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Pirate Bay Is Infringing Copyright, European Court of Justice Rules (theguardian.com)
The European court of justice (ECJ) has ruled that BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay is directly infringing copyright, in a move that could lead to ISPs and governments blocking access to other torrent sites across Europe. From a report: The ruling comes after a seven-year legal battle, which has seen the site, founded in Sweden in 2003, blocked and seized, its offices raided, and its three founders fined and jailed. At the heart of the case is the Pirate Bay's argument that, unlike the previous generation piracy sites like Napster, it doesn't host infringing files, nor link to them. Instead, it hosts "trackers," files which tell users of individual BitTorrent apps which other BitTorrent users to link to in order to download large files -- in the Pirate Bay's case, usually, but not exclusively, copyrighted material.
Yeah right!
the ECJ [argued] that the Pirate Bay goes further than a protected site should, by offering not just a search feature, but also categorising files, deleting faulty trackers, and filtering out some types of content. That means, in the court’s eyes: “The operators of the platform play an essential role in making those works available.”
I still think the primary mistake was naming themselves "The Pirate Bay." They should have followed the practice that politicians use in naming bills. Call it the "Noble Defenders of Copyright Bay" or something.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
If you want free/subsidized entertainment, check your library and state funded TV. Otherwise you must pay for it, or it won't get made at all.
This is now a precedent.
If you have *instructions* in your possession to lead you to copyright infringement, you are guilty of infringement.
Do we have other examples?
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
So, uhm. Why wouldn't that make google etc. equally illegal? You can find magnet links very easily there to just about anything you could want.
Where is the TOR equivalent of these sites? Surely that's where this game of whack-a-mole is headed - the lawless dark web.
By the same reasoning, the european court of justice is infringing copyright too, assuming they mentioned a functioning URL to the TPB website.
Or are URL's on paper somehow legally different from URL's on a website?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
It is quite clear that The Pirate Bay is violating copyright laws. The debate should be whether or not the laws are correct or not. I take neither side in this battle publicly. I don't think the fact they are providing copyright software is up for debate though.
Sent from my TARDIS
It was the torrent files and the fact that they curated them that got TPB into trouble. Not that they had links to files.
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Just based off anecdotal evidence:
There is less Tor darknet activity than 5 years ago. I2P activity doubled when Vuze implemented I2P support, but has stagnated since. The majority of new users have been Russian with a minor trickle of everybody else. I2P and Tor are both banned in China, and it is very difficult for either to reach nodelist servers to update available nodes in their region.
While there are a few virtual currency exchanges up, there is very little activity on them compared to clearnet exchanges, even when they are reputable and established (in terms of uptime/time existing, not usage) within the community.
The same has gone for both legitimate and pirated content: Both have dwindled in availability on 'public' darknet sites. If there are non-public sites, people aren't discussing them on the darknet IRC channels/forums.
What this means for the future I do not know, but in the short term at least, unless there is a huge recruitment drive, both Tor and I2P seem to be dwindling in hidden service availability and usage.
As a seemingly bizarre conclusion, i dare to claim that this is good for the average user and for the internet as a whole.
If sites like TPB gets blocked by ISP's, the average user will be more tempted to use a VPN service. This has, besides the primary goal of accessing blocked content, the effect of educating users into protecting data, bypassing arbitrary blocks put up by ISP's, and eventually protecting more if not all of their internet traffic.
The ones less pleased will be intelligence agencies, that suddenly watch an increase in encrypted and untraceable network traffic.
So, in effect it's a win for privacy. And for companies selling VPN services.
long live the pirate bay!
Because there's a fair value offered. But if your customers don't exist and are "pirating" it, then there was no fair value offered and without piracy, you have no customers and will die off anyway.
Tons of infighting URLs are published every day, in the form of DMCA complains. (and they are all guaranteed to not be fake sites, and actually contain the content you are looking for. very helpful.)
"Making available theory" I guess if you have enough money, you can convince a court of anything. Sad to see noble country of Sweden fall to this.
Everything goes somewhere, and digital data go everywhere. (Or something...)
I don't know everybody's laws, but by providing a dating service which matches people up... they are a facilitator, an accomplice of some sort. They are quite clearly NOT directly or literally violating copyright, they are closer to drug dealers than to drug chemists... more like a advertiser, pusher, informer--- "hey you asked me where to get the good stuff? Well, here is the phone number(ID hash) to some people I think you will want to talk to."
Prosecute them for being an accomplice... and apply laws designed for that purpose.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
I still think the primary mistake was naming themselves "The Pirate Bay." They should have followed the practice that politicians use in naming bills. Call it the "Noble Defenders of Copyright Bay" or something.
Patriot Bay?
Sounds good. Sounds legit. Evil lurks. Similar to other "Patriot" themed things.
The Pirate Bay doesn't have any torrent files on it, do they? I thought they got rid of them.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
piraterz, warezpupz, millenialz, grabazzez, this is why we can't have nice things.
There are tons of DHT indexing sites. These do the thankless job of making the info hashes and magnet links for every torrent imaginable available to anyone. The only problem I can think of is that links for totally dead torrents can persist this way.
If Europe says so, it must be so. Because, Europe.
"Instead, it hosts "trackers," files which tell users of individual BitTorrent apps"
Inconceivable!
I was downloading stuff offa TPB just last week. It's had a pretty good run seeing as how it's been supposedly killed off a dozen times by now in about as many years.