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BT Starts Blocking the Pirate Bay
judgecorp writes "The UK's largest ISP, BT, has obeyed a court order to block The Pirate Bay, following similar moves by five other service providers, after complaints by music trade body BPI. The Pirate Bay says it can continue regardless through workarounds. From the article: 'BT has started blocking access to The Pirate Bay, becoming the sixth major ISP to prevent access to the file-sharing service. It follows blocks enforced by Orange, Virgin, Sky, TalkTalk and O2, after they all obeyed a court order made in April. BT, which has been in ongoing discussions with trade body the BPI over how it would carry out a block, had not been hit with such an order until this week.'"
People will get around the blocks, people will pirate shit, people won't care.
Stupid ISPs.
These poor retards actually think they're fighting a successful action against "the pirates".
And what say we?
Harrrrr
Can any BT subscriber comment on weather your average deck-hand will have any trouble getting around the block? I know it's quite easy for the black-beards and peg-legs, but what will it mean for the average user? Do TPB crew have enough experience bypassing blocks that most wont even know it's been blocked?
Take what ye can. Give nothing back!
VPN provider profits skyrocket!
Yes, blocking at the backbone level can be defeated. With freedom.
Face it, Bittorrent is P2P but TPB is not. It's fundamentally a single domain name bound to an IP addy, it's a brand; TPB only works because people know they can reliably type "thepiratebay.se" or some similar easy-to-remember name and it'll get referred. TPB can start playing games with different names and proxies and referrers etc., but this'll knock out 90% of the casual users.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
I noticed after the recent ipv6 thing that visiting TPB will show a little thing at the bottom of the page indicating that im accessing it using ipv6..
changing DNS servers is easy enough for most anyone.. id imagine that they are blocking IPs ...
is access via ipv6 a thing they are blocking ?
Also to be in cahoots with the Anti-virus industry such that the RIAA/MPAA viruses aren't detected by AV scanners. Actually, have them detected but be 'impossible' to remove without taking it in to someone....and that someone is obligated to report the attempted copyright infringement instances.
signature is pants
I remember when ISPs provided free unlimited newsgroup access. Then they offered free newsgroup access through a third party with a data usage cap. Then they cut off free newsgroups altogether. Now there is something completely out of their control on the general Internet that they are trying to block access to. So much for the old wild west freedom of the Internet. Business and government interests are all so ready to curtail total freedom of information. I see a dark future full of censorship and paywalls.
'Gosh, now that it's mildly inconvenient to download things for free, I'm going to have to go to HMV for all my media needs!'
'If only there was another torrent site. But the internet couldn't possibly support TWO!'
'Wow, with all this extra money coming in from ex-pirates, we should begin transferring these extra profits onto THE ARTISTS!'
Or use Google to search for "stuffiwant .torrent" and the results will popup from Extratorrent, Isohunt, Kat, and such. There's even a .torrent search extension for Firefox. If people want to download it, THEY WILL...
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
TPB is just an indexer of magnet links and those magnet links are everywhere, so it's impossible to block at the core.
I am aware that Google occasionally partakes in collecting AdWords revenue off of someone else's movie.
Just remember, you're paying $50 month for the Internet, you paid $1000 for the computer, people are constantly collecting money from advertisers based on what you see, all of this money is going to billion-dollar mega-corporations, and not a dime of it is going to the people who made the thing you're looking for.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Blocking -- or atleast trying to block -- Pirate Bay and similar websites is just a temporary measure, there's bound to be worse stuff coming. As I already mentioned on my Google+ - page about the recent confirmation of the Flame-malware being written by the U.S. government and the U.S. government basically saying they have the right to target, track, spy and eliminate anyone they want, anywhere in the world, at any time, and even using illegal means to do so is all right, and that no other country in the world has any say in that, it doesn't seem to me all too far-fetched that with enough lobbying from RIAA/MPAA the U.S. government will write similar malware that targets pirates -- both the ones posting copyright-infringing material and the ones downloading such.
Don't forget that TPB is just an indexer of magnet links and those magnet links are everywhere, like in demonoid.me, BTDigg, and many other sites.
I have started using Tor.
Clearly there is small (but according to the RIAA; significant) part of our society that clearly feels that those "people who made the thing" make enough off of it.
Activate turbo mode.
Done.
http://194.71.107.82/
https://tpb.pirateparty.org.uk/
Am I the only one who gets confused when this company comes up in a storry related to Bit Torrent? It's gotten me a few times before, but this one really got me good. "BT starts blocking Pirate Bay" ... Da' fuck did I just read?
Fanboy Status: Apache Flex, C#, Eclipse, KDE, Pirate Party, Ron Paul, Slackware, Windows 7
And not a dime of it is going to the people who made the thing you're looking for.
That's their own fault.
Content providers refuse to accept money for the service that the customers want, while The Pirate Bay provides a superior service for free.
Amazing, professional musicians average about $34k a year; I assure you Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber aren't hurting, it's the session musicians and engineers and the 99% that get cut out. Meanwhile BT is a government-owned monopoly that took in 19 billion GPB last year.
If you're trying to be anti-establishment, you're doing it wrong. If you were principled you'd boycott BT, but we all know that's not going to be the response -- it'll just be more whining about information wanting to be free, all the while feeding more cash to the people that are hostile to you, and withholding all the money from the people the make the content.
I wonder where the quotes around "people who made the thing" come from. Is there some sort of debate about that? I admit my perspective on this is a little cockeyed, I'm a sound designer and I make my living working on movies. When movie revenues go down, they don't fire the actors and the directors, they sit pretty, they aren't dispensable.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
TPB can start playing games with different names and proxies and referrers etc., but this'll knock out 90% of the casual users.
Can you back those 90% somehow? I don't believe for a second that it's 90% or even close.
Furthermore, what will the reaction be when said BT block is shown to have zero effect?
I hate BPI and the fucking "industry" as a whole.
I don't hate actors, directors, writers, stage crew members, musicians, poets, painters and/or any other kind of artist.
I hate the industry and the fucking leeches within it who stop at nothing to keep draining money out of everyone else.
Just the other week, I paid for music which is available for zero cost, i.e no payment at all, at bandcamp. Why? Because I want to help the artist. So no, I don't "want everything for free" as someone is sure to be thinking.
In order to make this argument, you have to concede that the creators are entitled to be paid for their work, and that your problem is only over the mechanics of delivery and price discovery. Is that right?
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Clearly there is small (but according to the RIAA; significant) part of our society that clearly feels that those "people who made the thing" make enough off of it.
FALSE. We believe the "people who made the thing" are not making enough off it, while the middle men that sit between the artist and consumer use their power and influence to extract money from the process, are. If you support the artists, pirate every fucking thing you can, and spend that money on live shows instead. The music distribution business as, it exists, is no longer needed. What artists need are PR firms and managers. People who work for THEM.
Fanboy Status: Apache Flex, C#, Eclipse, KDE, Pirate Party, Ron Paul, Slackware, Windows 7
Small correction - BT hasn't been owned by the UK government since 1984 and the government sold their last shares in the company nearly 20 years ago.
Apart from that I agree with you.
Representations about the sort of split artists have with "middle men" are casually fraudulent and slanted pro-Free Content propaganda. "Pirating everything" just puts money in the pocket of ISPs, it doesn't help the artist in any material way -- Comcast, Google and AT&T thank you for your "Piracy (for Civil Disobedience)", they profit smartly off it! A hell of a lot more than the musician does.
What the fuck does an "Android, C#, Ron Paul" fanboy know about music industry contracts?
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
"FALSE. We believe the "people who made the thing" are not making enough off it, while the middle men that sit between the artist and consumer use their power and influence to extract money from the process, are."
So the answer is to make sure the "people who made the thing" make NOTHING off it instead of too little. All I know about the people at TPB is they deserve my money even less than the middlemen.
"if you support the artists, pirate every fucking thing you can, and spend that money on live shows instead."
My favorite artists don't do live shows, or don't do them near me.
You don't need to block EVERY user grabbing copyrighted material, you just need to block the casual ones.
The mirror they maintain at is yet another reason to get involved with your local pirate party. There website indicates that they can use assistance from UK residents who want to help with:
IT Team - Code
IT Team - Other
Campaigns - Design
Campaigns - Content
Campaigns - Local
Campaigns - Events
Campaigns - Candidates
Campaigns - Coordination
Campaigns - Newsletter
Treasury - Finance
Secretariat - Administration
Press - Pressteam
Leadership - Policy
Much Madness is divinest Sense --
To a discerning Eye --
Much Sense -- the starkest Madness
You don't need to block EVERY user grabbing copyrighted material, you just need to block the casual ones.
I agree so far, but please finish your thought: "(...) you just need to block the casual ones..." in order to achieve what exactly?
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Or use Google to search for "stuffiwant .torrent" and the results will popup from Extratorrent, Isohunt, Kat, and such. There's even a .torrent search extension for Firefox. If people want to download it, THEY WILL...
Even then, all that would be needed to stop piracy is to make illegal distributing .torrent files containing copyrighted material. And while the sites themselves don't host the files behind a torrent, it's obvious that they are the vehicle which makes it possible to copy the warez. Then they just snipe down Extratorrent, Isohunt, Kat, etc. and ultimately there's not much to be found in Google results either.
Even then, all that would be needed to stop piracy
Well, I have to take back some of my bullshit by adding that while killing the public torrent scene might be possible, pirated files would probably still have a bright future in some other forms in Internet...
Representations about the sort of split artists have with "middle men" are casually fraudulent [wordpress.com] and slanted pro-Free Content propaganda.
Yeah, sure. "Pro-Free Content propaganda" my ass.
The link below is a more accurate description of how the "music biz" works as it relates to artists and their relationship with the labels.
http://www.negativland.com/news/?page_id=17
BTW, I'm a semi-pro musician myself and I also hope the labels and distributors go belly-up. So do the signed artists I work & perform with regularly. The only signed artists that care about people sharing music are the very few at the top that are being marketed hard by the labels and have sold out (Metallica, I'm looking at YOU), or are in a weak position with their label and cave to pressure to join the anti-sharing propaganda machine.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Amazing, professional musicians average about $34k a year
I would like to see a reference that backs that number... or the median salary. Then again you seem to consider the session musicians not be professionals, even though they get paid for the sessions, which probably skews your statistics.
By the way, Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber are statistically insignificant.
I'm a sound designer and I make my living working on movies. When movie revenues go down, they don't fire the actors and the directors, they sit pretty, they aren't dispensable.
Become an actor or director then. But remember, once again, that there are actually very few actors or directors that make it big (once again, statistically insignificant when considering the whole actor or director population).
I think most people do. Heck if I could pirate avernum for the iPad (not available in my region and nobody has ripped it), I'd send Jeff Vogel the cash....
I have determined that my sig is indeterminate.
"Pirating everything" just puts money in the pocket of ISPs
Even if you didn't download everything, chances are you'd still need an internet connection (or, at the very least, have one). So downloading everything probably won't put any more money in the pockets of ISPs than usual.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
There are already distributed search engines for .torrent files and technically there are still a lot more possibilities. .torrent files itself are just a specific implementation of a concept, and could (and will eventually) be replaced by something more advanced.
Google, TPB and all the other torrent sites are just more convenient; they are by no means an essential part of the infrastructure.
In fact,
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Even then, all that would be needed to stop piracy is to make illegal distributing .torrent files containing copyrighted material.
You cannot stop copyright infringement with laws alone. In any case, this approach would probably involve the US proclaiming, once again, that it is the king of the world, as it seizes websites in completely different countries... Or the RIAA/MPAA could go the usual route and bribe every politician. Either way, corruption will be rampant.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
All while the more technical ones give the "casual ones" easy workarounds. But really, these people are at least proficient enough to use bittorrent, so I don't really see any such blocks preventing them from using a workaround.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Meanwhile BT is a government-owned monopoly that took in 19 billion GPB last year.
Well that's three mistakes in one sentence. Well done! BT was privatized in 1984, over 20 years ago! They ran a lot of adverts trying to get small investors, i.e. individuals, to buy the shares. Although a lot are owned by pension funds etc now, there's still a significant percentage of stock in individual hands. So not government owned. Nor is it a monopoly; BT is actually separate companies under one umbrella. BT Openreach owns the poles, cables and exchanges, and provides access to all other ISPs and phone service providers at the same rates - including BT openworld, the ISP arm. They're heavily regulated to ensure access, and also have price caps set by the regulator. ISPs can either use the BT openreach DSLAMS in the exchanges, or fit their own.
Openreach for example, haven't got round to upgrading my exchange to ADSL2 yet, but talktalk and sky have both put their own in the exchange, so do offer ADSL2, and only pay BT openreach for rent of the copper line to my house - I don't pay BT directly at all, and the service is cheaper to boot. There's also virgin internet, our sole cable provider having bought up the others, who have an entirely separate infrastructure over about 60% of the country.
BT openworld is the largest single UK ISP because of its brand, but if you tot up the subscriber numbers of the top 6 (via ispreview.co.uk) they've got about 33% of that number; and there are many, many smaller ISPs that all have the same access to the same openreach phone lines and exchanges that the big 6 do. Note virgin, the cable provider, is the 2nd largest.
Finally, 19 billion? revenue is about £4 billion a quarter, but falling. Profit is more like £500 million a quarter, which includes all their sub-company profits.
If you were principled you'd boycott BT.
Why? BT are a private company providing wire and ISP services, same as the others. They have to follow court orders, just like everybody else. They were actually one of the people that fought the order hardest in court; but the judge has decided that he has the right to censor websites not in the UK, convicted of nothing in the UK, and that he can order private companies to spend their profits purely on the say so and to the supposed benefit of other private companies on the basis of zero reliable evidence, to whit Sony BMG, Warner Music, Universal Music and EMI.
If we should be boycotting anyone, if should be Sony BMG, Warner Music, Universal Music and EMI for their abuse of the legal system to require ISP censorship.
Or did you actually mean you just want us to boycott the internet because we must all be dirty pirates if we think blocking thepiratebay is wrong, and shouldn't pay for an internet connection but just send the money direct to artists for music we can't listen to because we have no method of downloading it any more?
Personally, I think you should use the pirate party's own proxy. I'd like to see the brouhaha when a political party that promotes civil liberties and digital rights has its website censored by court order.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
Pretty Much.
Although, I want to expand upon the idea of entitlement. I believe that it is in the best interests of society to temporarily entitle creators to be paid for their contributions in that it helps create new content for the Public Domain. I don't care about the creators nearly as much as I care about the concept of the Public Domain. It represents the sum of knowledge, all of our art, all of the hard work and expressions of our ancestors that allow us the luxury of near instantaneous communication on a magic machine.
Creators are not entitled to "own" their works or ideas. Those are free from their inception, and until the ends of time itself. For the time being until we evolve into a more advanced society it just makes sense to help the creators have clothes, food, and shelter.
If the content providers (not always the creators) are Total Dicks and want to attach more to the transaction than simply give-me-my-shit-I-give-you-the-money, then they deserve everything they get. They have no ethical basis to maintain a presence in my home post-sale, nor to constrain my conduct with the content. The only two exceptions being distribution and public performance.
So yes, my problem is the delivery method, what is delivered, different prices and capabilities based on arbitrary time lines and geography, and sometimes complete lack of availability. If you don't make it available for sale, my viewpoint is that you just lost any entitlements to the material. Especially with digital distribution and the costs being so low.
If they are willing to let me have it, on my terms, at a reasonable price, they can have my money. I currently pay for a number of services, Netflix, Slacker, etc. and purchase DVD collections of TV shows, so I am no stranger to paying for stuff.
My terms are quite reasonable too. No DRM. No PUOs on the media players. No commercials or advertisements dispersed throughout the content. No dick-brained attempts at binding me to legal agreements well outside the scope and spirit of copyright to prevent me from media shifting, time shifting, etc.
In order to make this argument, you have to concede that the creators are entitled to be paid for their work
Wait... why? What if you're not saying that creators are entitled to be paid, but that they should at least have set up a way for someone to pay them if they choose to do so? It's possible for someone to argue in that way.
Those 90% have already asked me how to access TPB.
I only have nine links to give them.
Nine.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
My favorite artists don't do live shows, or don't do them near me.
So buy merchandise. Or, post on their fan forums, start a Facebook group etc. stating that you want a gig in $city. If enough people join, they may well do one.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
ISPs can either use the BT openreach DSLAMS in the exchanges, or fit their own.
Of course, the newest feature on the block is fibre-to-the-curb, which requires the use of BT Openreach-owned hardware for the ISPs entire network, including the links from the exchange IIRC. Plus, no matter who you're getting ADSL from you're reliant on BT Openreach for physical cabling to the exchange and their repair department is awful thanks to their monopoly - if it's an intermittent fault and it's not happening when they visit, they assume it's your equipment at fault and charge you for the visit.
Can you back those 90% somehow? I don't believe for a second that it's 90% or even close.
I can smell some kind of tautological No True Scotsman logic where "casual users" are defined as the people of whom 90% will leave due to this disruption.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
So why the bloody hell are you so pissed off at them?
Iran aren't breaking any iranian laws in producing nuclear power. Why the bloody hell are you so pissed off at them?
TPB isn't breaking any laws in Sweden, so why the bloody hell are you pissed off at them?
Julian Assange didn't break any laws in the USA, Sweden, Australia or UK. So why the hell are you pissed off at him?
all that would be needed to stop piracy is to make illegal distributing .torrent files containing copyrighted material.
Good thing .torrent files don't contain any copyrighted material, then.
lern2torrent
Dude, you completely missed his point. Are you have problems with your language parser? You seem to be in violent agreement, he is just not couching his language in the typical "MAFIAA is bad, pirates are teh awesomez" speech.
Small correction - BT hasn't been owned by the UK government since 1984
Coincidence? I think not!
No, it means that very few people actually know how to get to TPB. Those who do are, in general, not your granny-who-uses-this-internet-thing but people who know what they do to a much higher level than the average internet consumer.
Therefore you need to justify that 90% or retract it.
If you can't do either, then you're a moron.
The proxy is a good way to use TPB (and I agree about the fallout). However, so is using Plusnet or a raft of other ISPs that haven't had court orders slapped on them yet. Make sure to tell BT why you're leaving too (of course, if you're at the start of your contract, you may have to wait a while, so the proxy is your friend).
BT aren't helpless in all this - they could run full page ads in the national papers about this, they could write to all their subscribers, they could lobby the government. They have, to their credit, shot a few lawyers at this for a while. That didn't work though, and neither did posting on /. about how upset we were. Stopping giving them money is the next thing to do.
My uploads are copyrighted material of which I am the copyright holder. I have a right to make it freely available if I wish, yet these orders are now preventing thousands, if not millions of people from getting to my material. That is censorship. And before anybody argues that I can provide it someplace else, then that same argument could be made about pirated material also, so why block Pirate Bay?
No, if they can block some, they can block many or even all. This clearly demands a response. I do not like censorship, but the only way to deal with this is to punish those that went along with the court orders, and that means a DDOS to those domains to begin with, and blocking their domains and class addresses so none of their customers have reasonable functionality.
Also, do any of those ISPs provide "Cloud" services? I'm thinking that the flaws on their cloud services need to be exposed.
I think you're being a bit optimistic - my flatmate co-wrote a number 5 album, he got ~$10k for the first year's sales and about $1k a year from then on, it's hardly a fortune.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
I just wrote some days ago a script that collects the magnet links to torrents from the piratebay. All of them. People should have the latest one before it gets completely shut down. This will help not to loose any previous torrent at all. And instead of using torrent browser websites, we make a p2p network for torrent search. There are already systems for that. So with, or without piratebay, we gonna be ok. The bigger problem could be the deep packet inspection, but that's gonna be a cryptographic war, where there's no one with the upper hand, only for the time being. But the real deal here, is that with so much devices with networking capability, we should just avoid ISPs all together. WiFi in air.... lalalllla
There's no "could" about it. TPB replaced torrent files with magnet links ages ago.
I happen to be working from home today, so I'll spend a few minutes checking how they block TPB on the ISP O2, just out of curiosity.
WWW: I get a page telling me that the page has been blocked by court order
DNS: They return the correct IP address: 194.71.107.50
Traceroute: I get to thepiratebay.piratpartiet.se (194.14.56.2), but not all the way to the web server, on both a censored and a non-censored connection. This is probably because TBP filters out some ICMP packets, nothing to do with O2.
Ping: I can't ping the TPB server from any connection. (same reason as above)
So TPB have locked down their web servers pretty well. Makes things more difficult for me. I couldn't find any open ports apart from 80. So I'll do some more checking with the webserver:
No intersting headers;HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 1100
I get this page even when using the IP-address in the URL, so there is no Host: www.thepiratebay.org header.
Now let's do a traceroute on TCP port 80. First, I tried BBC, and I got some hosts outside of the O2 network, specifically:bbc-linx.pr01.thdow.bbc.co.uk . Now for TPB: The same as for an ICMP traceroute!! This is weird. It's clear that O2 are not proxying HTTP connections, at least not at the SYN packet, because the HTTP SYN packets get all the way to thepiratebay.piratpartiet.se (194.14.56.2).
OK so let's try to get the web server to leak some more information: I tried some different URLs and with "Host: 127.0.0.1", and just get the same "blocked" page. If you're on IPv6 you can have a look at the page at my local web server: http://blackhole.lan.fa2k.net/f/tpb-blocked.txt . Let's try a bogus request with telnet:[fa2k@blackhole ~]$ telnet 194.71.107.50 80 /
Trying 194.71.107.50...
Connected to 194.71.107.50.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET
HTTP/1.0 400 Bad Request
Connection: close
Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2012 12:57:00 GMT
Server: lighttpd
From the non-censored connection I get the same thing. Now I mistyped some HTML request into telnet, so I'm probably on some kind of list. Who cares, it's not illegal to be curious. Now let's try a valid HTTP 1.0 request with netcat:
[fa2k@blackhole ~]$ printf "GET / HTTP/1.0\n\n" > the-request.txt
[fa2k@blackhole ~]$ cat the-request.txt | nc 194.71.107.50 80
HTTP/1.0 301 Moved Permanently
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.4.4
Location: http://thepiratebay.se/
Content-type: text/html
Content-Length: 0
Connection: close
Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2012 13:08:22 GMT
Server: lighttpd
Neat! This seems to come right from thepiratebay itself. Maybe the blocking software doesn't understand HTTP 1.0. And no, "http://thepiratebay.se" doesn't work in a browser. It's a different server than .org, but acts in a similar way.
A HTTP 1.1 request without a Host: part is invalid, let's see what comes up when changing "1.0" to "1.1": a 400 invalid request, it seems to still come from TPB, as it has the lighttpd header. Supplying "a" as the host, I get the 302 again.
Ok, let's send a Host: thepiratebay.se header to the thepiratebay.org server:
[fa2k@blackhole ~]$ printf "GET / HTTP/1.1\nHost: thepiratebay.se\n\n" > the-request.txt
[fa2k@blackhole ~]$ cat the-request.txt | nc 194.71.107.50 80
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.4.4
Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=bbaee8ec681c1399b35cd5dba2cb7a31; path=/; domain=.thepiratebay.se
Set-Cookie: language=en_EN; expires=Fri, 21-Jun-2013 13:16:08 GMT; path=/; domain=.thepiratebay.se
Expires: Mon, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT
Last-Modified: Thu, 21 Jun 2012 13:16:08 GMT
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate
Cache-Control: post-check=0, pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache
Content-Type: text/html;charset=UTF-8
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2012 13:16
N/T
TPB became a virus fest when it became popular.
That claim is complete and utter baseless baloney (note the complete lack of proof he provided, folks).
Either you have no idea what you're talking about, you're spreading FUD or behalf of the dying legacy industries, or you're incompetent. My guess is that it's all three.
I have visited TPB almost daily and torrented from them regularly (hundreds of times) for the last 10 years or so and NEVER even seen a virus.
Don't blame someone else for your own failings.
I read the headline was like bittorrent is blocking the pirate bay? Now that is a dumb move.
I think he needs a better agent.
"Pirating everything" just puts money in the pocket of ISPs, it doesn't help the artist in any material way -- Comcast, Google and AT&T thank you for your "Piracy (for Civil Disobedience)", they profit smartly off it! A hell of a lot more than the musician does.
The problem is that these "middle men" are highly exploitative of artists and the consumers. These profits are then used to solidify their monopoly position even further, and on an international scale. They are able to do this because they own all of the distribution channels. This is why the Justin Bieber's make millions, and actual _artists_ can hardly make a living wage. If these companies did not exist (in their current form), art would be sold on its merits, and more artists would be able to earn a living wage. The really good ones will continue to make millions. I mention "in their current form," because there are still quite a lot of useful services these Labels provide (promotion, management, and yes, even distribution). However, these services would provide more value to the artist if they were broken up into into smaller, more focused, businesses that work _for_ the artist, instead of the other way around.
Putting aside the intangible benefits of free promotion, piracy helps artists by tanking the business model that exploits them.
Fanboy Status: Apache Flex, C#, Eclipse, KDE, Pirate Party, Ron Paul, Slackware, Windows 7
Obviously. He said it was a correction, not a coincidence.
Rubbish
Which is their goal.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Pirate Bay has already issued 2 new IP addresses for direct connection that BT hasn't blocked.
plus there are thousands of proxies that still will give you access.
Here is how to get around the block, no matter what ISP you are on that has blocked it: http://www.dude-suit.net/2012/05/the-pirate-bay-blocked-by-uk-isps-and-how-to-get-around-it/
Re-read this thread and try to comprehend my post properly. I'm not the OP and I'm agreeing with you. Oh dear indeed.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
I would like to point you to a very tl/dr discussion on finding a fair way to compensate artists for their work. Set aside abut 30 minutes to read the article, which will probably anger you, and all of the comments which follow.
http://thetrichordist.wordpress.com/2012/06/18/letter-to-emily-white-at-npr-all-songs-considered/
In short, your support at live shows is not enough for the artist to make a living. Even if they live in a van and eat just the free food. There is gas, travel time, and most venues (small bars, coffeehouses) just do not pay enough for multiple members of a band to split. Flogging T-shirts and CDs for a 20% markup might make enough for a beer run, but then you have to tote that merchandise with you from gig to gig.
For most popular music, the artist sold the rights to the recordings to the label for an upfront loan to make the recording. The artists are not going to see any additional revenue until that upfront loan is paid off according to the contract -- which in most cases means never. Any new artists should carefully read any recording contracts before they sign, walking in with their eyes wide open. The artists may be able to make new recordings of the same songs ("live" albums) where they get a better cut, but most people want the version they heard on the radio, so the studio is enriched instead of the artist.
Even worse, the companies like Apple and Amazon are taking 30% of a 0.99 song and adding that straight to their bottom line. None of that money flows back into the artist talent pool; it is absorbed into the technology company profits. Does it really cost 0.30 to ship 3MB of data to an end user? Hardly. The tech companies are hiring H1B visa lackeys to do all the hardware and software to support that, while the upper management throws another chunk of cash at the Washington lobbyists to keep extending copyrights.
The bad news is lots of mediocre artists are recording in their (parent's) basements and making music that is "good enough" but is not ever going to be "mass culture" popular. If you have a devoted following who will support you, that is not so bad. Playing gigs within driving distance of home, interaction with your fans on your personal website to share (some) recordings or signed merchandise; and with a partner who can keep a regular job and insurance, you can live the dream of making music for a living.
Before there was mechanically recorded music, you had to hire the musicians to play for you, or go to a venue to hear music. You paid a composer to write a love sonnet for you to use, or sponsored a set of music. We may have to move back to this patronage model (well, web-enabled with Kickstarter or other similar services) to get good music.
You want the artists to hire PR firms and managers. What PR firm or manager is going to work for the peanuts that the artists currently receive? None that I know of. Unless the artists fully controls the recordings, they do not set the price. When there are so many people willing to give away mediocre music at a pittance, the quality artists who ask for more money make no sales. Especially when the audience does not perceive a difference in quality (MP3 vs FLAC, the loudness wars, etc.)
Artists (and the related artists jobs -- sound engineer, gaffer, studio musicians) will find other, better paying jobs instead of following their muse, and I think our society is the poorer for it.
I do not have answers for many of these problems. An artist who today would like to create music, or video, or paintings, or software, has to accept that as soon as the first copy is given or sold, it will be digitized and shared with the world for free. Because the sharers are "sticking it to the man" without asking who "the man" is. The artist has to accept not getting fair recompense for the effort put into the art. If the person for whom you work told you to continue to work as hard as you have in the past, but they would just leave something for you in a tip jar at the end of the day based on whether they felt like paying, would you continue to work there?
Besides, his point is somewhat ambiguous:
If you were principled you'd boycott BT, but we all know that's not going to be the response -- it'll just be more whining about information wanting to be free, all the while feeding more cash to the people that are hostile to you, and withholding all the money from the people the make the content.
What does boycotting BT have to do with information wanting to be free? AFAIK the "information-wants-to-be-free-whiners" argument is comonly used to criticize P2P advocates and the like, not people using one ISP or other.
f it's an intermittent fault and it's not happening when they visit, they assume it's your equipment at fault and charge you for the visit.
Worse than that they charge your service provider for the visit who then charges you. So AIUI it's your service provider who has to fight to try and get you to pay a fee that should never have been charged (and who ultimately may end up having to decide between eating the cost and losing a customer) not openreach.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register