Finnish Anti-Piracy Site Pirates Thepiratebay Content

An anonymous reader writes "Finnish copyright lobby TTVK Ry (which earlier ordered the artist promotion site The Promo Bay to be censored as 'thepiratebay subpage' before later admitting that it's legal, and also got the police to confiscate a 9-year-old's Winnie-the-Pooh laptop on suspicion of having illegally downloaded a single album) launched an anti-piracy website: http://piraattilahti.fi./. The site closely resembles The Pirate Bay, and if you take a closer look, you'll notice that CSS has been directly copied from thepiratebay.se, complete with the original site name in comments (http://piraattilahti.fi/css/css.css, pastebin mirror). Of course, one interesting question is: how on Earth did they manage to pirate The Pirate Bay content, considering that they managed to get court orders for major ISPs to censor access to The Pirate Bay?"

Comments

In the words of South Park

[SirGeek]

"They are ABOVE the law !"

Re:In the words of South Park

[GameboyRMH]

Dey turk ur stalsheets!

Pirates!

[Dr. Evil]

The Pirate Bay doesn't host pirated content, but these anti-piracy guys do. Interesting.

I guess links to http://piraattilahti.fi/ are links to pirated content.

I'm sure if TPB asked them nicely to take down the infringement, they'd comply. No need to make a big issue out of it.

Re:Pirates!

[beachcoder]

It's not pirated content. Ever notice the Kopimi link at the bottom of TPB pages? http://www.kopimi.com/kopimi/

Re:Pirates!

[houghi]

Mod parent up till +6.
From the Kopimi page:
kopimi (copyme), symbol showing that you want to be copied.

How about a complete non-story.

Re:Pirates!

[AlphaWolf_HK]

While I don't read Finnish (or whatever language this is in) this website looks like it's a lampoon, which if it is, falls under fair use regardless of whether or not the kopimi symbol is there. I mean it has a picture of a sinking corsair ffs.

It's like RAIN....

[egcagrac0]

... because the best way to show people that copying IP is wrong is to copy their IP.

Not only CSS

[Noughmad]

The main picture is a span that says "The Pirate Bay".

Also, the ship doesn't look like it's really sinking, I guess they just took a random picture of a ship and tilted it.

Re:Not only CSS

[SJHillman]

It made me think of the boat from The Perfect Storm riding the huge waves. Which just makes pirates seem all the more badass.

Interview of Executive Director of TTVK

[Anonymous Coward]

There is an interview in finnish newspaper from Antti Kotilainen Executive Director of TTVK ry http://www.iltasanomat.fi/digi/art-1288540010300.html

Translated interview:

TTVK ry Executive Director Antti Kotilainen, so why it happend like this?
– In here we are trying to educate and tell people that there are legal options

But the webpage is copied from The Pirate Bay. When you check pages source code you can see the original refences to the Piratebay.
- If you see something in there, then we have to see what we are going to do. That is what we are looking for, so the people would start to use legal services

So what kinda message are you sending? Isn't there some ideological problem when you are copying from copyers?
- There is no ideological problem. If you watch carefully then you can see that there is a picture of sinking pirate-ship.

So what are you going to do to the page? Are you gonna leave it as it is?
- I don't know the technology so good that I can comment on that question.

Re:Interview of Executive Director of TTVK

[skiminki]

I read the same interview. To me, it seems that the director does not really know much about copyrights and is doing his best to avoid direct answers to simple questions. His best is not very good, though.

Basically he's saying that it's OK to rip the layout and the source code of a web site if you change the logo. And that there's no ideological problem whatsoever. I wonder whether anyone is going to cite that in legal cases against TTVK...

Tribalism

[Warhawke]

The concept of "fighting fire with fire" is little more than an extension of tribalism. At that point, you're no longer sticking to altruistic standards but simply advocating a formless "us vs. them."

Re:Tribalism

[jovius]

True. The url was chosen because of a proxy for the real thing is http://www.piraattilahti.org./ TPB is uneffectively blocked by a court order, which doesn't even include all of the TBP owned url's directing to the main site.

One subfolder of the .fi spoof page even includes an ad script of TPB... Well copied :)

Silly Question

[skywire]

>Of course one interesting question is, how on Earth did they manage to pirate thepiratebay content, considering that they managed to get court orders for major ISP's to censor access to thepiratebay?

No; not interesting, and certainly not worth the breathless hyperbole.

Re:Google cache?

[dragon-file]

A. It's Rhetorical. We all know the answer. B. The fact that we all know the answer makes the question humorous.

Arson, terrorism and jaywalking

[91degrees]

So, let me get this right... If I put a winnie the pooh sticker on my laptop and claim it belongs to my kid, copyright law doesn't apply to me. CSS takes as much time and effort to produce and is as directly profitable as movies, and that there aren't other ways to access the pirate bay.

Is it a slow news day? Honestly this just seems like an attempt to dig up new dirt on the media cartels. And it comes across as pretty desperate.

Re:Arson, terrorism and jaywalking

[Anonymous Coward]

So, let me get this right... CSS takes as much time and effort to produce and is as directly profitable as movies

Man, making movies is waaay easier than CSS. When was the last time you heard a director complain that his new flick is Gone With the Wind on Sony TVs and Terminator 2 on Panasonics?

And don't get me started about profitability. Of course movies are more profitable. See how CSS authors need way more protection than movie makers? They endure such hardship and then make hardly any money!

Kopimism doesn't erase infringement

[mjrauhal]

It has been pointed out that due to the Pirate Bay page being under Kopimism, there is no infringement. This turns out not to be quite true.

Ville Oksanen, cofounder of EFFI (the Finnish version of EFF) and a lawyer specializing in technology and media law, comments as follows: "In Finland you cannot give up your moral rights and Matti Nikki's parody-judgement was based specifically on violaiton of moral rights. I think that TPB just issues a sarcastic reaction but technically TTVK ry is indeed likely to break law here."

Moral rights can come into play when material is used in opposition to the moral standards of the original authors. Parody is not at all protected under the strict reading of the law, though in practice there is some (yet weak) protection under a supreme court ruling.

So yeah, there is every reason, even with a recent similar case with a guilty verdict, to think that the Finnish version of copyright law was indeed broken by the good antipiracy folks. At the very least they're operating on extremely gray area, which is not very flattering for their ilk either.

Ville's Google Plus post: https://plus.google.com/u/0/103784989123292634015/posts/XeLSWAjcCLw

Re:Kopimism doesn't erase infringement

[Anonymous Coward]

Note that: A) Finland (along with other countries) doesn't strictly speaking have copyright; they have *authorship rights*, ie a set of rights awarded to you as an author. The right to limit copying of your work is one of those rights. This right can be sold, transferred or waived. B) A *different* "authorship right" is something that the law more or less explicitly calls "moral right" and this is something that you *can't* waive. This protects your right to not have your work used in a manner that you disagree with. This right is independent of whether the copying of your work was legal.

So it doesn't matter whether you think copyright is a moral right. Finnish laws DOES award something called moral rights to authors, and that is what the post you commented referred to.

Re:DMCA Target

[cbhacking]

If it weren't for the fact that TPB expressly permits copying their content, you mean? Less irony, more "I have no idea what I'm talking about but I'll point any laugh anyhow!"