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Pirates of the Caribbean: the Pirate Bay Moves To Island of Sint Maarten

Posted by Soulskill on from the arrr-me-hearties dept.

New submitter coolnumbr12 writes "For the second time in a week, The Pirate Bay has found a new home for its popular torrent website. A complaint issued Tuesday by Swedish prosecutors threated the Icelandic domain, forcing the file-sharing pirates to take harbor in the Caribbean island of Sint Maarten with a new .sx domain name. 'Control of the island, which has just 78,000 residents, is split between France and the Netherlands. Around 41,000 live on the Dutch side and 37,000 on the French. ... Even if the court grants the prosecutor’s request it remains to be seen how effective any seizures will be. Time and again the BitTorrent site has responded by relocating to new domains.'"

26 of 108 comments (clear)

  1. Whats really amazing. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Is they hop around the world with almost no downtime at all.
    Even the best sites that we PAY for can barely manage to do simple upgrades and changes and say the same..

    1. Re:Whats really amazing. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      lots of practice, and the systems are designed to move.

    2. Re:Whats really amazing. by Nyder · · Score: 5, Informative

      Is they hop around the world with almost no downtime at all.
      Even the best sites that we PAY for can barely manage to do simple upgrades and changes and say the same..

      The only thing that moved, is where it's domain name is at. the servers are in the "cloud" they don't need to move, and if they did, they can do it no problem. But all this is just about domain name changes.

      --
      Be seeing you...
    3. Re:Whats really amazing. by girlintraining · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Even the best sites that we PAY for can barely manage to do simple upgrades and changes and say the same..

      That's because the biggest threat to any company has never been natural disaster, but government intervention. You can protect against everything but a corrupt government with a desire to seize all of your infrastructure. It started with Steve Jackson Games; It continues to this day. Every day, dozens of corporations are rendered extinct due to seizures by the government... and lacking the ability to continue to conduct business, they lack income, and thus there is no legal challenge mounted. The only businesses that can survive, are those who go multinational, hide their money in secret accounts, and bury themselves in a complex and dense legal framework that makes easy elimination by the government difficult.

      All of that costs a lot of money. The pirate bay, on the other hand, doesn't have to worry about that. They don't have to pretend to be "legit", so the operating costs are quite low, and redundancy quite easy. And as they're showing... once you pass a threshold, you can become a criminal organization that the government can't touch, at least as long as your assets are entirely digital and distributed across many jurisdictions.

      It is a model I expect more small businesses, legitimate and otherwise, to do more often. It's the only reasonable reaction to a corrupted government... let alone over a hundred of them, all corrupted to varying degrees.

      --
      #fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
    4. Re:Whats really amazing. by rvw · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It is a model I expect more small businesses, legitimate and otherwise, to do more often. It's the only reasonable reaction to a corrupted government... let alone over a hundred of them, all corrupted to varying degrees.

      Corruption or coercion? Many countries simply can't afford to ignore the "wishes" of the US (or China or Russia).

    5. Re:Whats really amazing. by dintech · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Here in the UK the main domain has been blocked by the major ISPs several months ago. Immediately there were no end of proxy alternative domains by which to get access to the same content, no one particular domain really matters at all. I think it's cute that they keep going after the main domain. It keeps them distracted while the main event is going on elsewhere.

    6. Re:Whats really amazing. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      You can protect against everything but a corrupt government with a desire to seize all of your infrastructure.

      Don't forget that intervention by zealous government agents has been a prime threat to entire industries, such as providers of unsolicited email advertisements and PC online protection. Slashdot readers should be outraged.

  2. are they really moveing or it is some kind of quic by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 3, Insightful

    are they really moving or it is some kind of quick DNS thing?

  3. Exactly what Namecoin was designed for... by Thantik · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I really kinda hoped they'd set up a .bit domain. I know, I know -- a lot of people are thinking "oh the bitcoin hype", but Namecoin is basically calculated off of bitcoin "for free", and it's meant to be a censorship-free domain name system. ThePirateBay needs to setup thepiratebay.bit and utilize namecoin as a censorship-free domain registration option.

    1. Re:Exactly what Namecoin was designed for... by larry+bagina · · Score: 3, Insightful

      thepiratebay.onion.

      --
      Do you even lift?

      These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.

  4. pirate ship by aahpandasrun · · Score: 5, Funny

    I like to imagine that the Pirate Bay servers are located on a pirate ship that pulls up anchor and sets sail to another part of the world when they run into legal trouble.

    1. Re:pirate ship by moxfactor · · Score: 2

      Would the Exxon Valdez suffice? (and Dennis Hopper at the helm of course)

  5. "Seizures" by girlintraining · · Score: 4, Insightful

    . Even if the court grants the prosecutorâ(TM)s request it remains to be seen how effective any seizures will be.

    Ineffectual as always. All they're "seizing" is a forwarding address. It's the digital equivalent of seizing an empty PO box. You just open up a new one and continue on your merry.

    It's already been proven that the internet routes around censorship... and it does so through peer communication. People who pirate know other people who pirate... and the seven shades of separation and all that ensures that a new address would propagate through social networks in days.

    So, how do I put this gently...

    Dear Government, You're fucked, now fuck off. Sincerely, The Internet.

    --
    #fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
    1. Re:"Seizures" by Fluffeh · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's the digital equivalent of seizing an empty PO box.

      What's amusing is that it takes them months of meetings, requests, follow-ups, investigation, more meetings, some additional requests and some more meetings - all costing thousands and thousands and some more thousands.

      TPB on the other hand fills in a few little details in a webform for the most part.

      Dear Government, You're fucked, now fuck off. Sincerely, The Internet.

      I would change that ever so slightly. Dead Big Business, the government is fucked here, stop bothering them already will you? At the end of the day, the governments want happy, content people who have all the access to entertainment they want - after all it makes them more complacent.

      --
      Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
    2. Re:"Seizures" by tehcyder · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Dear Government, You're fucked, now fuck off. Sincerely, The Internet.

      Call me old fashioned, but I'd rather have a government in charge than the digital investigative geniuses at 4chan and reddit.

      Posted AC for obvious...oh, fuck it, who cares?

      --
      To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
  6. Not that amazing, built in. by dutchwhizzman · · Score: 2, Informative

    The whole architecture of the internet is built around decentralized management. If one part fails, other parts take over and people will replace the failing parts with what resources they can get available. "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." -- John Gilmore

    --
    I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
    1. Re:Not that amazing, built in. by furbyhater · · Score: 2

      When that happens they should look into getting a .bit TLD, a potential solution to DNS cencorship: http://dot-bit.org/Main_Page

  7. Re:A Whole Social Movement by Joce640k · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That revolves around stealing other people's stuff.

    Governments?

    --
    No sig today...
  8. Re:tpb in spaaace by Joce640k · · Score: 3, Informative

    Why bother? We already have pirate bay proxies: http://proxybay.info/

    --
    No sig today...
  9. same as for wikileaks financial blockade by girlinatrainingbra · · Score: 4, Informative
    re: You can protect against everything but a corrupt government with a desire to seize all of your infrastructure.

    .
    Amen to that. That's exactly what happened to Wikileaks and the financial blockade forced by the USA government. A little protection racket talk against Visa and Mastercard ("nice little business and cash flow you've got there. You wouldn't want to forfeit all of it by continuing to provide processing and money access to some punks like wikileaks, then, would ya?") and suddenly there was no way for Wikileaks to get any donations from anyone. You are so right about corrupt governments. Sad but true.

  10. Re:Here's a plan. by Zontar+The+Mindless · · Score: 2

    Time and again the BitTorrent site has responded by relocating to new domains.

    They should implement themselves in software, and put it on BitTorrent.

    Something like this, perhaps?

    --
    Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
  11. Re: are they really moveing or it is some kind of by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Just a domain change (.sx), presumably. A new domain can be registered and active within afew minutes.

    Downtime is usually due to a server/script issue, not propagation, in my experiences...but is that a bad sign?!

  12. Re:GFWoC by heypete · · Score: 4, Informative

    That's because their website isn't http://www.piratebay.sx/

    Their websit is http://thepiratebay.sx/ -- note the presence of "the" in the name.

  13. TPB is NOT a BitTorrent site by EmagGeek · · Score: 3, Interesting

    TPB has absolutely DICK to do with BitTorrent or its creators.

    TPB is a site that aggregates links to torrent files that pirates created, much to the chagrin of the BitTorrent and users who use it for legitimate purposes.

    But, again, to describe TPB as a "BitTorrent site" is patently false at best, and a thinly veiled attempt at associating TPB with the creators of BitTorrent at worst.

    1. Re:TPB is NOT a BitTorrent site by king+neckbeard · · Score: 4, Informative

      TPB does have a decent amount of legit content, and it's called a "BitTorrent site" because of the BitTorrent protocol. Similarly, sites that have 'gifs' in their name are not related to Compuserve.

      --
      This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
  14. Re:A Whole Social Movement by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Wow, that's a lot of uninsightful moderation. The only thing that allows you to own something in the first place is the existence of laws and something that can enforce them, i.e. a government. Laws set up rules for what things can be owned, and what it means to own them (e.g. how one can come to own something and how one can lose them). Without that, you don't have property, you only have stuff that somebody stronger hasn't arbitrarily chosen to take yet.