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Hundreds of IP Addresses Make Pirate Bay a Hard Target
jones_supa writes "Last week The Pirate Bay added a new IP address which allows users to circumvent the many court-ordered blockades against the site. While this proved to be quite effective, the Hollywood backed anti-piracy group BREIN has already been to court to demand a block against this new address. But that won't deter The Pirate Bay, who say they are fully prepared for an extended game of whac-a-mole using the hundreds of IP addresses they have available. Courts all around the world have ordered Internet providers to block subscriber access to the torrent site, and the end is still not in sight."
The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
I wonder if they have IPV6 support, unfortunately searches on "the pirate bay" are blocked here at work. If tey do they could add billions of IP addresses!
So Pirate Bay goes around and getting new IPs and I assume releasing the old ones. Then what? Imagine getting a new netblock for your own stuff and finding out it used to be a PB IP. How do you go about getting that unblocked all around the world.
The Internet is not just some fancy cable TV system; websites are not channels, "access devices" (read: personal computers) are not "view only," and BitTorrent is not some service that can be shut down. Millions of people want to share and download their entertainment; I would guess that they outnumber the people running the various businesses that are still struggling to adapt to this "new" technology. How about instead of fighting a battle that can never be won, we tell the copyright industry that they need to adapt or die?
Palm trees and 8
IP addresses tend to change hands. The "bad guys" get new IP addresses, while some innocent bystanders gets the old, tainted ones. It is hard enough to get an IP address off a vigilante style blacklist, but how bloody hard would it not be to get it off a court ordered IP block? The block would likely be in a different country altogether, or perhaps several countries at once.
They are really starting to mess hard with the core structure of the internet. But of course, these big cartels do not care. They get their slightly higher profits, and as usual someone else gets to sort out the mess later on.
I love Photoshop. I know it well, and can do things in it far easier than I can in GIMP, largely because of experience, but I do not have the time to invest to learn GIMP well.
If I want to make a quick button for me website, or clean up a photo, or make a nice card from my girlfriend, it is the tool I go to.
I am not well off.
Graphic design is -not- my career, therefore I really only have need to use Photoshop once a month or less.
I am not going to pay $700 or more for software that I only use 6 or 8 times a year. That equates to about $100 per project/use.
If I could somehow rent it for less. Say, $25 for a week, then I would be more willing to pay for it.
Of course, adobe now has their creative cloud, which if you sign up for a whole year is $50 a month. For a single month it is $75.
However, I do not need the whole month when I have a project I want to complete. I may need 2 days to a week, so that $75 still feels an unfair price, and untenable on my budget.
Ergo, pirating as solution.
That is one scenario for pirating out of thousands. But the bottom line is, as long as people have things they desire--music, movies, software, designer clothing, etc--that are out of reach to them because of the price or the pathetic way in which it is delivered, there will always be some sort of black market. Some sort of theft, because there will always be people who see the reward as greater than the risk.
Silence is a state of mime.
Probably if IP address will be shared with other resources (who are not related at all to Pirate Bay), it will be illegal to block the IP.
Why would you think that would make it illegal to block the IP? I'm not aware of any laws that say "You can only block an IP address if it ONLY hosts illegal material." In fact, quite a few raids have been made against servers that also hosted legitimate content (MegaUpload, for example).
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Wait until they find out that TPB is only one of many torrent sites.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
In the Beta Max case, Universal sued Sony because their video device could record TV, and dual decks could dub copyrighted video tapes. The court found that, regardless of the primary use case, the devices were legal because of the mere POSSIBILITY that they could be used in non-infringing ways.
Now... That was a court in the USA, and the US is not the world... TPB isn't blocked via my US ISP, either. However, it's primarily US corps petitioning the US government to make treaties that push US laws into foreign lands with only all of the bad, and none of the beneficial parts going with them.
I download lots of legitimate stuff using torrents from The Pirate Bay (my OS, Project Gutenberg works, Revision3 shows, etc), I wonder how many people pressed the record button on their VHS and Beta decks while watching TV? I mean... The things had whole menu systems with multiple timers and some could even record one show while you watched another. Point is, copying information is the basis of life, it's not going away any time soon.
I fear the end result will just be raised ISP bills, just like the blank CD & DVD tax. My whole life I've tried to play by the book. I didn't make mix tapes, I didn't dub rented videos, I didn't rip & burn CDs or DVDs of copyrighted content... I created my own content and backups to store on these, but I paid the infringer's tax the whole time -- for my whole damn life. Screw these entitled media bastards. It's enough to make me want to cancel Netflix (which I just did, after I read this article), and not fund the big media in any way possible.
I have kept full regular backups of my entire life's worth of content, photos, slides, etc on multiple media formats... I calculated that I've paid over US$5,000 in "pirate taxes" just over the existing media I still have on hand. The idea was that such tax would pay for any possible infringing I might do. The money I've already paid to cross the trolls under the digital bridge would more than pay for my media entertainment expenses for the next five years, at least... That's why I cancelled Netflix. I'm not paying them another red cent, I'll import my blank media if I have to.
All that time NOT infringing any of their content while paying a "pirate fee" for all my blank media?! I can see how some people would just say, "Screw it, if I'm going to do the time, I might as well do the crime." Petitioning our "representatives" isn't working either, because $$$ = speech. Well, screw it I say. You know what happened last time there was a bunch of taxation without representation and or mock trials that unjustly rule in favour of the corrupt establishment? Well, then you can guess what happens next. This is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.