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

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.'"

Comments

Whats really amazing.

[Anonymous Coward]

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..

Re:Whats really amazing.

[Nyder]

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.

Re:Whats really amazing.

[girlintraining]

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.

Re:Whats really amazing.

[rvw]

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).

Exactly what Namecoin was designed for...

[Thantik]

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.

pirate ship

[aahpandasrun]

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.

"Seizures"

[girlintraining]

. 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.

Re:"Seizures"

[Fluffeh]

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.

Re:A Whole Social Movement

[Joce640k]

That revolves around stealing other people's stuff.

Governments?

same as for wikileaks financial blockade

[girlinatrainingbra]

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.

Re:GFWoC

[heypete]

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.

Re:TPB is NOT a BitTorrent site

[king neckbeard]

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.