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How the US Pushed Sweden to Take Down the Pirate Bay

701 points by pawal 9y ago

upofadown 9y ago
Canada has been on the 301 watch list for a long time now. There have been some attempts to get off it (theatre camcording law) but it turned out that that the real reason a country is put on the list is a lack of fawning obedience to the US copyright cartel. A country that is perceived to not be toeing the line is put on the list. If there no actual policy reason to be there the copyright cartel just makes stuff up. So these days the list is meaningless and is roundly ignored by Canada. Sweden probably should of did the same thing.
ronjouch 9y ago
Honest question: why is this surprising / newsworthy?
- zdkl 9y ago
  It's important to not forget what the web used to be, in order to have some context for what it's becoming (see Net Neutrality).
- jacobush 9y ago
  At least to me a Swede, this [datacenter] "... was raided by 65 Swedish police officers" is so incredibly out of touch with normal reality in this country, on so many levels. * Copyright infringement case assigned to that many officers? Unheard of. High profile murder investigations don't get that many. * We have this peculiar law, that ministers are NOT TO meddle in the running of government agencies. Yet, this is what we got. * From cautious "see what happens" attitude among prosecutors with regards to copyright infringement and copying for personal use - to a big leap: not only an attempted (though only partially successful) witch hunt of Pirate Bay founders, but also inventing a whole new crime, called "accessory to copyright infringement". Not that I don't agree that what Pirate Bay did was at times shady, but the whole thing made me believe without a doubt a few things: - US as a case of "wag the dog". The trade associations (RIAA etc) in the US can easily make the state do their bidding. And the US state as an institution is quite weak, when it does these things so quickly. What that implies, is that there is no thinking things through. No serious cost/benefit analysis can possibly have been made. "How much ill will from foreign countries is this move worth? Fuck that, do it now." - That Sweden would be pushed around so quickly. I must have been naive, but it was surprising how not even a symbolic attempt at saving face was made here. Our domestic response was decisive and swift. Can't help but make you wonder what we could be made to do to ourselves over something more serious than fucking copyright infringement. Dance, monkey, dance.
  - staticelf 9y ago
    Yes especially when pretty much all other crimes except murder and stuff like that are disregarded nowadays. Swedens judicial system is completely broken.
    - draugadrotten 9y ago
      ...And police officers and whistleblowers like Peter Springare that dares to speak out about it are ostracized and made persona non grata.
    - jacobush 9y ago
      Though I agree with much of that, I didn't want to conflate what happened 10 years ago with the current situation. The current situation needs it's own whole topic/thread. Edit: though now we are talking about current situation anyway, I feel there is a chance to turn things around for the better. But it would probably involve many very big adjustments, one being massively higher salary for police officers. (Like 30% more.)
    - bionoid 9y ago
      Norway is the same for the record. There was a local case recently where the police knocked down an innocent man on the street, handcuffed him, and charged him with assaulting a police officer. There were something like 30 eye witnesses, still he lost in court, police clearly giving false testimony. Luckily he did win the appeal.
      - jacobush 9y ago
        "Luckily he did win the appeal." ... so system is not broken? Edit: I misunderstood. I thought the officers were punished. Sorry.
        bionoid 9y ago
        They knocked him down on the street, arrested him, charged him, dragged him through two years of trials. After winning the appeal, the chief of police mocked him openly and called him a liar. There was ZERO repercussions for any of the involved officers. That's not broken? edit: and you could look up the historical cases like Tonny Askevold. Charges of first-degree murder was dropped. The police can and will do whatever the fuck they want.
- thomastjeffery 9y ago
  It need not be "surprising" to be worthy of discussion. The fact that the US has so much control over international copyright law enforcement is a big deal. The fact that a site that does not host copyrighted material was taken down in the name of copyright law is a big deal.
  - erikb 9y ago
    What he says is not that he doesn't know it. What he says is that everybody knows it since years and the article doesn't contain anything that hasn't been known already. I wouldn't fully agree with that, but his question is quite clear, imo.
    - aquadrop 9y ago
      Well, since it was about things that long ago, new people grew up for whom that might be newsworthy.
- icantdrive55 9y ago
  I didn't know about this 301 list that US corporations threaten other counties with. It looks like Finland made the list because it refuses to pay more for a drug than the cheapest generic. (I don't know why this is a bad thing? I guess it's bad for certain Pharmaceutical companies?) And China is a 301 favorite, but we still do so much business with them? We used this list to scare Sweden into doing something about The Pirate Bay.
- fsloth 9y ago
  Because exposition of abuse of power requires proven concrete examples.
- jokoon 9y ago
  It confirms that american businesses can apply pressure on a geopolitical and diplomatic level, which is scary. Laws should apply to their own countries. If a foreign business can influence how the law is applied, it should be perceived as the US doing things that should be out of its reach. That's something empires do, and if they keep doing it, it will taint a bad image on the US.
louhike 9y ago
I've discovered some days ago that the thepiratebay.org domain was available again. Is it linked to the original one or is it just a proxy?
- kowdermeister 9y ago
  I use it often so somebody keeps it running, actually there are dozens of mirrors running on various ccTLD-s. The source must be available somewhere online so you can spin up your own instance.
  - Mayzie 9y ago
    It is. As The Pirate Bay don't host any .torrent files, only magnet links, on memory the entire site came to under 200mb.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- callesgg 9y ago
  It was only down for a few months. I have read that other people are running the website these days. It has degraded a bit but essentially it works fine most of the time.
- Strom 9y ago
  What do you mean by again? Was it blocked by your ISP previously, or do you mean that it used to redirect to others like .se? Because I'm pretty sure the .org domain has continuously worked for me since 2004 when it was registered.
jesperlang 9y ago
Wow, 10 years ago already? This was quite big here in Sweden back when it happened. It's scary how quickly these things slip out of our conscience (at least mine). It's chilling what you can get away with by just staying cool for while... Or is the short term damage in PR not worth waiting it out for the long?
realusername 9y ago
I remember the piratebay trial being a gigantic farce where some of the judges had ties to copyright organisations. It's crazy how much power have these mafia-like organisations. (edit: spelling)
- draugadrotten 9y ago
  The judge was Thomas Norström. Swedish public radio revealed that the judge, Thomas Norström, is a member of several copyright protection associations, whose members include Monique Wadsted and Peter Danowsky – attorneys who represented the music and movie industries in the case. According to the report, Judge Norström also serves as a board member on one of the groups of which Mrs. Wadsted, the Motion Picture Association of America’s attorney, is a member. That this passed without causing a conflict of interest is astonishing. https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2009/0423/pirate-bay-judge-under-fire-for-conflict-of-interest https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2009/0423/pirate... Also worth mentioning is that the lead investigating police got a job from Warner Brothers very soon after the trial was successful. Thank you, job well done. https://techcrunch.com/2008/04/18/officer-who-investigated-pirate-bay-took-job-with-warner-brothers-will-still-testify-against-pirate-bay/ https://techcrunch.com/2008/04/18/officer-who-investigated-p... In recent news, the chair of Swedens Supreme court judge Stefan Lindskog has been implied in shady financial transactions, and is under investigation by the police. The belief we once had that Sweden had a low level of corruption can be put to history. And of course even having a low level still means there is some corruption. https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/polisen-utreder-hogsta-domstolens-ordforande/ https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/polisen-utreder-hogsta-doms... YMMV.
  - paradoja 9y ago
    It is my impression that corruption measures usually indicate corruption available or actively done by normal people without power (eg. bribing officers to get licenses or similar things). Corruption by big corporations and similar things is usually another thing (although if things are corrupt in the low level, they will for sure be in the higher levels).
  - marksomnian 9y ago
wimagguc 9y ago
To remove pirated movies from the interwebs there are two options really: either attack content providers / trackers etc, or, find the users directly. In Germany, as soon as you start a torrent client, your traffic is being monitored by bots and agents, and if you upload something inappropriate you (or your host) will get a letter from a law firm with a heavy fine. (I know of two friends who had to pay $600 and $3000.)
- scandinavegan 9y ago
  At least a few years ago in Sweden, all cases where someone had payed a fine for downloading pirated material due to such letters was because the person admitted guilt. The anti-piracy organizations had no way of forcing someone to pay, because none of the evidence would hold up in court. They tried to submit screenshots of IP addresses, but since it's easy to spoof it wasn't enough to convict someone. I don't know if this has changed in recent years, as I haven't heard anything about it recently.
- _Codemonkeyism 9y ago
  "In Germany, as soon as you start a torrent client, your traffic is being monitored by bots and agents" How is traffic monitored when I start a client? Don't I need to download/upload something to get monitored? Is the monitoring connected to trackers I download from or ISP monitored? "[...] with a heavy fine." Was it a fine or some kind of fee? ("Abmahngebühr")
  - wimagguc 9y ago
    I'm not familiar with the German legal system but the sum did depend on what they've uploaded. (It was detailed in the letter, if I remember correctly, $600 for half an episode-of-whatever and $3000 for multiple movies.) As for the traffic monitoring, indeed, I'd imagine it to be honeypot tracker where all content/traffic is visible rather than something installed on the ISP side.
    - JohnStrange 9y ago
      No it's not the tracker, it also works for magnet links and people get letters for downloading. There are companies who join the download swarm and register all other downloading parties. That's very easy with bittorrent, since the protocol is (originally) designed for fast download sharing without any regard to anonymity or pseudonymity.[1] The process is not reliable for providing evidence of copyright infringement, though, and the German system mostly works by scare tactics of lawyers - many people don't want to risk a lawsuit even if they could win it. [1] https://torrentfreak.com/thousands-of-spies-are-watching-trackerless-torrents-151004/ https://torrentfreak.com/thousands-of-spies-are-watching-tra...
jakobegger 9y ago
And despite all these efforts, I'm still a happy user of the pirate bay whenever I want to watch something that I can't find on iTunes or Amazon. For me, the Pirate Bay has been the most reliable way to find stuff over the last years, for so many things it's still better than all the paid alternatives that I use. So much money wasted on futile attempts to suppress a website...
- johndoe90 9y ago
  I hope TPB will teach copyright owners a lesson that there's no point and no way to fight piracy.
  - sharmi 9y ago
    For the one TPB that has survived, there are several file sharing websites (decent ones that are actually usable) and torrent sites that have been pulled down and the copyright owners have prevailed. I think this more points to the technical acumen of the ppl behind TPB. I am not taking strong sides against or for fighting piracy. I do hope the greater share of the profits do end up with the original authors and not the content distributors.
    - digi_owl 9y ago
      These days TPB is little more than a indexer of magnet links. I think there was a claim floating around that one could offer all the TPB magnet links in a simple text file that would be a maybe a MB in size.
      - anc84 9y ago
        It's more but not even 100MB: https://archive.org/details/pirate-bay-torrent-dumps-2004-2016 https://archive.org/details/pirate-bay-torrent-dumps-2004-20... This does not include the descriptions though. Also check out https://github.com/sergiotapia/magnetissimo https://github.com/sergiotapia/magnetissimo
      - Teever 9y ago
ploggingdev 9y ago
If you're interested in learning more about The Pirate Bay, the founders and the trial, watch the documentary called TPB AFK (The Pirate Bay : Away From Keyboard) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTOKXCEwo_8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTOKXCEwo_8 One of the founders of TPB, Peter Sunde started: * Njalla (https://njal.la/ https://njal.la/) - a privacy focused domain registration service * Flattr (https://flattr.com/ https://flattr.com/) - a tipping/micropayment service to support content creators * A VPN service - https://ipredator.se/ https://ipredator.se/ Another link that you might find interesting, his interview with Vice : https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/qkjpbd/pirate-bay-founder-peter-sunde-i-have-given-up https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/qkjpbd/pirate-bay...
- Marazan 9y ago
  Does it talk much about the financier Carl Lundström's role in TPB? He never gets mentioned much for some reason* * Because of his far right connections
  - ploggingdev 9y ago
    IIRC it does, but only briefly. He bought advertising space on TPB and it became a controversy. The TPB guys were falsely accused of being right wing extremists for doing business with Carl Lundström.
    - Marazan 9y ago
      Woah, woah. He was a co-defendant at the trial. He was more that just a dude who bought some ad space.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
    - icebraining 9y ago
      The allegations by the prosecution are of a bit more than that: https://gigaom.com/2008/02/02/who-is-the-fourth-man-in-the-pirate-bay-case/ https://gigaom.com/2008/02/02/who-is-the-fourth-man-in-the-p...
fsloth 9y ago
"The new confessions of an economic hitman" by John Perkins is a very good exposition of the close ties of state and corporate powers in the US and how they co-operate to increase the capital wealth of the elite. It's more autobiographical than a research document, and has some unproven claims, but no one has punched holes in the important claims there AFAIK.
madshiva 9y ago
When it's a big player of course they can chase and track you. But when it's your photo, music, YouTube video, so one, ideas, there's no one to protect you to be stolen.
pferde 9y ago
Got to love the 'privacy' instead of 'piracy' typo in the first cable screenshot: "2. Summary. In a visit to Sweden last month to raise the growing concerns about Internet privacy in Sweden, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPA), together with ..."
- gcb0 9y ago
  was it a typo or a huge backdoor of piracy into privacy talks?
coldtea 9y ago
>At the time there were some rumors that Sweden would be placed on the US Trade Representative’s 301 Watch List. This could possibly result in negative trade implications. However, in a cable written April 2006, the US Embassy in Sweden was informed that, while there were concerns, it would not be listed. Not yet at least. “We understand that a specialized organization for enforcement against Internet piracy currently is under consideration,” the cable reads, while mentioning The Pirate Bay once again. Typical, not so subtle, blackmail. One wonders what would happen if, say, the leader of some disclosure website was residing in Sweden and a superpower wanted him... (From a comment below on TPB case: "The judge was Thomas Norström. Swedish public radio revealed that the judge, Thomas Norström, is a member of several copyright protection associations, whose members include Monique Wadsted and Peter Danowsky – attorneys who represented the music and movie industries in the case. According to the report, Judge Norström also serves as a board member on one of the groups of which Mrs. Wadsted, the Motion Picture Association of America’s attorney, is a member." -- hurray for independent justice in any case..)
- robert_foss 9y ago
  Overall the whole series of events was pretty offensive, and it paints the picture of the US being a schoolyard bully.
  - RobertoG 9y ago
    Business as usual, but better the bully than the psychopath. From Wikipedia's "1954_Guatemalan_coup_d'état": "[..] The United Fruit Company (UFC), whose highly profitable business had been affected by the end to exploitative labor practices in Guatemala, engaged in an influential lobbying campaign to persuade the U.S. to overthrow the Guatemalan government. U.S. President Harry Truman authorized Operation PBFORTUNE to topple Árbenz in 1952; although the operation was quickly aborted, it was a precursor to PBSUCCESS." Reading about those things, one get the impression that the Department of State works for the Camber of Commerce, instead of the USA citizens. (1). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27%C3%A...
antigirl 9y ago
do people still use piratebay ? there are better alternatives now
- mac01021 9y ago
  For example?
  - jokoon 9y ago
    DHT indexes, btdig and btdb.io
  - bluetwo 9y ago
    Kodi with Exodus
- kushal812 9y ago
  https://thepiratebay.live https://thepiratebay.live
cup-of-tea 9y ago
The copyright industry has had far too much power for many years now. But when I talk to people about this nobody cares. For most people the products of this industry are just "content" which they use to waste their time so I suppose it makes sense that they don't care too much about it. The tragedy is that the copyright industry controls a large and continually growing part of our culture and their power is only increasing. I was there when a UK music tracker called OiNK's Pink Palace was shut down. The police raided the home of the site owner before dawn and even the home of his father who had no idea what his son was up to. Copyright industry writers wrote the news article, claiming it was "extremely lucrative" and included gems such as "Within a few hours of a popular pre-release track being posted on the OiNK site, hundreds of copies can be found". The site's owner was found not guilty in court several years later, but not before the copyright industry essentially ruined his life. But how does this happen? If you talk to most people they don't understand copyright at all. They think it's some kind of privileged status that you have to pay for, like a trademark or something. Most people are not even aware that they hold copyrights. And why would they? Can the average person summon the police to help protect their copyright? Of course not. It's not even a criminal matter. The police being involved seems nothing short of corruption.
- marcoperaza 9y ago
  He was running a website that revolved around violating millions of copyrights. Why shouldn't he go to jail? What gives you the right to take someone else's painstakingly created artistic creation and give it away for free to thousands of people, depriving them of the exclusive right to sell their own work. Copyright is both a criminal and civil matter. The civil court system is useful for many things, but it is limited to monetary damages, which is not very helpful when the damages are in the millions and the defendant isn't very wealthy. The penal power of the criminal system is not appropriate for individual people downloading music, but it certainly is for a sophisticated operation involving the illegal distribution of millions of copyrighted works to hundreds of thousands of users. == Edit == Some responses, since I'm rate-limited: >In most cases i read about it's more a matter of the current copyright holder versus the facilitator. Not a matter of the creator versus the actual downloader. Two points. 1. How do you think the current copyright holder got the copyright? They acquired it from the creator by either paying in advance or after the fact or as part of some ongoing deal. 2. If you run a market that you know is used almost exclusively by people selling contraband, do you think that's legal just because you're not the buyer or the seller? In case you don't know, it's not, and you'll go to jail just as if you had sold the contraband. >If the defendant isn't wealthy after distributing all that content, is the content worth millions? Or is the government-enforced business model worth millions? Yes, intellectual property isn't worth anything without government enforcement. But we've decided to, as individual societies and as an entire world by treaty, to provide such enforcement, because we think recognizing such property rights is good for our society. And as for the first point, how much you make by violating other people's rights isn't that relevant. If I steal a truckload of iPhones and give them away for free, I still stole them. I realize IP is very different from physical property, but the profit of the crook isn't that relevant in either.
marcoperaza 9y ago
And why shouldn't the US have pressured Sweden to take down the Pirate Bay? The people running that site are openly and proudly flouting copyright laws and allowing American-owned (among other) content to be downloaded without payment to the owners. Very large portions of the US economy are dependent on international enforcement of copyright and patent law. If the US isn't using its leverage over other countries to make them enforce intellectual property laws, then it is failing to protect its citizens' economic security.
- praxeum 9y ago
  Not only that, but the people running TPB has earned millions from advertising revenue, literally earning money off other peoples' work.
- Strom 9y ago
  Yes it might be very much fine from the US perspective to do this. Things change however once you look from the other side. It can easily be in the economic interest of other countries to not pay the US copyright holders, especially 100 years after something was created. So this is not so much about claiming the US is doing something against the interest of US citizens. This is about other country politicans/judges/police being corrupt, taking benefits from USA and acting against the best interests of the people they promised to defend.
ckastner 9y ago
It never ceases to amaze me how much influence the MPAA has. Movies, while extremely popular, don't generate that much money: in 2016, total box office results in the US were under $12bn [1]. That's the entire industry. Apple alone makes that much money in three weeks' time. Amazing, that you can apply such pressure to politics, with so little. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/187069/north-american-box-office-gross-revenue-since-1980/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/187069/north-american-bo...
- digi_owl 9y ago
  It's because so few care about copyright. It is seen as something dry and stodgy that only affect artists and their publishers/labels. This perhaps because once the cassette recorder, never mind the VCR, came to be, most nations on the western side of the wall decided to not go full police state and thus added a "friends and family" clause to their copyright laws. This meant that a person could create a copy, if it was meant for a direct friend or a relative. This avoided having to park a copyright cop in every home in the nation. Never mind that producing analog copies from tape to tape cause of a noticeable loss of content with each generation removed from the original. But the computer, never mind the internet, changed all that. It made mass copying not something that required massive machinery in a warehouse, but something every kid could do in their own home. Especially as bandwidth and storage capacity kept improving at a massive rate. And digital copies do not degrade like an analog one does.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    The organizations also play a game of the Boy Who Cried Wolf. Remember Home Taping Is Killing Music? By their propaganda, the music industry should have died multiple times in the past few decades.
  - slantyyz 9y ago
    >> It's because so few care about copyright. It is seen as something dry and stodgy that only affect artists and their publishers/labels. This is because copyright relates to stuff that's usually intangible. People easily grasp the idea of theft when it comes to tangible, physical stuff. >> And digital copies do not degrade like an analog one does. True, but digital copies are for the most part still stored on media that can degrade, break or malfunction. In the context of places like TPB, digital copies are indeed degraded as they are often uploaded with lossy compression to reduce file size.
koliber 9y ago
Interesting aside: is the redacting technique vulnerable to an analogue of the "timing attack" on certain crypto? The name of the employee in the wires has been redacted. I wonder if the physical size of the redacted box, together with the fact that this is a name, together with a database of public employees, could be used to uncover the identity of the person. By comparing the size of the redacting box with the lines above and below, we can guess that 6-9 characters are masked out (including the space). This is an a rough parallel to a timing attack used against crypto. The DB of public employees could be thought of as a list of candidate inputs. Weak redacting? This reminds me of a law in Poland where a person accused of a crime can not be named. Media will blur out photos and state something to the effect of "Mark W. an executive at XYZ Corp., stands accused of ...". If the accused is a well known actor with a unique first name, this becomes a running joke.
- andrewla 9y ago
  The 2008 Underhanded C Contest [1] had an exercise in "leaky" redaction. The winner, [2], used a very fun approach. [1] http://www.underhanded-c.org/_page_id_17.html http://www.underhanded-c.org/_page_id_17.html [2] http://notanumber.net/archives/54/underhanded-c-the-leaky-redaction http://notanumber.net/archives/54/underhanded-c-the-leaky-re...
Feniks 9y ago
Still up though. I use it every once in a while because its on TOR. My ISP has to block some pirate sites now. I'm from the generation that grew up with digital piracy. I am accustomed to have all media available. From nineties anime shows to strategy guides for videogames.
thriftwy 9y ago
I wonder why isn't there torrent-search-over-DHT yet? I mean, this is known point of vulnerability. Maybe it's because owners of popular bittorrent software don't want that feature?
- jokoon 9y ago
  btdb.io and btdig btdig seems better as it doesn't have annoying pop ups, which are constantly brought up on btdb, even with ublock origin and noscript. I would not be surprised that btdb is buying ads from an ad provider that sell js injections to a MPAA operated third party. btdb is nice because you can sort by seeds, you cannot with btdig. To be honest I stopped using classic torrent indexers entirely since I started using DHT indexes. They have much larger choice. The issue is that you cannot "post" magnets links on the DHT automatically (I think you cannot), so the DHT works as long as people are finding magnets or torrents elsewhere. It's bringing more decentralization, which mean more chaos but much less traceability.
- betterunix2 9y ago
  It did not work terribly well for other networks like Gnutella; it just gets flooded with spam and malware attacks. Good engineers and researchers never had the chance to develop solutions to that problem because the copyright industry delegitimized peer-to-peer and pushed everyone to more centralized systems (by abusing the court system).
beloch 9y ago
I'm sure there are many reading this who have absolutely no sympathy for pirates. They're stealing and that's that. Well, how do you feel about your government blackmailing, extorting, or otherwise "strong-arming" other sovereign nations in order to foist its laws upon them and then hiding that from you? (It really is a minor miracle this cable was released at all.) Is it truly worth stooping to such measures to ensure that Micky Mouse remains copyright protected for all time everywhere? Don't other nations have the right to make their own laws? How would you feel if some other nation foisted it's laws on the U.S. in such a manner? Why does the U.S. government go to such extremes for private enterprise anyways?[1] Piracy is bad. What the U.S. government has done in response is worse. [1]I suggest you google the United Fruit Company's history the next time you're eating a Chiquita banana for a real eye opener.
- Daycrawler 9y ago
  Copyright holders lose customers because of piracy, but that's not stealing. If I sell some object and my logistics is that I sell 3 per months, then I manufacture 3 objects per months and wait for customers to buy them. If someone steals one, then I've only 2 remaining objects. I've the choice between telling the 3rd expected customer that I'm out, or to manufacture one extra, which in any case result in a direct loss of money. I'm a victim of theft. If I'm a film producer and my logistics is that I sell N viewings per month, and someone pirates the movie, then this doesn't interfere with my ability to sell the N viewings to my expected customers. So this isn't theft. Of course, I would like the pirate to be my customer so that I can step up to N+1 viewing per month, but if I want to enforce that I need to turn to who made the copy available to the pirate, which is counterfeit.
- distantsounds 9y ago
  "don't steal, the government hates competition" - some bumper sticker
- thomastjeffery 9y ago
  After decades of extreme propaganda on the subject, most Americans equate piracy to theft, which is obviously untrue. Beyond that, there is a hatred toward piracy that is arguably worse than that of theft. Fighting this propaganda-fueled nonsense is difficult, because piracy, on the surface, is a choice to not pay rightsholders, which is, on the surface, bad. As soon as one digs beneath the surface, however, it is easy to find many neutral, or even good reasons to "pirate" content. The abuse by rightsholders, organizations, and even government in the name of protecting copyright is bad, and not simply on the surface. It is a deep-rooted, malicious system, and people ought to understand that whatever hatred they have toward piracy, they should have ten fold toward anti-piracy.
spodek 9y ago
The framers of the U.S. Constitution knew the risks of the government creating and granting monopolies, however limited. The incentives are to remove the limitations and expand them. The industries formed by these government-granted and defended monopolies have removed most of their limitations and keep growing. We see the benefit to them. They make big blockbusters that people enjoy watching, so we see that benefit. The costs keep growing too, such as this article and the deprivation from the public domain of nearly a century of work. Meanwhile, technology has lowered the costs of production and distribution, making investment for most works unnecessary, obviating the need for a monopoly. Have the costs grown to outweigh the benefits? The monopolists' power can maintain the monopolies past when that point so it's hard to tell, and people with different values will disagree, but this article points in that direction.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
dghughes 9y ago
People aren't stupid they know it's wrong to download a movie or music they didn't buy. But everyone agrees the response by the US law enforcement is overreaching and out of proportion. Convenience is the real reason people went to websites such as the Pirate bay not stealing, people don't buy fast food for their health. The rise of cheap and reliable streaming video websites such as Netflix changed that. That's all anyone wanted a convenient reliable way to legally watch and pay a reasonable amount.
VeronicaJJ123 9y ago
This is the reason why we need countries that will stand up against USA. China's rise in that sense is good.
vinceguidry 9y ago
The copyright industry is a direct arm of American soft power projection into the rest of the world. For the content industry it's about money, but for policy makers and the geopolitical strategists who have the ear of those policy makers, it's about furthering the nation's position in the world. The content industry punches above its weight in getting the government to protect it overseas for this reason.
kwhitefoot 9y ago
> U.S. authorities provide concrete suggestions for improvement I don't think improvement is quite the right word.
parski 9y ago
"In your face, Hollywood."
scopecreep 9y ago
You mean the one I used last night to watch Dunkirk? Great detective work there Lou.
redm 9y ago
I don't understand why there is so much controversy over this. I've been reading about the reasons TPB is a bastion of freedom for years and they read like a list of reasons its ok to cheat on taxes, or put recyclable materials in the compost bin. We all know its illegal in the US, we know TPB knows it, and instead of changing copyright laws, it is continually justified. It feels disingenuous. I'm tired of the same conversation for the last 20 years.
- spraak 9y ago
  20 years seems like a huge exaggeration unless you're talking about something more than just TPB.
  - redm 9y ago
    On the Internet, the conversation about mainstream piracy goes all the way back to Napster (1999).
- thomastjeffery 9y ago
  > We all know its illegal in the US We are talking about Sweden. Illegal is even a stretch here: thepiratebay.org did not, and does not, host copyrighted content. It hosted torrent files, and now hosts magnet links.
ksk 9y ago
It's interesting that even after all the scummy things the movie industry has done, people still desperately want to pirate their content. People who base their opinion on a principled opposition to copyright, should be leading the charge in promoting other means of compensating content creators. Stop signalling how much you desire the copyrighted product, and start signalling how much you desire the non-copyrighted one! IMHO The only people who should be pirating are the people who don't have a principled stance on copyright.
thomastjeffery 9y ago
Let's get one thing straight: Torrent sites do not host content. They host community. The only thing thepiratebay.org, what.cd, kickasstorrents.cr, etc. did or continue to do is the same that a forum or news site like reddit or hackernews does: provide a community with a purpose. While hackernews is a community for discussing news or interesting things, etc. WhatCD was a place for discussing music, quality releases, and sharing good encodings, rather than the transcoded lossy->lossy formats you see flying around most places. Naturally, WhatCD's as a community wasn't concerned with things like copyright owner's profits, etc., even though many of its users certainly were, but simply couldn't find an alternative, as a lot of music is not even to be found, let alone sold in particularly high quality lossless formats. When what.cd was taken down, none of the copies of copyrighted content were deleted. The community was broken up. If piracy is to be considered such a serious crime, taking down torrent trackers is like going to a meeting of known criminals, and - rather than arresting them - evicting them. It has only a minimal effect, as they are free to gather elsewhere. What bothers me the most is that the only thing being dismantled is the thing that clearly contains the most value to individuals, and society at large. Community is a good thing. When WhatCD was taken down, a countless amount of valuable data that could be found practically nowhere else was suddenly destined to be hidden from society at large, and the community it had cultivated was scattered, without a care for what that meant. Sure, quite a few people find that, while using copyright enforcement as a business model, piracy significantly detracts from sales. Sure, there is a culture that undervalues creators, but it is not a black and white problem, and most popular solutions have serious consequences that go practically ignored.
ataturk 9y ago
US copyright laws need to be reined in.
frabbit 9y ago
Why is the name of the official who spearheaded this initiative REDACTED? Is this undercover, spy-type work as opposed to public, legal actions carried out by a legitimate government agency?
paul7986 9y ago
With Net neutrality repealed say hello the blocking sites like this one .. well without a vpn.
l33tbro 9y ago
Funny, the "brand equity" of The Pirate Bay is really something. After over 10 years of use, there's almost a nostalgic bond to the site for me now which makes the downloading of material a familiar ritual with only positive associations. Not necessarily proud of this, just something I've noticed.
belorn 9y ago
Many interesting points which contradict the behavior of the lawyers of said MPA during the court hearings. “However, it is not clear to us what constraints Sweden and even U.S. authorities would be under in pursuing a case like this when the site is legally well advised and studiously avoids storing any copyrighted material.” A focus by the prosecutor was the claim that the founders did not have well legal advice. The idea was to prove to the court that the accused did the infringement knowingly and was aware that what they did was illegal. Here we can read that this supposedly obviousness of wrong doing was not so clear to the very high paid lawyers arguing it. "Both Bodström and Eliasson denied any direct involvement of the Justice Ministry with the work of the police and prosecutors in the Pirate Bay case." That they surely did. It is very illegal for them to directly act in any specific legal case. If it ever was proven it would directly end any political carer. When similar document was earthened it was said that just because the US believe they influenced Swedish politicians it still doesn't mean that they did it, so no proof of foul play has been made.
casualtech 9y ago
I don't care indeed, but someone has to think about the potentials and ecosystem that it could lead. Don't block the possibilities and help them to be in right way.
jmull 9y ago
(rant, sorry in advance) Eh, f--- Pirate Bay and everyone else who makes a living stealing the efforts of others. (And F-you too if you're a supporter/user of theirs.) Of course the various governments were stupid, clumsy, ham-fisted, and in the pockets of corporations. So what else is new? How does that make it OK to steal stuff? People want to talk about what total hipocrite jackasses they are (which is true) to deflect attention from the fact that they are casually and constantly taking stuff they don't have a right to (also true, come on why don't you want to talk about that?!?). If you don't like the terms, prices, availability, etc, of the Taxi reruns they are selling, well, then, don't watch the Taxi reruns. Trust me, despite Danny Devito, you aren't missing much. Likewise for all the pop music, old software, movies and virtually all the other content people are stealing through PB and similar. Is this the stuff you really what you want to sell your integrity out for? Think about it. If you all were mainly -- well, even just somewhat sporadically -- taking enlightening, high-quality stuff with an ounce or 1/2 of cultural importance that was otherwise too expensive, then I might be able to understand. But no. You're just mainly swiping bad superhero movies and video editing software that you'll never learn to use. I think we need to proceed on all the right paths here: 1. yes, the governments and their associated law-enforcement, and regulatory bodies are a-holes who are beholden to petty, stupid, obsolete, obnoxious corporate ip holders. AND 2. Stealing is wrong (and that doesn't change if you are stealing from 1.)
- executesorder66 9y ago
  Piracy is not stealing. If I make an exact copy of your car and drive off in the copy, did I just steal your car?
  - hyperdunc 9y ago
    Yes, the distinction is so obvious and yet it needs to be raised repeatedly.
  - jmull 9y ago
    Your analogy is terrible, but let's go with it: If I spend a million dollars inventing a nice car that can be freely replicated I don't have to sell it for a million dollars to break even. I could sell a copy of it to 1100 people for $1000 each and everyone wins: Nice cars are inexpensive for everyone and I make a living, so I can keep inventing nice things. But if there are 200 pirates among the 1100 who take a copy of the car but don't pay the $1000 things are different. Now I'm selling 900 cars and losing money so I have to do something. Such as: * charge $1200 per car. Pirates win but car buyers lose, to the tune of $200 per car. Don't call it stealing if you don't want to, but your pirates are getting something and someone else has less money as a result. And of course you can't simply raise the price without losing some customers, so this can only go so far. * invest less to make up the difference (making a crappier car). Pirates win and car buyers lose. The pirates don't win as much, though, since they have to drive the crappy cars too. * enact stringent anti-copying mechanisms to try to precent unauthorized copying by pirates. This costs money, raising the price of the cars and is inevitably user hostile. So, again pirates win and customers lose. But again, the pirates don't win as much because they have to deal with the user-hostile anti-copying features as well. Note this is a vicious circle. As piracy makes the product more expensive and crappier, more people will be motivated to pirate rather than pay, causing the product to get even crappier or more expensive. And anything that makes buyers lose also makes my car company lose, with fewer sales at lower prices to less satisfied customers. * Ultimately, I might find I can't make money doing this at all: that there isn't a price high enough to make up for the piracy and low enough that anyone will pay for my crappy cars and I just stop making things altogether. Here pirates lose, buyers lose, and, of course, I lose. Don't call it stealing if you don't want, but you are getting something without paying for it and it is costing other people more money as a result. Not only is your piracy making stuff more expensive for everyone else, it's also making it crappier for everyone and ultimately lead to less nice stuff being available at all.
implosificated 9y ago
I wouldn’t be as miserably ashamed for this as I am, if it weren’t for the fact that the popular artists my country has produced since, oh... 1996? Aren’t worth defending from piracy. You can harp on how there’s no accounting for taste, but the truth is that the industry this sort of thing protects certainly does account for taste, and only invests in the kind of lowest-common-denominator/mass-appeal trash that makes them the most money. And so, we are left to suffer the guilt trip that because we don’t adhere to an honor system of donating funds for better artists (paying and not pirating, copying, stealing, sharing, music and movies), we get the artists we deserve. But that’s clearly not true, because the money made off the garbage produced today, doesn’t make it into any kind of honor system that benefits the interests of better artists. How about producers of bad music and movies demonstrate that they are willing to donate into the honor system first? The profits that the industry sees are not reinvested. The artists, mysteriously, continue to worsen.
ketsa 9y ago
Amazing how Yankees are annoying g the whole world...
kushal812 9y ago
Use this instead https://thepiratebay.live https://thepiratebay.live which is fast and secured. Completly adv free

701 points by pawal 9y ago

Canada has been on the 301 watch list for a long time now. There have been some attempts to get off it (theatre camcording law) but it turned out that that the real reason a country is put on the list is a lack of fawning obedience to the US copyright cartel. A country that is perceived to not be toeing the line is put on the list. If there no actual policy reason to be there the copyright cartel just makes stuff up. So these days the list is meaningless and is roundly ignored by Canada. Sweden probably should of did the same thing.

ronjouch 9y ago

Honest question: why is this surprising / newsworthy?

zdkl 9y ago
It's important to not forget what the web used to be, in order to have some context for what it's becoming (see Net Neutrality).
jacobush 9y ago
At least to me a Swede, this [datacenter] "... was raided by 65 Swedish police officers" is so incredibly out of touch with normal reality in this country, on so many levels. * Copyright infringement case assigned to that many officers? Unheard of. High profile murder investigations don't get that many. * We have this peculiar law, that ministers are NOT TO meddle in the running of government agencies. Yet, this is what we got. * From cautious "see what happens" attitude among prosecutors with regards to copyright infringement and copying for personal use - to a big leap: not only an attempted (though only partially successful) witch hunt of Pirate Bay founders, but also inventing a whole new crime, called "accessory to copyright infringement". Not that I don't agree that what Pirate Bay did was at times shady, but the whole thing made me believe without a doubt a few things: - US as a case of "wag the dog". The trade associations (RIAA etc) in the US can easily make the state do their bidding. And the US state as an institution is quite weak, when it does these things so quickly. What that implies, is that there is no thinking things through. No serious cost/benefit analysis can possibly have been made. "How much ill will from foreign countries is this move worth? Fuck that, do it now." - That Sweden would be pushed around so quickly. I must have been naive, but it was surprising how not even a symbolic attempt at saving face was made here. Our domestic response was decisive and swift. Can't help but make you wonder what we could be made to do to ourselves over something more serious than fucking copyright infringement. Dance, monkey, dance.
- staticelf 9y ago
  Yes especially when pretty much all other crimes except murder and stuff like that are disregarded nowadays. Swedens judicial system is completely broken.
  - draugadrotten 9y ago
    ...And police officers and whistleblowers like Peter Springare that dares to speak out about it are ostracized and made persona non grata.
  - jacobush 9y ago
    Though I agree with much of that, I didn't want to conflate what happened 10 years ago with the current situation. The current situation needs it's own whole topic/thread. Edit: though now we are talking about current situation anyway, I feel there is a chance to turn things around for the better. But it would probably involve many very big adjustments, one being massively higher salary for police officers. (Like 30% more.)
  - bionoid 9y ago
    Norway is the same for the record. There was a local case recently where the police knocked down an innocent man on the street, handcuffed him, and charged him with assaulting a police officer. There were something like 30 eye witnesses, still he lost in court, police clearly giving false testimony. Luckily he did win the appeal.
    - jacobush 9y ago
      "Luckily he did win the appeal." ... so system is not broken? Edit: I misunderstood. I thought the officers were punished. Sorry.
      - bionoid 9y ago
        They knocked him down on the street, arrested him, charged him, dragged him through two years of trials. After winning the appeal, the chief of police mocked him openly and called him a liar. There was ZERO repercussions for any of the involved officers. That's not broken? edit: and you could look up the historical cases like Tonny Askevold. Charges of first-degree murder was dropped. The police can and will do whatever the fuck they want.
thomastjeffery 9y ago
It need not be "surprising" to be worthy of discussion. The fact that the US has so much control over international copyright law enforcement is a big deal. The fact that a site that does not host copyrighted material was taken down in the name of copyright law is a big deal.
- erikb 9y ago
  What he says is not that he doesn't know it. What he says is that everybody knows it since years and the article doesn't contain anything that hasn't been known already. I wouldn't fully agree with that, but his question is quite clear, imo.
  - aquadrop 9y ago
    Well, since it was about things that long ago, new people grew up for whom that might be newsworthy.
icantdrive55 9y ago
I didn't know about this 301 list that US corporations threaten other counties with. It looks like Finland made the list because it refuses to pay more for a drug than the cheapest generic. (I don't know why this is a bad thing? I guess it's bad for certain Pharmaceutical companies?) And China is a 301 favorite, but we still do so much business with them? We used this list to scare Sweden into doing something about The Pirate Bay.
fsloth 9y ago
Because exposition of abuse of power requires proven concrete examples.
jokoon 9y ago
It confirms that american businesses can apply pressure on a geopolitical and diplomatic level, which is scary. Laws should apply to their own countries. If a foreign business can influence how the law is applied, it should be perceived as the US doing things that should be out of its reach. That's something empires do, and if they keep doing it, it will taint a bad image on the US.

louhike 9y ago

I've discovered some days ago that the thepiratebay.org domain was available again. Is it linked to the original one or is it just a proxy?

kowdermeister 9y ago
I use it often so somebody keeps it running, actually there are dozens of mirrors running on various ccTLD-s. The source must be available somewhere online so you can spin up your own instance.
- Mayzie 9y ago
  It is. As The Pirate Bay don't host any .torrent files, only magnet links, on memory the entire site came to under 200mb.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
callesgg 9y ago
It was only down for a few months. I have read that other people are running the website these days. It has degraded a bit but essentially it works fine most of the time.
Strom 9y ago
What do you mean by again? Was it blocked by your ISP previously, or do you mean that it used to redirect to others like .se? Because I'm pretty sure the .org domain has continuously worked for me since 2004 when it was registered.

jesperlang 9y ago

Wow, 10 years ago already? This was quite big here in Sweden back when it happened. It's scary how quickly these things slip out of our conscience (at least mine). It's chilling what you can get away with by just staying cool for while... Or is the short term damage in PR not worth waiting it out for the long?

realusername 9y ago

I remember the piratebay trial being a gigantic farce where some of the judges had ties to copyright organisations. It's crazy how much power have these mafia-like organisations. (edit: spelling)

draugadrotten 9y ago
The judge was Thomas Norström. Swedish public radio revealed that the judge, Thomas Norström, is a member of several copyright protection associations, whose members include Monique Wadsted and Peter Danowsky – attorneys who represented the music and movie industries in the case. According to the report, Judge Norström also serves as a board member on one of the groups of which Mrs. Wadsted, the Motion Picture Association of America’s attorney, is a member. That this passed without causing a conflict of interest is astonishing. https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2009/0423/pirate-bay-judge-under-fire-for-conflict-of-interest https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2009/0423/pirate... Also worth mentioning is that the lead investigating police got a job from Warner Brothers very soon after the trial was successful. Thank you, job well done. https://techcrunch.com/2008/04/18/officer-who-investigated-pirate-bay-took-job-with-warner-brothers-will-still-testify-against-pirate-bay/ https://techcrunch.com/2008/04/18/officer-who-investigated-p... In recent news, the chair of Swedens Supreme court judge Stefan Lindskog has been implied in shady financial transactions, and is under investigation by the police. The belief we once had that Sweden had a low level of corruption can be put to history. And of course even having a low level still means there is some corruption. https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/polisen-utreder-hogsta-domstolens-ordforande/ https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/polisen-utreder-hogsta-doms... YMMV.
- paradoja 9y ago
  It is my impression that corruption measures usually indicate corruption available or actively done by normal people without power (eg. bribing officers to get licenses or similar things). Corruption by big corporations and similar things is usually another thing (although if things are corrupt in the low level, they will for sure be in the higher levels).
- marksomnian 9y ago

wimagguc 9y ago

To remove pirated movies from the interwebs there are two options really: either attack content providers / trackers etc, or, find the users directly. In Germany, as soon as you start a torrent client, your traffic is being monitored by bots and agents, and if you upload something inappropriate you (or your host) will get a letter from a law firm with a heavy fine. (I know of two friends who had to pay $600 and $3000.)

scandinavegan 9y ago
At least a few years ago in Sweden, all cases where someone had payed a fine for downloading pirated material due to such letters was because the person admitted guilt. The anti-piracy organizations had no way of forcing someone to pay, because none of the evidence would hold up in court. They tried to submit screenshots of IP addresses, but since it's easy to spoof it wasn't enough to convict someone. I don't know if this has changed in recent years, as I haven't heard anything about it recently.
_Codemonkeyism 9y ago
"In Germany, as soon as you start a torrent client, your traffic is being monitored by bots and agents" How is traffic monitored when I start a client? Don't I need to download/upload something to get monitored? Is the monitoring connected to trackers I download from or ISP monitored? "[...] with a heavy fine." Was it a fine or some kind of fee? ("Abmahngebühr")
- wimagguc 9y ago
  I'm not familiar with the German legal system but the sum did depend on what they've uploaded. (It was detailed in the letter, if I remember correctly, $600 for half an episode-of-whatever and $3000 for multiple movies.) As for the traffic monitoring, indeed, I'd imagine it to be honeypot tracker where all content/traffic is visible rather than something installed on the ISP side.
  - JohnStrange 9y ago
    No it's not the tracker, it also works for magnet links and people get letters for downloading. There are companies who join the download swarm and register all other downloading parties. That's very easy with bittorrent, since the protocol is (originally) designed for fast download sharing without any regard to anonymity or pseudonymity.[1] The process is not reliable for providing evidence of copyright infringement, though, and the German system mostly works by scare tactics of lawyers - many people don't want to risk a lawsuit even if they could win it. [1] https://torrentfreak.com/thousands-of-spies-are-watching-trackerless-torrents-151004/ https://torrentfreak.com/thousands-of-spies-are-watching-tra...

jakobegger 9y ago

And despite all these efforts, I'm still a happy user of the pirate bay whenever I want to watch something that I can't find on iTunes or Amazon. For me, the Pirate Bay has been the most reliable way to find stuff over the last years, for so many things it's still better than all the paid alternatives that I use. So much money wasted on futile attempts to suppress a website...

johndoe90 9y ago
I hope TPB will teach copyright owners a lesson that there's no point and no way to fight piracy.
- sharmi 9y ago
  For the one TPB that has survived, there are several file sharing websites (decent ones that are actually usable) and torrent sites that have been pulled down and the copyright owners have prevailed. I think this more points to the technical acumen of the ppl behind TPB. I am not taking strong sides against or for fighting piracy. I do hope the greater share of the profits do end up with the original authors and not the content distributors.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    These days TPB is little more than a indexer of magnet links. I think there was a claim floating around that one could offer all the TPB magnet links in a simple text file that would be a maybe a MB in size.
    - anc84 9y ago
      It's more but not even 100MB: https://archive.org/details/pirate-bay-torrent-dumps-2004-2016 https://archive.org/details/pirate-bay-torrent-dumps-2004-20... This does not include the descriptions though. Also check out https://github.com/sergiotapia/magnetissimo https://github.com/sergiotapia/magnetissimo
    - Teever 9y ago

ploggingdev 9y ago

If you're interested in learning more about The Pirate Bay, the founders and the trial, watch the documentary called TPB AFK (The Pirate Bay : Away From Keyboard) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTOKXCEwo_8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTOKXCEwo_8 One of the founders of TPB, Peter Sunde started: * Njalla (https://njal.la/ https://njal.la/) - a privacy focused domain registration service * Flattr (https://flattr.com/ https://flattr.com/) - a tipping/micropayment service to support content creators * A VPN service - https://ipredator.se/ https://ipredator.se/ Another link that you might find interesting, his interview with Vice : https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/qkjpbd/pirate-bay-founder-peter-sunde-i-have-given-up https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/qkjpbd/pirate-bay...

Marazan 9y ago
Does it talk much about the financier Carl Lundström's role in TPB? He never gets mentioned much for some reason* * Because of his far right connections
- ploggingdev 9y ago
  IIRC it does, but only briefly. He bought advertising space on TPB and it became a controversy. The TPB guys were falsely accused of being right wing extremists for doing business with Carl Lundström.
  - Marazan 9y ago
    Woah, woah. He was a co-defendant at the trial. He was more that just a dude who bought some ad space.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - icebraining 9y ago
    The allegations by the prosecution are of a bit more than that: https://gigaom.com/2008/02/02/who-is-the-fourth-man-in-the-pirate-bay-case/ https://gigaom.com/2008/02/02/who-is-the-fourth-man-in-the-p...

fsloth 9y ago

"The new confessions of an economic hitman" by John Perkins is a very good exposition of the close ties of state and corporate powers in the US and how they co-operate to increase the capital wealth of the elite. It's more autobiographical than a research document, and has some unproven claims, but no one has punched holes in the important claims there AFAIK.

madshiva 9y ago

When it's a big player of course they can chase and track you. But when it's your photo, music, YouTube video, so one, ideas, there's no one to protect you to be stolen.

pferde 9y ago

Got to love the 'privacy' instead of 'piracy' typo in the first cable screenshot: "2. Summary. In a visit to Sweden last month to raise the growing concerns about Internet privacy in Sweden, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPA), together with ..."

gcb0 9y ago
was it a typo or a huge backdoor of piracy into privacy talks?

coldtea 9y ago

>At the time there were some rumors that Sweden would be placed on the US Trade Representative’s 301 Watch List. This could possibly result in negative trade implications. However, in a cable written April 2006, the US Embassy in Sweden was informed that, while there were concerns, it would not be listed. Not yet at least. “We understand that a specialized organization for enforcement against Internet piracy currently is under consideration,” the cable reads, while mentioning The Pirate Bay once again. Typical, not so subtle, blackmail. One wonders what would happen if, say, the leader of some disclosure website was residing in Sweden and a superpower wanted him... (From a comment below on TPB case: "The judge was Thomas Norström. Swedish public radio revealed that the judge, Thomas Norström, is a member of several copyright protection associations, whose members include Monique Wadsted and Peter Danowsky – attorneys who represented the music and movie industries in the case. According to the report, Judge Norström also serves as a board member on one of the groups of which Mrs. Wadsted, the Motion Picture Association of America’s attorney, is a member." -- hurray for independent justice in any case..)

robert_foss 9y ago
Overall the whole series of events was pretty offensive, and it paints the picture of the US being a schoolyard bully.
- RobertoG 9y ago
  Business as usual, but better the bully than the psychopath. From Wikipedia's "1954_Guatemalan_coup_d'état": "[..] The United Fruit Company (UFC), whose highly profitable business had been affected by the end to exploitative labor practices in Guatemala, engaged in an influential lobbying campaign to persuade the U.S. to overthrow the Guatemalan government. U.S. President Harry Truman authorized Operation PBFORTUNE to topple Árbenz in 1952; although the operation was quickly aborted, it was a precursor to PBSUCCESS." Reading about those things, one get the impression that the Department of State works for the Camber of Commerce, instead of the USA citizens. (1). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27%C3%A...

antigirl 9y ago

do people still use piratebay ? there are better alternatives now

mac01021 9y ago
For example?
- jokoon 9y ago
  DHT indexes, btdig and btdb.io
- bluetwo 9y ago
  Kodi with Exodus
kushal812 9y ago
https://thepiratebay.live https://thepiratebay.live

cup-of-tea 9y ago

The copyright industry has had far too much power for many years now. But when I talk to people about this nobody cares. For most people the products of this industry are just "content" which they use to waste their time so I suppose it makes sense that they don't care too much about it. The tragedy is that the copyright industry controls a large and continually growing part of our culture and their power is only increasing. I was there when a UK music tracker called OiNK's Pink Palace was shut down. The police raided the home of the site owner before dawn and even the home of his father who had no idea what his son was up to. Copyright industry writers wrote the news article, claiming it was "extremely lucrative" and included gems such as "Within a few hours of a popular pre-release track being posted on the OiNK site, hundreds of copies can be found". The site's owner was found not guilty in court several years later, but not before the copyright industry essentially ruined his life. But how does this happen? If you talk to most people they don't understand copyright at all. They think it's some kind of privileged status that you have to pay for, like a trademark or something. Most people are not even aware that they hold copyrights. And why would they? Can the average person summon the police to help protect their copyright? Of course not. It's not even a criminal matter. The police being involved seems nothing short of corruption.

marcoperaza 9y ago
He was running a website that revolved around violating millions of copyrights. Why shouldn't he go to jail? What gives you the right to take someone else's painstakingly created artistic creation and give it away for free to thousands of people, depriving them of the exclusive right to sell their own work. Copyright is both a criminal and civil matter. The civil court system is useful for many things, but it is limited to monetary damages, which is not very helpful when the damages are in the millions and the defendant isn't very wealthy. The penal power of the criminal system is not appropriate for individual people downloading music, but it certainly is for a sophisticated operation involving the illegal distribution of millions of copyrighted works to hundreds of thousands of users. == Edit == Some responses, since I'm rate-limited: >In most cases i read about it's more a matter of the current copyright holder versus the facilitator. Not a matter of the creator versus the actual downloader. Two points. 1. How do you think the current copyright holder got the copyright? They acquired it from the creator by either paying in advance or after the fact or as part of some ongoing deal. 2. If you run a market that you know is used almost exclusively by people selling contraband, do you think that's legal just because you're not the buyer or the seller? In case you don't know, it's not, and you'll go to jail just as if you had sold the contraband. >If the defendant isn't wealthy after distributing all that content, is the content worth millions? Or is the government-enforced business model worth millions? Yes, intellectual property isn't worth anything without government enforcement. But we've decided to, as individual societies and as an entire world by treaty, to provide such enforcement, because we think recognizing such property rights is good for our society. And as for the first point, how much you make by violating other people's rights isn't that relevant. If I steal a truckload of iPhones and give them away for free, I still stole them. I realize IP is very different from physical property, but the profit of the crook isn't that relevant in either.

marcoperaza 9y ago

And why shouldn't the US have pressured Sweden to take down the Pirate Bay? The people running that site are openly and proudly flouting copyright laws and allowing American-owned (among other) content to be downloaded without payment to the owners. Very large portions of the US economy are dependent on international enforcement of copyright and patent law. If the US isn't using its leverage over other countries to make them enforce intellectual property laws, then it is failing to protect its citizens' economic security.

praxeum 9y ago
Not only that, but the people running TPB has earned millions from advertising revenue, literally earning money off other peoples' work.
Strom 9y ago
Yes it might be very much fine from the US perspective to do this. Things change however once you look from the other side. It can easily be in the economic interest of other countries to not pay the US copyright holders, especially 100 years after something was created. So this is not so much about claiming the US is doing something against the interest of US citizens. This is about other country politicans/judges/police being corrupt, taking benefits from USA and acting against the best interests of the people they promised to defend.

ckastner 9y ago

It never ceases to amaze me how much influence the MPAA has. Movies, while extremely popular, don't generate that much money: in 2016, total box office results in the US were under $12bn [1]. That's the entire industry. Apple alone makes that much money in three weeks' time. Amazing, that you can apply such pressure to politics, with so little. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/187069/north-american-box-office-gross-revenue-since-1980/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/187069/north-american-bo...

digi_owl 9y ago
It's because so few care about copyright. It is seen as something dry and stodgy that only affect artists and their publishers/labels. This perhaps because once the cassette recorder, never mind the VCR, came to be, most nations on the western side of the wall decided to not go full police state and thus added a "friends and family" clause to their copyright laws. This meant that a person could create a copy, if it was meant for a direct friend or a relative. This avoided having to park a copyright cop in every home in the nation. Never mind that producing analog copies from tape to tape cause of a noticeable loss of content with each generation removed from the original. But the computer, never mind the internet, changed all that. It made mass copying not something that required massive machinery in a warehouse, but something every kid could do in their own home. Especially as bandwidth and storage capacity kept improving at a massive rate. And digital copies do not degrade like an analog one does.
- icebraining 9y ago
  The organizations also play a game of the Boy Who Cried Wolf. Remember Home Taping Is Killing Music? By their propaganda, the music industry should have died multiple times in the past few decades.
- slantyyz 9y ago
  >> It's because so few care about copyright. It is seen as something dry and stodgy that only affect artists and their publishers/labels. This is because copyright relates to stuff that's usually intangible. People easily grasp the idea of theft when it comes to tangible, physical stuff. >> And digital copies do not degrade like an analog one does. True, but digital copies are for the most part still stored on media that can degrade, break or malfunction. In the context of places like TPB, digital copies are indeed degraded as they are often uploaded with lossy compression to reduce file size.

koliber 9y ago

Interesting aside: is the redacting technique vulnerable to an analogue of the "timing attack" on certain crypto? The name of the employee in the wires has been redacted. I wonder if the physical size of the redacted box, together with the fact that this is a name, together with a database of public employees, could be used to uncover the identity of the person. By comparing the size of the redacting box with the lines above and below, we can guess that 6-9 characters are masked out (including the space). This is an a rough parallel to a timing attack used against crypto. The DB of public employees could be thought of as a list of candidate inputs. Weak redacting? This reminds me of a law in Poland where a person accused of a crime can not be named. Media will blur out photos and state something to the effect of "Mark W. an executive at XYZ Corp., stands accused of ...". If the accused is a well known actor with a unique first name, this becomes a running joke.

andrewla 9y ago
The 2008 Underhanded C Contest [1] had an exercise in "leaky" redaction. The winner, [2], used a very fun approach. [1] http://www.underhanded-c.org/_page_id_17.html http://www.underhanded-c.org/_page_id_17.html [2] http://notanumber.net/archives/54/underhanded-c-the-leaky-redaction http://notanumber.net/archives/54/underhanded-c-the-leaky-re...

Feniks 9y ago

Still up though. I use it every once in a while because its on TOR. My ISP has to block some pirate sites now. I'm from the generation that grew up with digital piracy. I am accustomed to have all media available. From nineties anime shows to strategy guides for videogames.

thriftwy 9y ago

I wonder why isn't there torrent-search-over-DHT yet? I mean, this is known point of vulnerability. Maybe it's because owners of popular bittorrent software don't want that feature?

jokoon 9y ago
btdb.io and btdig btdig seems better as it doesn't have annoying pop ups, which are constantly brought up on btdb, even with ublock origin and noscript. I would not be surprised that btdb is buying ads from an ad provider that sell js injections to a MPAA operated third party. btdb is nice because you can sort by seeds, you cannot with btdig. To be honest I stopped using classic torrent indexers entirely since I started using DHT indexes. They have much larger choice. The issue is that you cannot "post" magnets links on the DHT automatically (I think you cannot), so the DHT works as long as people are finding magnets or torrents elsewhere. It's bringing more decentralization, which mean more chaos but much less traceability.
betterunix2 9y ago
It did not work terribly well for other networks like Gnutella; it just gets flooded with spam and malware attacks. Good engineers and researchers never had the chance to develop solutions to that problem because the copyright industry delegitimized peer-to-peer and pushed everyone to more centralized systems (by abusing the court system).

beloch 9y ago

I'm sure there are many reading this who have absolutely no sympathy for pirates. They're stealing and that's that. Well, how do you feel about your government blackmailing, extorting, or otherwise "strong-arming" other sovereign nations in order to foist its laws upon them and then hiding that from you? (It really is a minor miracle this cable was released at all.) Is it truly worth stooping to such measures to ensure that Micky Mouse remains copyright protected for all time everywhere? Don't other nations have the right to make their own laws? How would you feel if some other nation foisted it's laws on the U.S. in such a manner? Why does the U.S. government go to such extremes for private enterprise anyways?[1] Piracy is bad. What the U.S. government has done in response is worse. [1]I suggest you google the United Fruit Company's history the next time you're eating a Chiquita banana for a real eye opener.

Daycrawler 9y ago
Copyright holders lose customers because of piracy, but that's not stealing. If I sell some object and my logistics is that I sell 3 per months, then I manufacture 3 objects per months and wait for customers to buy them. If someone steals one, then I've only 2 remaining objects. I've the choice between telling the 3rd expected customer that I'm out, or to manufacture one extra, which in any case result in a direct loss of money. I'm a victim of theft. If I'm a film producer and my logistics is that I sell N viewings per month, and someone pirates the movie, then this doesn't interfere with my ability to sell the N viewings to my expected customers. So this isn't theft. Of course, I would like the pirate to be my customer so that I can step up to N+1 viewing per month, but if I want to enforce that I need to turn to who made the copy available to the pirate, which is counterfeit.
distantsounds 9y ago
"don't steal, the government hates competition" - some bumper sticker
thomastjeffery 9y ago
After decades of extreme propaganda on the subject, most Americans equate piracy to theft, which is obviously untrue. Beyond that, there is a hatred toward piracy that is arguably worse than that of theft. Fighting this propaganda-fueled nonsense is difficult, because piracy, on the surface, is a choice to not pay rightsholders, which is, on the surface, bad. As soon as one digs beneath the surface, however, it is easy to find many neutral, or even good reasons to "pirate" content. The abuse by rightsholders, organizations, and even government in the name of protecting copyright is bad, and not simply on the surface. It is a deep-rooted, malicious system, and people ought to understand that whatever hatred they have toward piracy, they should have ten fold toward anti-piracy.

spodek 9y ago

The framers of the U.S. Constitution knew the risks of the government creating and granting monopolies, however limited. The incentives are to remove the limitations and expand them. The industries formed by these government-granted and defended monopolies have removed most of their limitations and keep growing. We see the benefit to them. They make big blockbusters that people enjoy watching, so we see that benefit. The costs keep growing too, such as this article and the deprivation from the public domain of nearly a century of work. Meanwhile, technology has lowered the costs of production and distribution, making investment for most works unnecessary, obviating the need for a monopoly. Have the costs grown to outweigh the benefits? The monopolists' power can maintain the monopolies past when that point so it's hard to tell, and people with different values will disagree, but this article points in that direction.

deleted 9y ago

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dghughes 9y ago

People aren't stupid they know it's wrong to download a movie or music they didn't buy. But everyone agrees the response by the US law enforcement is overreaching and out of proportion. Convenience is the real reason people went to websites such as the Pirate bay not stealing, people don't buy fast food for their health. The rise of cheap and reliable streaming video websites such as Netflix changed that. That's all anyone wanted a convenient reliable way to legally watch and pay a reasonable amount.

VeronicaJJ123 9y ago

This is the reason why we need countries that will stand up against USA. China's rise in that sense is good.

vinceguidry 9y ago

The copyright industry is a direct arm of American soft power projection into the rest of the world. For the content industry it's about money, but for policy makers and the geopolitical strategists who have the ear of those policy makers, it's about furthering the nation's position in the world. The content industry punches above its weight in getting the government to protect it overseas for this reason.

kwhitefoot 9y ago

> U.S. authorities provide concrete suggestions for improvement I don't think improvement is quite the right word.

parski 9y ago

"In your face, Hollywood."

scopecreep 9y ago

You mean the one I used last night to watch Dunkirk? Great detective work there Lou.

redm 9y ago

I don't understand why there is so much controversy over this. I've been reading about the reasons TPB is a bastion of freedom for years and they read like a list of reasons its ok to cheat on taxes, or put recyclable materials in the compost bin. We all know its illegal in the US, we know TPB knows it, and instead of changing copyright laws, it is continually justified. It feels disingenuous. I'm tired of the same conversation for the last 20 years.

spraak 9y ago
20 years seems like a huge exaggeration unless you're talking about something more than just TPB.
- redm 9y ago
  On the Internet, the conversation about mainstream piracy goes all the way back to Napster (1999).
thomastjeffery 9y ago
> We all know its illegal in the US We are talking about Sweden. Illegal is even a stretch here: thepiratebay.org did not, and does not, host copyrighted content. It hosted torrent files, and now hosts magnet links.

ksk 9y ago

It's interesting that even after all the scummy things the movie industry has done, people still desperately want to pirate their content. People who base their opinion on a principled opposition to copyright, should be leading the charge in promoting other means of compensating content creators. Stop signalling how much you desire the copyrighted product, and start signalling how much you desire the non-copyrighted one! IMHO The only people who should be pirating are the people who don't have a principled stance on copyright.

thomastjeffery 9y ago

Let's get one thing straight: Torrent sites do not host content. They host community. The only thing thepiratebay.org, what.cd, kickasstorrents.cr, etc. did or continue to do is the same that a forum or news site like reddit or hackernews does: provide a community with a purpose. While hackernews is a community for discussing news or interesting things, etc. WhatCD was a place for discussing music, quality releases, and sharing good encodings, rather than the transcoded lossy->lossy formats you see flying around most places. Naturally, WhatCD's as a community wasn't concerned with things like copyright owner's profits, etc., even though many of its users certainly were, but simply couldn't find an alternative, as a lot of music is not even to be found, let alone sold in particularly high quality lossless formats. When what.cd was taken down, none of the copies of copyrighted content were deleted. The community was broken up. If piracy is to be considered such a serious crime, taking down torrent trackers is like going to a meeting of known criminals, and - rather than arresting them - evicting them. It has only a minimal effect, as they are free to gather elsewhere. What bothers me the most is that the only thing being dismantled is the thing that clearly contains the most value to individuals, and society at large. Community is a good thing. When WhatCD was taken down, a countless amount of valuable data that could be found practically nowhere else was suddenly destined to be hidden from society at large, and the community it had cultivated was scattered, without a care for what that meant. Sure, quite a few people find that, while using copyright enforcement as a business model, piracy significantly detracts from sales. Sure, there is a culture that undervalues creators, but it is not a black and white problem, and most popular solutions have serious consequences that go practically ignored.

ataturk 9y ago

US copyright laws need to be reined in.

frabbit 9y ago

Why is the name of the official who spearheaded this initiative REDACTED? Is this undercover, spy-type work as opposed to public, legal actions carried out by a legitimate government agency?

paul7986 9y ago

With Net neutrality repealed say hello the blocking sites like this one .. well without a vpn.

l33tbro 9y ago

Funny, the "brand equity" of The Pirate Bay is really something. After over 10 years of use, there's almost a nostalgic bond to the site for me now which makes the downloading of material a familiar ritual with only positive associations. Not necessarily proud of this, just something I've noticed.

belorn 9y ago

Many interesting points which contradict the behavior of the lawyers of said MPA during the court hearings. “However, it is not clear to us what constraints Sweden and even U.S. authorities would be under in pursuing a case like this when the site is legally well advised and studiously avoids storing any copyrighted material.” A focus by the prosecutor was the claim that the founders did not have well legal advice. The idea was to prove to the court that the accused did the infringement knowingly and was aware that what they did was illegal. Here we can read that this supposedly obviousness of wrong doing was not so clear to the very high paid lawyers arguing it. "Both Bodström and Eliasson denied any direct involvement of the Justice Ministry with the work of the police and prosecutors in the Pirate Bay case." That they surely did. It is very illegal for them to directly act in any specific legal case. If it ever was proven it would directly end any political carer. When similar document was earthened it was said that just because the US believe they influenced Swedish politicians it still doesn't mean that they did it, so no proof of foul play has been made.

casualtech 9y ago

I don't care indeed, but someone has to think about the potentials and ecosystem that it could lead. Don't block the possibilities and help them to be in right way.

jmull 9y ago

(rant, sorry in advance) Eh, f--- Pirate Bay and everyone else who makes a living stealing the efforts of others. (And F-you too if you're a supporter/user of theirs.) Of course the various governments were stupid, clumsy, ham-fisted, and in the pockets of corporations. So what else is new? How does that make it OK to steal stuff? People want to talk about what total hipocrite jackasses they are (which is true) to deflect attention from the fact that they are casually and constantly taking stuff they don't have a right to (also true, come on why don't you want to talk about that?!?). If you don't like the terms, prices, availability, etc, of the Taxi reruns they are selling, well, then, don't watch the Taxi reruns. Trust me, despite Danny Devito, you aren't missing much. Likewise for all the pop music, old software, movies and virtually all the other content people are stealing through PB and similar. Is this the stuff you really what you want to sell your integrity out for? Think about it. If you all were mainly -- well, even just somewhat sporadically -- taking enlightening, high-quality stuff with an ounce or 1/2 of cultural importance that was otherwise too expensive, then I might be able to understand. But no. You're just mainly swiping bad superhero movies and video editing software that you'll never learn to use. I think we need to proceed on all the right paths here: 1. yes, the governments and their associated law-enforcement, and regulatory bodies are a-holes who are beholden to petty, stupid, obsolete, obnoxious corporate ip holders. AND 2. Stealing is wrong (and that doesn't change if you are stealing from 1.)

executesorder66 9y ago
Piracy is not stealing. If I make an exact copy of your car and drive off in the copy, did I just steal your car?
- hyperdunc 9y ago
  Yes, the distinction is so obvious and yet it needs to be raised repeatedly.
- jmull 9y ago
  Your analogy is terrible, but let's go with it: If I spend a million dollars inventing a nice car that can be freely replicated I don't have to sell it for a million dollars to break even. I could sell a copy of it to 1100 people for $1000 each and everyone wins: Nice cars are inexpensive for everyone and I make a living, so I can keep inventing nice things. But if there are 200 pirates among the 1100 who take a copy of the car but don't pay the $1000 things are different. Now I'm selling 900 cars and losing money so I have to do something. Such as: * charge $1200 per car. Pirates win but car buyers lose, to the tune of $200 per car. Don't call it stealing if you don't want to, but your pirates are getting something and someone else has less money as a result. And of course you can't simply raise the price without losing some customers, so this can only go so far. * invest less to make up the difference (making a crappier car). Pirates win and car buyers lose. The pirates don't win as much, though, since they have to drive the crappy cars too. * enact stringent anti-copying mechanisms to try to precent unauthorized copying by pirates. This costs money, raising the price of the cars and is inevitably user hostile. So, again pirates win and customers lose. But again, the pirates don't win as much because they have to deal with the user-hostile anti-copying features as well. Note this is a vicious circle. As piracy makes the product more expensive and crappier, more people will be motivated to pirate rather than pay, causing the product to get even crappier or more expensive. And anything that makes buyers lose also makes my car company lose, with fewer sales at lower prices to less satisfied customers. * Ultimately, I might find I can't make money doing this at all: that there isn't a price high enough to make up for the piracy and low enough that anyone will pay for my crappy cars and I just stop making things altogether. Here pirates lose, buyers lose, and, of course, I lose. Don't call it stealing if you don't want, but you are getting something without paying for it and it is costing other people more money as a result. Not only is your piracy making stuff more expensive for everyone else, it's also making it crappier for everyone and ultimately lead to less nice stuff being available at all.

implosificated 9y ago

I wouldn’t be as miserably ashamed for this as I am, if it weren’t for the fact that the popular artists my country has produced since, oh... 1996? Aren’t worth defending from piracy. You can harp on how there’s no accounting for taste, but the truth is that the industry this sort of thing protects certainly does account for taste, and only invests in the kind of lowest-common-denominator/mass-appeal trash that makes them the most money. And so, we are left to suffer the guilt trip that because we don’t adhere to an honor system of donating funds for better artists (paying and not pirating, copying, stealing, sharing, music and movies), we get the artists we deserve. But that’s clearly not true, because the money made off the garbage produced today, doesn’t make it into any kind of honor system that benefits the interests of better artists. How about producers of bad music and movies demonstrate that they are willing to donate into the honor system first? The profits that the industry sees are not reinvested. The artists, mysteriously, continue to worsen.

ketsa 9y ago

Amazing how Yankees are annoying g the whole world...

kushal812 9y ago

Use this instead https://thepiratebay.live https://thepiratebay.live which is fast and secured. Completly adv free