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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.
Wrong continent.
SJWs are the new boogeyman. -Me
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."
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
Ridiculous reasoning. Cavemen painted on the walls without having a DMCA in place, copyright protection, or a mega-corporation offering them exclusive perpetual distribution rights contracts.
Culture will happen regardless of whatever nonsense motivations you put behind it. An artist doesn't stop being an artist because people that weren't going to buy the art anyway, in fact, don't buy their art.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Where is the TOR equivalent of these sites? Surely that's where this game of whack-a-mole is headed - the lawless dark web.
Google doesn't profit exclusively from it, and doesn't curate those links based on their internal activity. They do face anti-competitive activity charges though.
There are two envelopes on your desk. They are labeled A and B. Each contains a website.
Citizens have intentionally used A to commit infringement.
Citizens have intentionally used B to commit far more infringement.
Both profit from it.
Guess which one is youtube.
Truthful answer: Google has money, and can be leveraged by media whores to make them more money.
"One infringes contributorily by intentionally inducing or encouraging direct infringement . . . and infringes vicariously by profiting from direct infringement while declining to exercise a right to stop or limit it. . . ."
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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?
Sure.... How do you find it, who pays for channel distribution (broadcast or hosting for electronic media), who pays for storage and display (physical media)? How does the artist eat, pay rent, afford school fees for their kids, etc.? Money is required to function in the economy, and artists are not exempted from that requirement.
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.
"Google doesn't profit exclusively from it, and doesn't curate those links based on their internal activity"
You must never scroll to the bottom of a Google Search, where they say they clearly omit results based upon DMCA complaints.
And if you click the link to show those omitted results, you still get ads on that results page, so yes, they do directly profit from it (it doesn't have to be exclusively.)
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
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.
There are plenty of ways to do it like doing work on a commission basis. I'm a programmer and I don't expect people to continue paying me for my services after I've been dead for 80 years.
Sure.... How do you find it, who pays for channel distribution (broadcast or hosting for electronic media)
broadcast is actually free: so called "free TV". In fact it even makes much more money via ads than it costs to distribute this way: those freeTV channels pay money for the right to distribute it and earn a profit themselves on top of that.
Infringing Internet distribution is paid by the infringers: they store it on their own media and use their own bandiwith to distribute. So no money needed either there.
, who pays for storage and display (physical media)?
Same. See above: the copyright infringers do that themselves and are happy about it.
How does the artist eat, pay rent, afford school fees for their kids, etc.? Money is required to function in the economy, and artists are not exempted from that requirement.
Question: how did the painting caveman eat? How did Shakespeare eat? Both created lots of art before any form of copyright. I think Shakespeare didn't have kids, instead he had a whole acting troupe to feed. No school fees but feeding them all might be worse than schooling the statistical 2,1 kids we have today. Especially when school education is free in all reasonable countries.
"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.
Culture will happen regardless of whatever nonsense motivations you put behind it.
We were in a weird place for the past 20 years, where it wasn't clear how the artist could shed the corporate distribution, yet still make money - how to solve the logistical problem of payment, really. But now the evidence is mounting that Patreon and the like will really work for artists.
But that won't work for billion-dollar film budgets. Movies in particular remain a sticking point. It's not clear that crowdfunding can work for those. However, I'm very hopeful for a surge of indie material once "good enough" 3D animation gets cheap enough. I think crowdfunding will work fine to get competent voice actors on a project.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
Bread AND water?! Don't be so fast to bite the hand that feeds.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
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!
"Google doesn't profit exclusively from it, and doesn't curate those links based on their internal activity. They do face anti-competitive activity charges though."
And Google has deeper pockets and would be much harder to successfully sue than the Pirate Bay people.
But that won't work for billion-dollar film budgets. Movies in particular remain a sticking point.
Copyright infringement is a problem, sure. However, even with all the torrent sites, movie budgets have been constantly increasing, and profits are great (if you ignore the Hollywood account that makes the most successful movies lose money on paper).
Hollywood is doing great. The focus on the AAA movies is completely misguided. We should turn our eyes to the smaller movies, the indie movies and such and check what the result there is. Hollywood blockbusters, like the five or six times before that they cried and at least one time swore under oath that something needs to be done or they're out of business, Hollywood blockbusters are doing just fine.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Otherwise you must pay for it, or it won't get made at all.
So if we all download Disney crap enough, the place will finally shut down and cease to exist? Can Sony be chained to Disney before it walks the plank?
Yarr.
Torrents obviously pay for channel distribution. We find it on Pirate Bay.
Don't be so naive.
I'm a programmer and I don't expect people to continue paying me for my services after I've been dead for 80 years.
Apparently you are doing it wrong.
Google take active measures to reduce copyright infringement.
The vast majority of material indexed by Google is not infringing,
Their business model would be viable without infringement.
The Pirate Bay spent a lot of time mocking people who made complaints about copyright infringement.
The vast majority of material indexed by The Pirate Bay is infringing copyright, and this fact is obvious to most people. (Really, major movies from 2016 and 2017 are very unlikely to be given away for free).
Their business model relies on a high level of infringement.
I think that's the real problem though, the idea the movies even need multi-million dollar budgets.
Most of those budgets are only so large because of the absurd artificially inflated actors wages. Contrary to popular belief music and acting talent is quite common, what's not is the amount of actors and musicians that get a brand built around them by a large corporation and turned into a billion dollar product of which they get a fraction of the cut.
In almost every bar across the world you get a few indie bands a week playing, a proportion of which are just as good as the big corporate brands. The Susan Boyles of the world are two a penny, she was just a run of the mill church singer of which there are thousands in the UK alone.
I had the misfortune of watching War Machine the other day, where Brad Pitt basically spends 2 hours making a really stupid face whilst pretending that's classed as acting. Quite why you would pay anyone that inept many millions of pounds to do such a shoddy job, when you could get a better actor from your local amateur dramatics society I've no fucking idea.
So the real barrier isn't currently technological, it's to do with the concentration of wealth in the industry caused by music and movie cartels fixing prices, and artificially inflating salaries of what is otherwise be common talent. The cost of movie making will come down when unions and cartels are forced stop artificially inflating salaries of a select few through the inevitable march of market forces.
You only have to look at what's happened with the newest Star Wars films- they've just picked up a bunch of fresh out of drama school nobodies and proven that they're just as capable as any of the big name multi-million dollar salary actors. The films have been just as successful, but they didn't need any expensive unionised big name Hollywood actors - for many, having fresh faces added to the film, because the problem with having the big names is that they all typically have fairly fixed styles that have been defined and that they stick to as part of their corporate branding, and that style can distract and hence detract from the film itself. The big name actors they did have in the newest Star Wars films were ironically those who were typecast as Star Wars actors because they were themselves picked up as nobodies for the original trilogy back in the 70s. If you'd put someone like Brad Pitt into any of these films he would've absolutely wrecked them because there's no place in films like that for the dunce jock past-it ex-toyboy image.
The biggest barrier remaining is actually organising a film - there need to be better sites for finding a crew, for finding talent for building sets, for competent producers to find what they need and get the necessary people involved, and to find musicians and people capable of doing special effects. If someone builds a site for this, then there's no reason Hollywood quality films couldn't be done on a fraction of the budget by people working on the projects out of passion for the idea rather than a need to drive profits for shareholders by creating human brands, rather than good films. This isn't massively different to the age old difficulty in putting together a good mod team for a video game mod - I remember back in the 90s it was a nightmare finding people good at 3D modelling and animation for a mod - the barrier to making a good mod was never money, it was about connecting the right people to form great teams.