5 ms·

The Pirate Bay goes down after legal pressure

83 points by adamhowell 16y ago

chaosmachine 16y ago
Torrentfreak seems to be down, too. Just getting a blank page. Edit: looks like it was just my ISP. Anyway, here's the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/may/17/pirate-bay-offline http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/may/17/pirate...
- baby 16y ago
  Torrentfreak is not down for me (France).
- dustingetz 16y ago
  up for me (US)
- Bossman 16y ago
  I've been on TorrentFreak a few times today. No issues here.
Qz 16y ago
'goes down' in the title kind of makes it sound like the site is down for good, which isn't the case.
jrockway 16y ago
Good strategy. People aren't going to care about the politics of file sharing until they can't get what they want for free anymore. Taking the Pirate Bay down is the first step towards organized dissent that removes the laws that the media companies are relying on in the first place. Also, an injunction without oral arguments? That will last, oh, maybe a few hours...
- wmf 16y ago
  It's not a strategy; they didn't shut down voluntarily and it's only for a few hours.
  - jrockway 16y ago
    I was using the word "good" sarcastically and was applying it to the media companies' strategy.
Groxx 16y ago
The Pirate Bay is suffering some temporary downtime as their bandwidth provider has stopped passing through traffic. A week ago, Hollywood got an injunction to effectively shut down the Pirate Bay by threatening its provider with huge fines. The Pirate Bay team is currently working on a solution. They'll be back.
viraptor 16y ago
If I remember correctly the original TPB guys claimed that servers are out of their control now, which is why they can't take it down. But now I read there's "Managing Director Sven Olaf Kamphuis". Is there some official ownership of TPB again?
- omarchowdhury 16y ago
  Kamphuis is the managing director of the hosting company
  - viraptor 16y ago
    It makes sense now, thanks.
- benologist 16y ago
  The TPB guys really just spew out rhetoric for the masses. "the Pirate Bay crew claims that they themselves have no idea where the servers are located. After the raid on their servers in 2006, they decided that it was better not to know where they are. One thing is sure though, they are not hosted in just one country." http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-is-safe-080131/ http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-is-safe-080131/
pedrokost 16y ago
What's the real purpose of shutting sites like TPB down? People won't rush to stores to get the movies they want to see if they can't download them.
- jrockway 16y ago
  Same purpose as scheduling a department meeting -- it feels better than doing nothing.
- jdminhbg 16y ago
  Serves as a deterrent effect. If there were no enforcement ever, lots of people from sites like HN would be thinking of fun, clever new ways to post/share stuff. Since there is, only a smaller segment of the hacker population is willing to put up with the legal hassle.
  - swolchok 16y ago
    Thing is, there's nothing wrong with thinking of fun, clever ways to post/share stuff. If nothing else, you can do it to anticipate what the bad guys might do, on the same principle as any other kind of attack research.
  - Ygor 16y ago
    On the other hand, it also adds to the publicity, doesn't it? They probably assume the deterrent effect has a greater impact than all the press and the buzz about banning and shuting down?
- coffeeaddicted 16y ago
  Funny thing is I would actually prefer downloading from official (maybe more legal) sources if I would find way to do that in my country, with my favorite OS, without stupid DRM restrictions and warnings and maybe for sane prices. But living in Germany and using Linux - such a movie-download service does to my knowledge in 2010 still not exist and is also not in sight. Something like eDonkey but at the cost of lets say 1€ per GB and I would be happy. Then a DVD would be same price like cheap DVD's in a shop and I can decide to go with lower-quality if I don't want to spend as much. I don't even know why producers don't just do that. Or maybe they do in other countries?
tansey 16y ago
I always see sites that decide either they allow everything or they shut down. Why is obfuscation never an option? What if you had separate sites dedicated to each of the following steps: 1. Start a bt site, advertised as a site for baking recipes. Seed the site with tons of existing videos on baking, to increase legitimacy. 2. Create a translator site for each baking-related keyword. For example, "muffins" = "Lost". 3. Write a browser plug-in that translates the baking site into the real torrent site. Who would one sue then? Would it not work simply because the __AA would constantly request torrents to be taken down? I know TPB has a political agenda, so they might not want to do this.. but sites like mininova could have.
- callahad 16y ago
  It wouldn't work because the first site would still be facilitating copyright infringement, and thus still subject to legal pressure. Calling it by a code-name doesn't remove its copyright, nor does hiding it amongst legally redistributable torrents. Simply put, you'd sue everyone involved in the creation of that infrastructure. The second site and the guy who wrote the browser plugin may be able to escape unscathed, but the first site would be in exactly the same predicament as The Pirate Bay, Mininova, etc., except with the added bonus of trying to hide what they were doing. That wouldn't go over well in court.
- someone_here 16y ago
  The hot plate bay
- zacharypinter 16y ago
  Reminds me of the Napster pig latin stunts: http://www.celticguitarmusic.com/Mland_napster.htm http://www.celticguitarmusic.com/Mland_napster.htm Probably wouldn't last that long...
hassenben 16y ago
They need to switch to a complete distributed architecture. Where the site, the tracker, everything is hosted by users. This way, no corporate tools can target them. The "how" is much more complicated though.
- dlnovell 16y ago
  Maybe the diaspora guys can tackle this in the fall after they've knocked out their distributed fb
  - die_sekte 16y ago
    In the fall? Next month. With Ruby® on® Rails®, building a Facebook clone will take mere minutes!
- swolchok 16y ago
  Poisoning is arguably harder to deal with in a distributed architecture.
jacquesm 16y ago
They'll be back. We've been here before. Also, it's their provider that shut them down, the pirate bay has little to do with that. Weren't they their own provider? Meanwhile if you are looking for the torrent of some linux distro, there is always http://torrindex.com/ http://torrindex.com/
dmn001 16y ago
latest from www.twitter.com/tpb http://newteevee.com/2010/05/17/the-pirate-bay-forced-offline-trading-continues/ http://newteevee.com/2010/05/17/the-pirate-bay-forced-offlin... There are many torrent spiders/indexers that host torrents from many websites. e.g. http://www.torrentz.com/ http://www.torrentz.com/ and nearly all torrents use DHT and multiple trackers. Taking 1 site down temporarily doesn't affect anything.
davidmurphy 16y ago
Call me crazy, but I dislike piracy. Back when I was at my first startup, we found that people pirated our own software, and it stunk. So I don't want to pirate other intellectual property.
danh 16y ago
And now they are back.

83 points by adamhowell 16y ago

Torrentfreak seems to be down, too. Just getting a blank page. Edit: looks like it was just my ISP. Anyway, here's the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/may/17/pirate-bay-offline http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/may/17/pirate...

baby 16y ago
Torrentfreak is not down for me (France).
dustingetz 16y ago
up for me (US)
Bossman 16y ago
I've been on TorrentFreak a few times today. No issues here.

Qz 16y ago

'goes down' in the title kind of makes it sound like the site is down for good, which isn't the case.

jrockway 16y ago

Good strategy. People aren't going to care about the politics of file sharing until they can't get what they want for free anymore. Taking the Pirate Bay down is the first step towards organized dissent that removes the laws that the media companies are relying on in the first place. Also, an injunction without oral arguments? That will last, oh, maybe a few hours...

wmf 16y ago
It's not a strategy; they didn't shut down voluntarily and it's only for a few hours.
- jrockway 16y ago
  I was using the word "good" sarcastically and was applying it to the media companies' strategy.

Groxx 16y ago

The Pirate Bay is suffering some temporary downtime as their bandwidth provider has stopped passing through traffic. A week ago, Hollywood got an injunction to effectively shut down the Pirate Bay by threatening its provider with huge fines. The Pirate Bay team is currently working on a solution. They'll be back.

viraptor 16y ago

If I remember correctly the original TPB guys claimed that servers are out of their control now, which is why they can't take it down. But now I read there's "Managing Director Sven Olaf Kamphuis". Is there some official ownership of TPB again?

omarchowdhury 16y ago
Kamphuis is the managing director of the hosting company
- viraptor 16y ago
  It makes sense now, thanks.
benologist 16y ago
The TPB guys really just spew out rhetoric for the masses. "the Pirate Bay crew claims that they themselves have no idea where the servers are located. After the raid on their servers in 2006, they decided that it was better not to know where they are. One thing is sure though, they are not hosted in just one country." http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-is-safe-080131/ http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-is-safe-080131/

pedrokost 16y ago

What's the real purpose of shutting sites like TPB down? People won't rush to stores to get the movies they want to see if they can't download them.

jrockway 16y ago
Same purpose as scheduling a department meeting -- it feels better than doing nothing.
jdminhbg 16y ago
Serves as a deterrent effect. If there were no enforcement ever, lots of people from sites like HN would be thinking of fun, clever new ways to post/share stuff. Since there is, only a smaller segment of the hacker population is willing to put up with the legal hassle.
- swolchok 16y ago
  Thing is, there's nothing wrong with thinking of fun, clever ways to post/share stuff. If nothing else, you can do it to anticipate what the bad guys might do, on the same principle as any other kind of attack research.
- Ygor 16y ago
  On the other hand, it also adds to the publicity, doesn't it? They probably assume the deterrent effect has a greater impact than all the press and the buzz about banning and shuting down?
coffeeaddicted 16y ago
Funny thing is I would actually prefer downloading from official (maybe more legal) sources if I would find way to do that in my country, with my favorite OS, without stupid DRM restrictions and warnings and maybe for sane prices. But living in Germany and using Linux - such a movie-download service does to my knowledge in 2010 still not exist and is also not in sight. Something like eDonkey but at the cost of lets say 1€ per GB and I would be happy. Then a DVD would be same price like cheap DVD's in a shop and I can decide to go with lower-quality if I don't want to spend as much. I don't even know why producers don't just do that. Or maybe they do in other countries?

tansey 16y ago

I always see sites that decide either they allow everything or they shut down. Why is obfuscation never an option? What if you had separate sites dedicated to each of the following steps: 1. Start a bt site, advertised as a site for baking recipes. Seed the site with tons of existing videos on baking, to increase legitimacy. 2. Create a translator site for each baking-related keyword. For example, "muffins" = "Lost". 3. Write a browser plug-in that translates the baking site into the real torrent site. Who would one sue then? Would it not work simply because the __AA would constantly request torrents to be taken down? I know TPB has a political agenda, so they might not want to do this.. but sites like mininova could have.

callahad 16y ago
It wouldn't work because the first site would still be facilitating copyright infringement, and thus still subject to legal pressure. Calling it by a code-name doesn't remove its copyright, nor does hiding it amongst legally redistributable torrents. Simply put, you'd sue everyone involved in the creation of that infrastructure. The second site and the guy who wrote the browser plugin may be able to escape unscathed, but the first site would be in exactly the same predicament as The Pirate Bay, Mininova, etc., except with the added bonus of trying to hide what they were doing. That wouldn't go over well in court.
someone_here 16y ago
The hot plate bay
zacharypinter 16y ago
Reminds me of the Napster pig latin stunts: http://www.celticguitarmusic.com/Mland_napster.htm http://www.celticguitarmusic.com/Mland_napster.htm Probably wouldn't last that long...

hassenben 16y ago

They need to switch to a complete distributed architecture. Where the site, the tracker, everything is hosted by users. This way, no corporate tools can target them. The "how" is much more complicated though.

dlnovell 16y ago
Maybe the diaspora guys can tackle this in the fall after they've knocked out their distributed fb
- die_sekte 16y ago
  In the fall? Next month. With Ruby® on® Rails®, building a Facebook clone will take mere minutes!
swolchok 16y ago
Poisoning is arguably harder to deal with in a distributed architecture.

jacquesm 16y ago

They'll be back. We've been here before. Also, it's their provider that shut them down, the pirate bay has little to do with that. Weren't they their own provider? Meanwhile if you are looking for the torrent of some linux distro, there is always http://torrindex.com/ http://torrindex.com/

dmn001 16y ago

latest from www.twitter.com/tpb http://newteevee.com/2010/05/17/the-pirate-bay-forced-offline-trading-continues/ http://newteevee.com/2010/05/17/the-pirate-bay-forced-offlin... There are many torrent spiders/indexers that host torrents from many websites. e.g. http://www.torrentz.com/ http://www.torrentz.com/ and nearly all torrents use DHT and multiple trackers. Taking 1 site down temporarily doesn't affect anything.

davidmurphy 16y ago

Call me crazy, but I dislike piracy. Back when I was at my first startup, we found that people pirated our own software, and it stunk. So I don't want to pirate other intellectual property.

danh 16y ago

And now they are back.