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Irish SOPA Used To Block Pirate Bay Access
ObsessiveMathsFreak writes "Ireland's own SOPA Act has finally struck home. Today, the Irish High Court ordered all ISPs to begin censoring the The Pirate Bay. After earlier attempts were struck down, this case was brought by EMI, Sony, Warner Music and Universal music under new copyright laws brought in last year. This follows the largest ISP Eircom already having voluntarily blocked the Pirate Bay after previous legal action. Despite some early indications that some ISPs would appeal the decision, it now appears that like Eircom, they have quietly given up. Pity; IT was one of the few industries Ireland was getting right."
Its pretty hard to find legal downloads on the PirateBay.
can it be to take the lawyer money and build the damn distribution websites aleady. If people with no money can do it in their spare time, I guess the answer is the studios dont want to. Then WTF are you in the business for? Seriosuly are these mother fucker so out of touch with reality?
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
I'm more concerned with the precedent this could set than with specifically seeing the government block TPB.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Nothing is actually returned back unlike the spam page that an incorrect URL leads you to, but the site became inaccessible for most not long after the UK ISP story was posted, coincidentally. You can still easily connect through a proxy so it's obviously just a simple firewall on Rogers' part, but it's nothing that's been announced either.
Disney free? Are you sure? Are you really REALLY sure?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_Disney
A quick glance shows me that Touchstone is part of Disney, and they are a pretty big movie company...if you own movies, you probably own some of theirs.
And this illustrates the fundamental problem with the "take my business elsewhere" suggestion: I can boycott Disney, but unless I happen to know that Touchstone or ABC are a part of Disney, I may still be giving them my business. It's like last year when people were bitching about the factories in China and how we all need our precious iPhones - only to find out that the Androids, Dells, and damn near everything else that we work with are manufactured in the same facility (not sure if 'droids or Dells are built there or not - not relevant to my point).
Until there is an independent company out there producing decent material - and that company is forthright about who owns what - anywhere you go is likely going to further contribute to the problem (regardless of the problem you're experiencing, be it the MAFIAA, oil companies, grocery stores, etc)
Then how hard is it for you the offended reader to stop buying the products of the companies who lobbied for this outcome or in some other way hurt their bottom line ?
The funny thing is that we did. And the response of the shit-flinging monkeys, suits, and marketing morons of the MafiAA was... to blame their losses on piracy rather than shitty broken-by-design products.
TPB hosts only 100% legal material. Some of that legal material includes infohashes that, when processed by a BitTorrent client, many steps down the line, will eventually lead to other material not hosted on TPB which may or may not be legal.
They've rightly refused to comply with takedown notices since they ask for 100% legal material to be taken down, or the takedown of material they are not hosting.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Is all this heat on The Pirate Bay simply because of its name recognition? There are many many more torrent trackers out there that all have the same content.
I have found there are just two ways to go.
It all comes down to livin' fast or dyin' slow. -REK, Jr.
Here in .fi, some operators were ordered to block thepiratebay.org and associated domains. The blocks ranged from simple DNS blocks, trivial to get past, to blocking actual connections to certain IP adresses, depending on the ISP.
Among the blocked domains was piraattilahti.org (that would translate to "pirate bay") - but at the time being, it forwarded to effi.org (local EFF). The block on piraattilahti.org was lifter after a while. Now, when you visit piraattilahti.org, it functions as a proxy to thepiratebay.org, so you can get there no matter what ISP you use.
The point being, these kinds of blocks are completely futile. Those interested in pirating content will continue to do so (and while TPB is undoubtedly a large tracker, it is hardly the only one), and ISPs will not certainly implement such blocks out of charity, so ultimately the costs will be paid by the subscribers. The only way to reduce piracy is to offer legal (and reasonable) alternatives. Currently, between subscriptions to Netflix/HBO Nordic/Spotify, I personally pirate very little - I do like to pay the content producers, if I'm able. But if I'm not, arrrrrr it is (Comedy Central, should you be listening, I'd gladly pay for Daily Show and Colbert).
How many links does it take to make the difference between legal and illegal linking?
They've already moved to magnet links, which are just more abstract infohashes. Those link to the .torrent file contents, which the BitTorrent client can use through trackers and DHT to find computers that host the content, which can then deliver the contents. So that's (at least, I'm sure I've oversimplified) 5 layers of separation between TPB and pirated content - far more than Google could boast.
Also I'm not an American and would never suggest that their government isn't horribly corrupted.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I can boycott Disney, but unless I happen to know that Touchstone or ABC are a part of Disney, I may still be giving them my business.
There's an app for that
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Could there not be some tech or protocol that lets you host something the pirate bay directly on torrents somehow, via signing + distributed hashing or somehting? If anyone could get something like that started it would be TPB. Surely there's some way to create an app or site which leverages distributed nature of torrent to host an application or website "everywhere"?
hawhawhawhawhaw
Carry on.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
And to clarify the EU thing, Sean Sherlock, at the time claimed this law to be required for compliance with EU obligations. Lying bastard of a man! He blamed the EU rather than admit that either he's on the take or is seriously a power crazed gobshite.
If this was a requirement, I don't see all other EU nations rushing to meet it. No, Sherlock got something out of this. Knowing the cunt, it could something as small as a Little Mermaid DVD box set (region 1, you langer) and a bag of oranges. He's been an irritating mannequin-faced wanker since his days in Mallow as chief pencil organizer for the local Aspergers society meetings. Absolute shambles if a man, and he looks like a rubberized robot.
Yes. Now the US must "harmonize" their laws with those in Ireland, otherwise the terrorists and child molesters will win.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Pity; IT was one of the few industries Ireland was getting right.
And this is linked to banning TPB how?
Stopping people from pirating TV, films & music will somehow magically nuke the local IT industry?
there s a move rental store down the street from me. I want to OWN and play the disk/file on any device that can play the file/disk. I want to own so that 5 years down the line I have access to the movie/music if the streaming servers go down/are turned off or the comapny thinks switching to a different file name requires me to re-purchase all my enterteinment once again.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
It doesn't matter how many layers of indirection there are. None of the technical details matter legally. The purpose of the site is to help users get unlicensed copyrighted content. How that happens just doesn't matter - the intent matters.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
So do you think they could make this go away if they renamed themselves "the file bay?"
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
This. I might go into a theatre now once a year (never by choice), and the last piece of physical media I bought was BBC's Life on Blu-Ray. It's not that I'm out downloading a storm to get everything else - it's that the quality of product from the majors has dropped so significantly over the past decade, I'm just no interested in paying for a $15 movie ticket/physical media/legal download to watch Big Name Actor to jump around in front of a green screen for two hours.
Until the big studios stop milking existing franchises or Lucasing the crap out of their movies, most of my leisure money goes to indie game developers - they work hard producing original content, and then they don't try to blame me if it doesn't sell.
Well, at this point any change would be unconvincing, but history aside: if they responded to DMCA takedown requests and had (pointers to) mostly non-infringing content, sure. That's why many file hosting services are still up - dropbox etc - and why general-purpose search engines aren't worried, and so on. Intent matters in law.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Hi,
This really just PR nonsense. The majority of people will not notice and will continue to pirate anyway.
There is only one solution to piracy and it's a bloody easy one.
Stop with walled gardens and make everything available everywhere at the same time for a reasonable price. It's that fupping simple.
I can fully understand why Hollywood's complete and utter lack of imagination and inability to consider anything new or original has resulted in them missing that memo.
I pay for netflix. It's reasonably priced and with a little effort I can access, on a very rare occasion, the American version if there is a specific need.
Shows like Dexter, Game of Thrones, Walking Dead and Breaking bad would get a far higher viewership and make far more ad and product placement revenue if they went out on on their own websites at the same time as they were televised. It's the future one way or another why go to so much hassle and expense to try and stop what will not be stopped until you simply give people what the want?
This is also about Censorship and Control. Yes torrents are used to distribute some pirated content. But they are also used to distribute home made videos, free educational videos and so on. I have a .torrent site where I mainly distribute videos by Alex Jones / http://infowars.com/ and I can legally distribute everything on that site. I had Google Adsense on it for a while but one day they sent me an e-mail saying that having a .torrent file on your site violates their policy. It apparently doesn't matter to Google _what_ you distribute with a torrent, just using torrents is "bad". That's as stupid as saying "using http is against our policy" regardless of what you serve, but that's the "do evil" corporation for you. The Pirate Bay may have some "bad" content, but there's also a whole lot of important _legal_ content there. You can't easily censor videos distributed using BitTorrent. BitTorrent is important for free speech and free thought. I do understand why Disney wants to shut down sites who distribute videos with information that goes against their propaganda, but it's not alright.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation