorrent works...
--
You may be interested to hear that the UK, among other places, is not in America.
--
Child pornography should be legal, just as snuff films should be legal. Free speech is free speech. If the video is evidence of a crime, persecute the offenders in the video who perpetrated the crime. Video or pictures of crimes being committed should be legal, including child pornography. You're probably thinking that there will be more videos of 60-year-old-men diddling three-year-olds. This is unlikely to be the case, as this kind of pornography is incredibly rare because there really aren't that many sick fucks who will do that (I could be wrong).
You will, however, be able to see a 16-year-old girl willingly take video of herself masturbating. And two fourteen-year-olds having sex on video (and it was their idea). If the argument is that legalized video will spurn more coercion of children - coercion of children for sex with adults is already illegal (although the age of consent is too high, IMO).
The only reason child pornography is illegal is the puritanical mindset of the United States (I imagine some of Europe made it illegal to appease the U.S.). Child pornography was common in the '70s and nobody batted an eye. If you have video of a thirteen year old masturbating alone from 1975, don't you think that person (who would be 51 now) has either forgotten about it or it doesn't bother them and they don't mind others watching it? Yes, in extreme cases (child rape) the victims hate the video that exists of it, but that shouldn't make it illegal. Watching a video of a child being molested by an adult may be ethically and morally questionable or wrong, but it should not be crime that warrants the current outrageously extreme punishment (20-100 years in prison, sexual offender's watchlist for life, banned from the Internet for life).
The problem is that a local market (i.e., in the US) might create supply elsewhere (i.e., Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia). I'm afraid that I'd support criminalizing the market as well as the production, because the supply will just move to wherever enforcement is non-existent otherwise. It's a formula for outsourcing child-rape.
I do distinguish between pedophilia and attraction to teens. I don't think it's appropriate to treat pictures of naked teenagers in the same way as videos of toddlers being raped. In the case of the latter, I think even viewing/possessing them should be criminalized in very strong terms.
The Swedish authorities already raided The Pirate Bay and found nothing, zip, zitch, zero infringing files on their servers. So how can it breach any copyright laws?
Sure, it facilitates file sharing and those files shared may be copyrighted... but it plays no larger role than for instance roads do in various other crimes. I mean, a road is used to facilitate almost all crimes, either as the crime scene itself or as a means of getting there or escaping afterwards. Sure, roads have legitimate uses but given that almost all crimes involve them, they do play an instrumental role.
So... if roads are not put on trial for their involvement in all those other crimes (they're just passive means, but they're there), why persecute The Pirate Bay for copyright infringement as they're also just passive means. The Pirate Bay is simply a portal, nothing more. There's no content, no hashes, no trackers. All content resides elsewhere. They have no access to hashes of the complete files shared and also have no reference hashes to verify against in order to eliminate copyrighted content, so in essence they want to ban the principle of file sharing just because you may be sharing something copyrighted.
The conclusion for the courts: Censorship for no other purpose than to quench the concept of file sharing. Possibly infringing files are not transferred through The Pirate Bay in any way and yet it must be banned?
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
Oh, child pornography doesn't follow the same rules as other media.
You see, if you pirate other media you harm the content creator but if you pirate child pornography you support the content creator.
At least that is what I have been told.
Normally I would find this sort of thing scary.
But, let's look at it through our un-biased glasses for a second.
A judge made a ruling that may lead to certain companies pursuing court orders to have the site blocked by telcos within Britain.
Now, this is not even the government censoring Britain's internet. These are companies who (obviously) have a vested interest in having the site blocked as the site exists almost solely for the purpose of illegally distributing copyrighted material (let's be completely honest here).
This is not the government trying to mute anyone's opinions.
This is not the government trying to censor what you are allowed to see.
I know people will probably claim "But it could be X, Y or Z". It is not. This is a judge making what is IMO a just and fair ruling that may or may not end up in private companies making an attempt to have a certain site, whose profits mostly come from distributing copyrighted material, blocked within Britain.
This is not as big as people are making it out to be and I'm not particularly scared (for now).
Well it is The Register and this isn't the first time they have predicted this kind of thing. Even extremist web sites preaching hate and containing bomb making information doesn't get censored via Cleanfeed for the most part, and the authorities are probably unwilling to use it that way. Blocking such sites would make people find ways around the block and then they would have no way of monitoring them so easily.
Blocking TBP would push encryption and privacy into the public conciousness and millions more people would start caring about it. It would be a disaster for Big Brother.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
At 90MB for the whole site what are the authorities going to do when thousands of us are mirroring TPB on a dedicated Raspberry Pi each?
The months are just too short. I can count the number of days on one hand.
Being in a country (NL) where TPB is blocked by two major providers, I can tell you that no such thing has occurred on any notable scale.
What did happen?
1. Outrage at forums and news sites.
2. Questions of how to get around the blockade.
3. Answers providing many methods to get 'around' the blockade, none of which require encryption or privacy-enhancing methods, really. Sure, TOR has been suggested, but TOR is cumbersome.
4. Further answers pointing out alternatives, including 'news' servers.
5. Outrage? What outrage? Oh, The Pirate Beach? Yeah, I vaguely remember that irrelevant site. *goes back to watching recent episode of popular U.S. show downloaded from news server*
Maybe it would be different in the U.K.
And yet the UK has a fraction of the murder rate of the U.S. despite having a more urbanised population. 125 murders in Metropolitan London last year - a densely populated urban region with population of around 13 million with 5000 people per square km. Compare that to U.S. cities! 620 murders in the entire UK for a population of 62 million people. The majority of British people think gun control is a great idea.