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'We Won't Block Pirate Bay,' Swedish Telecoms Giant Says (torrentfreak.com)
Last week, a Swedish Patent and Market Court of Appeal ordered The Pirate Bay and streaming portal Swefilmer to be blocked by internet service provider Bredbandsbolaget for the next three years. The order was not well supported by other internet service providers in Sweden, as it appears they don't like the idea of becoming copyright policemen. TorrentFreak reports: Last week ISP Bahnhof absolutely slammed the decision to block The Pirate Bay, describing the effort as signaling the "death throes" of the copyright industry. It even hinted that it may offer some kind of technical solution to customers who are prevented from accessing the site. For those familiar with Bahnhof's stance over the years, this response didn't come as a surprise. The ISP is traditionally pro-freedom and has gone out of its way to make life difficult for copyright enforcers of all kinds. However, as one of the leading telecoms companies in Sweden and neighboring Norway, ISP Telia is more moderate. Nevertheless, it too says it has no intention of blocking The Pirate Bay, unless it is forced to do so by law. "No, we will not block if we are not forced to do so by a court," a company press officer said this morning. Telia says that the decision last week from the Patent and Market Court affects only Bredbandsbolaget, indicating that a fresh legal process will be required to get it to respond. That eventuality appears to be understood by the rightsholders but they're keeping their options open.
70% of Swedish youths are pirates. Don't tell me that number isn't related to Somalian refugees.
We now have a situation where an ISP is ordered by law to block Pirate Bay, but the order (some time ago) to block certain child porn sites is just a recommendation. If that doesn't tell us which crime the authorities are more concerned about, I don't know what does.
Last week ISP Bahnhof absolutely slammed the decision to block The Pirate Bay, describing the effort as signaling the "death throes" of the copyright industry.
Kudos to the Swedes for not wanting to be copyright cops. I would feel better about copyright if the laws went back to the US Constitutional constraint of being applicable for only 28 years max, and could only be applied to expression and not the underlying ideas. Then it really would be a tool to incentivise innovation. Nowadays groups like the MPAA, RIAA, and WIPO use copyright weaponry such as DRM and the TRIPS agreement to secure lucrative revenue streams for an unforeseeable future, and while doing so, create a hostile environment for the arts and science, stifling inquiry and free expression.
Title quote: 'We Won't Block Pirate Bay,'
Actual quote: 'No, we will not block if we are not forced to do so by a court,'
Sure, you can block a domain name from resolving to an IP address on your DNS servers or you can block an IP address from being accessed on your network, but what good does either of those actually do? TPB mirrors would just crop up all over the place with different IPs and different urls.
In order to effectively block any site like TPB they would have to put in actual content filtering which would require a huge amount of hardware to ensure that it didn't adversely affect network speeds. Even then, throw HTTPS at it and if it's not doing a man in the middle negotiation (thereby compromising the security of all the traffic that passes through it) it can't read the content to see if it should block it.