Swedish Police Raid the Pirate Bay Again

o_ferguson writes: TorrentFreak is reporting that police in Sweden carried out a raid in Stockholm today, seizing servers, computers, and other equipment. At the same time The Pirate Bay and several other torrent-related sites disappeared offline. Although no official statement has been made, TF sources confirm action against TPB. This is not the first time that this has happened.

Comments

Free Enterprise

[theshowmecanuck]

Sweden is trying hard to make a name for itself as a place high tech start ups should work. Sweden is a place that will allow them to be creative without fear of undo influence from multinationals or foreign influence. cough cough movie studios cough cough riaa cough cough Assange...

Re:Free Enterprise

[rasmusbr]

Yeah...

First they came for TPB, but you didn't say anything because you weren't running a piracy torrent tracker, then they came for, uh, TPB again. And yeah, next they'll probably raid Spotify.

Re:Free Enterprise

[AthanasiusKircher]

Before I respond, let me be clear that I absolutely think copyright law is broken and needs significant reform -- at a minimum to make the time until something goes into public domain be only a few years (like it was in original 18th century statutes), not a century or more That said...

Sharing/copying should be encouraged as a social good. Sharing of knowledge is what made our civilization, and keeps it alive. Voluntarily allow a few elite control over what may be copied and who can copy, and you weaken civilization.

I always find these sorts of arguments hilarious. Because you know who funded the arts before copyright existed? Rich dudes.

How did one become an artist in the age before artists could make money off of publications and copying? Well, you had two choices:

(1) Be independently wealthy. A lot of art, music, literature, etc. used to be created by only those filthy rich who didn't have to work for a living. So, if you had nothing else to do and were bored, you could afford to make art.

(2) You're not rich? Well, if you want to be an artist, musician, writer, or skilled craftsman, you have to find yourself another rich dude to fund your work. In other words, you found yourself a patron, because otherwise, how are you going to support yourself?

If you actually want art that requires significant SKILL and TRAINING to learn a craft, those are your primary choices without some concept of intellectual property.

There are other ways for artists to earn a living.

Sure, you can say performing musicians have to tour rather than making money off of recordings, but what about the composers who actually write the songs? Lots of pop artists don't make their own songs -- they rely on expert songwriters to do that. How exactly does one make money off of those sorts of creations? One can't exactly become a "touring songwriter." (I mean, yeah, improvisation is fun and you can make up crappy songs on the spot for a paying audience I suppose, but there's little incentive then to spend time crafting an actual good song...)

So far, I've just been talking about pop music, but it gets harder if you want someone with real talent to devote months or even years to an extended project -- like a book, for example. And how about training? Mozart spent maybe 15 years learning the craft of composition before he began writing stuff of a "mature composer" with thorough training in how to write music. Who pays for those 15 years of training before one can even begin to compose?... and then one's compositions are just shared with no reward for the person who spent his life acquiring the skill to make them.

That's ultimately the problem with these arguments. A system without any sort of intellectual property makes it much more difficult for anyone to spend significant time on any given creative project, since no money can be made from that lost time... let alone taking any time to learn a skilled craft.

Art thus becomes only an amateur occupation, something your crappy band in a garage does improving stupid songs on a weekend, but no room for any possible types of refinement or skills. We expect doctors and engineers and scientists and programmers to spend years refining their skills so that they can produce a quality product. And when they do, they are rewarded for their work. But if you're a skilled artist who took years to learn a trade, too bad -- we still want you to make art, but we want you to donate it to us for free. Find some other way to make your money, thanks.

Unless, well, you're a rich dude and can spend the time acquiring random skills and putting time in creative tasks that won't make you any money. Or if you can find a rich dude to serve as your patron.

Yeah, once you're an established artist with a record, you might be able to get some crowd-funding or something today, but good luck to get that mon

Re:Free Enterprise

[AmiMoJo]

We are not talking about going back to the old rich-dude patronage system. These days we have YouTube, where anyone can upload their work for free. Even recording your work is pretty cheap these days. So the current choice of a musician is:

1. Take a loan from the record label and pray you can afford to live until it is paid off and you are a megastar

2. Upload to YouTube and spam Facebook in the hopes of gaining a following and some ad revenue

Option 2 seems to be the better one for a lot of artists these days. It doesn't work for everyone, but then again not everyone has mass market appeal or is actually any good.

I give it 24 hours

[lance423]

TPB doesn't stay down long. It's like the Hydra of piracy. Cut off all the heads you want but it won't stay dead.

Re:...and here we go again

[pellik]

No no, that was RAID proof the whole time. There is no redundancy of any kind in the pirate bay's system.

Your tax dollars at work

[Snufu]

Law enforcement and judicial officials working round the clock to ensure the world is safe for multinational corporations.

Re:Your tax dollars at work

[Anonymous Coward]

If there was property tax on intellectual property, you know, the same sort of argument why physical property is taxed -- "we the govt. have to spend so much money protecting your land!!" -- then, I bet, these wankers who claim their intellectual property is worth trillions will suddenly go, 'oh, did we say trillions? We mean, er, uh, very little. Please don't tax us." They'd actually have to pick a value that's in equilibrium with downward pressure to avoid taxes and upward pressure to sue infringement. Right now, there is no equilibrium, just upward pressure to maximize payout from suing over infringement, hence the sky-high ludicrous appraisals of their intellectual property.

Re:Are there any good alternatives?

[ArcadeMan]

There's always Netflix, iTunes, Amazon... /duck

For how long?

[thevirtualcat]

12 hours? 24 hours? I'm pretty sure TPB has had longer downtimes that were self-inflicted.

If they can take TPB down and keep it down for a month? That's news.

Re:Hey Look

[ArcadeMan]

According to MPAA accounting, the few minutes TPB was offline generated 5.6 billion dollars in sales.

And if we use Verizon accounting for the same numbers, the few minutes TPB was offline generated 560 billion dollars in sales.

Re:...and here we go again

[sexconker]

The malware bay endures!

I have never once gotten malware from TPB.
"Reputable" sites such as download.com have been injecting it into / wrapping it around every download for the past few years now.

Re:Are there any good alternatives?

[El_Muerte_TDS]

iTunes does not work on my 10 month old Panasonic "Smart" TV, or Linux based HTPC, or Sony PS3. Amazon only recently started selling ebooks here, nothing else. Netflix is great though, now if they can finally convince content providers to license them more content.
So what are these alternatives?

Why TPB and not the banks?

[jenningsthecat]

Banks in EVERY jurisdiction carry out transactions with and pay interest on money deposited by criminals of various stripes, from tax evaders to mobsters to drug lords to terrorists. And in many cases the banksters know the provenance of those funds, and simply don't care, 'cause business is business after all. Not to mention the thefts the banks themselves commit, which are only not considered illegal via the legal legerdemain of calling them 'service fees'. So why do governments, (and by extension, their corporate masters), have such a hate on for the TPB? Yeah, I know, it's a rhetorical question, but I had to ask it.

So Pirate Bay is raided and shut down, and its founders thrown in prison, while bank CEO's are allowed to conduct business freely and in full daylight with impunity. It seems that a lot of somebodies in a lot of places consider the facilitation of file sharing a more heinous crime than the facilitation of theft, murder, gun running, etc. Gee, that disconnect wouldn't have anything at all to do with the profits of big corporations, would it?