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Piratebay strikes back
- bandris 17y agoBREIN appears to have forged evidence. Piratebay files criminal charges against them.
- ash 17y agoThanks for a short summary. But the post was a great read still!
- jacquesm 17y agoaccording to: http://webwereld.nl/nieuws/63922/pirate-bay-doet-aangifte-tegen-brein-en-kuik---update-2.html http://webwereld.nl/nieuws/63922/pirate-bay-doet-aangifte-te... (dutch) Update 22.03 uur: Joris van Manen, advocaat voor de stichting Brein, laat in een reactie weten dat het Experian-rapport voor Brein "geen enkele rol" speelt in de zaak tegen de beheerders. Het was destijds bij een brief aan de rechtbank toegevoegd in de zaak tegen Reservella. "We doen helemaal geen beroep meer op dat rapport. Het is ons bekend dat de gegevens erin niet kloppen." Update 22.25 uur: Tim Kuik zegt in een reactie dat Brein zich inderdaad niet beroept op dat rapport in de zaak tegen de beheerders. Volgens hem is het rapport wel degelijk authentiek en afkomstig van Experian, maar bleek het niet te kloppen. "Dit is afleiding, het zoveelste rookgordijn. Deze jongens blijven verstoppertje spelen. We hebben genoeg bewijs dat de beheerders verantwoordelijk zijn voor The Pirate Bay," aldus Kuik. Persoonlijk doet de aangifte hem weinig. "Sunde zégt dat hij aangifte doet. We weten het nog niet. Ach, ik merk het wel. Van die vorige aangifte is in elk geval ook nooit meer iets vernomen." Translation: Update 22:03: Joris van Manan, legal council for Brein respons that the Experian report is no longer playing "any role" in the case against the owners [of tpb]. The report was added with a letter to the court in the case against Reservella. "We don't base anything on that report. We know that the data in there isn't correct" Update 22:25: Tim Kuik responds that Brein indeed doesn't base anything on that report. According to him the report is authentic and it came from Experian, but it turned out not to be correct. "This is just a distraction, the nth smokecurtain. These boys continue to play hide and seek. We have enough proof that as administrators they are responsible for The Pirate Bay", according to Kuik. He's not bothered personally by the filing of charges. "Sunde says he's going to file. We don't know that yet. I'll fin out about it. That previous filing was never heard from.". -- That may all be true, but I can't believe that the court is going to be happy with a party that has apparently not retracted a report that it knew to contain false information. Also, if Experian says they didn't make that report and Brein says they did, where did it really come from ? If it can be pinned on Brein that they did falsify information it is going to hurt them tremendously. One thing they do is continuously harping on being on the right side of the law, if they falsify evidence then that veil is pierced once and for all. It will be very interesting to see how this plays out over time, but I don't think 'we're not using that report' is going to make this go away.
- aerique 17y agoI'm willing to bet 100 euros that Brein will get away with it.
- potatolicious 17y agoWhat we really need right now is for Experian to come out and present the real report - or to publicly refute that any report was ever requested. If Experian can testify to the tune that Brein falsified the report, then they're in for a real ride.
- puredemo 17y agoOh shit! Have fun with those forgery charges..
- moe 17y agoThis is so hilarious, I'm absoutely loving it. The amount of raw, undistilled incompetence boggles the mind. Fighting a lost case and losing the case is one thing. Forging court documents and losing everything: PRICELESS. It also speaks volumes about the mental capabilities of the individuals at work here. How absurdly stupid do you have to be to forge a document that can be trivially cross-checked with a phone-call at the issuing agency? This is not something where you can weasel out later with an "oops, didn't mean to". It's plain out fraud and I don't think judges have much humor in that regard. Anyways, I think I'm gonna forge me a nice tax-return statement now and sue my state over it...
- arithmetic 17y agoHilarious! This is worthy of a movie. Or a soap opera at the minimum.
- anApple 17y agoTo be honest, I hope these guys are going to jail. You must be a fool to believe that they don't own the pirate bay anymore, or are not associated with the keyman islands shell company running the company. Alone mininova disclosed making > 1 million of profit a year, piratebay's profit must be much bigger, all from the copyrighted works of others. Most of you wouldn't support piratebay anymore if your program/source code showed up there, except if it's opensource.
- rimantas 17y agoexcept that source code couldn't possibly show on piratebay.
- Quarrelsome 17y agoWith source code the major economic benefit is understanding and being able to modify that code, less so the code itself. Source code available on pirate bay is useless unless someone spends a lot of time / money on figuring out how it works. This is why people can write in scripting languages without worrying about the "openness" of the source.
- eli 17y agoIt's disappointing that so many people are downvoting this comment just because they disagree with you. I think the truth is more nuanced than that, but you have a perfectly valid opinion.
- diablo_r 17y agoThis war is already lost for copyrights protectors, the question is when they stop bother us.
- Keyframe 17y agoBy us, people who steal stuff?
- callahad 17y agoThe tactics involved in "defending" copyright do more to inconvenience legitimate consumers than pirates.
- omouse 17y ago^^This! Bittorrent is possibly the best distribution system ever. There is no DRM, there are no checks to see if you're in the right country, there's nothing stopping you from getting exactly what you want. Movies for example...some people hate the extra/bonus features on DVDs and just want to see the damned movie while others like them. Why don't movie companies distribute two different versions? Also, what about letting people in all sorts of countries download or watch things? This is possibly the worst thing for me because I'm Canadian.
- jrockway 17y agoIndeed. I would not mind paying for movies, but the studios won't let me. My computer runs the wrong operating system, my HDMI cable is not the right kind, the movie isn't for sale in my country, etc., etc. OK fine, I will just download it instead. All that anti-piracy protection gave me no option but to pirate the movie. Oh, the irony. (I could "just do without", but why should I suffer for the studio's mistakes?)
- bullseye 17y agoI think this argument is disingenuous. We as consumers do not have any "right" to copyrighted content. If you can't watch a movie because of some distribution problem, so what? It's their loss because they've alienated a purchaser, but it still doesn't mean you are entitled to it. I am very against DRM on content I have purchased, and I've admittedly "sampled" music that I may or may not have purchased later. But I've never violated digital rights because I felt like I had some sort of privilege to do so. I would love to see an overhaul of the industry, but until we do, we can play by their rules, or at least be genuine about it when we don’t.
- Luc 17y agoBREIN is the organisation that puts inane 'Downloading is theft' (which it a simple lie, as any lawyer can tell you) commercials at the start of movies in the cinema and on DVD - not possible to skip them of course! Talking down to their paying public like they do, it's like they really WANT people to stop paying for movies and pirate them.
- aerique 17y agoAgreed. Not being able to skip that (and other) crap on DVDs is infuriating! It's really one of my pet peeves.
- eli 17y agoIf you don't mind using a PC as a DVD player, AnyDvd strips all that stuff out (along with region coding and most other DRM)
- cracki 17y agoand then you burn the stripped video back and put it in your home theater.
- eli 17y agoGood point. I've actually got an old Thinkpad hooked up to my TV. It works better than you might think. The dock has HDMI and it puts out a full 1080.
- listic 17y agoWould you please elaborate: which Thinkpad and dock models are those? I was not aware that there is such thing as dock with HDMI.
- eli 17y agoApologies! I meant DVI (along with a DVI->HDMI cable). But as far as I can tell, that's just as good. All digital signal and it looks crisp on my HD TV. It's a T43/p. I believe the /p is important since the regular T43 had a crap graphics card. And I think it's a ThinkPad Port Replicator II (like $20 on ebay). Getting the drivers for the DVI port just right under Linux took some work though.
- maxer 17y agoI'm happy for the guys behind pirate bay they are making a killing, every time an article like this crops up on pages like this or digg/reddit its more marketing. start-ups take note- controversial is king!
- tom_rath 17y agoSoftware start-ups should in particular note: If you're selling B2C and your target market is technically savvy, the folks who will pirate and distribute your work are considered heroes by many you've hoped to sell to.
- CamperBob 17y agoThey provide a better product for less money. That's called capitalism. The fact that it's my product is unfortunate, but ultimately, I have to compete with them. I can only do that if I can make it easier to deal with my company than with the Pirate Bay. (Which is exactly how iTunes and Spotify work, for instance. You can compete with free: you do it by being convenient, and by finding ways to add value where it wouldn't otherwise exist.) I've downloaded quite a bit of stuff from various torrent sites, but you know what's funny? I've never downloaded anything that I could have purchased from the copyright holder instead. Whose fault is that?
- stavrianos 17y agoIs there actually controversy here? I thought that the anti-piracy boys had more or less entrenched themselves as antagonists in the public mindset.
- maxer 17y agolook at it from both sides- wouldnt be in court if it wasnt controversial
- dustingetz 17y agolol, yes it would
- vizzy 17y agowell, it's good to believe Reservella is not connected to TPB, but it must be run and owned by someone. TPB claims that the ownership was transferred to this company in 2006. Now how they can be continually discussing a sale of TPB if they don't own it? Anonymous offshore companies are useless under the scrutiny they get. Sooner or latter it will be known who controls it and in this case, I believe, to our major disappointment.
- hapless 17y ago" it's good to believe Reservella is not connected to TPB, but it must be run and owned by someone. " That's true in most European countries, but in the U.S. and certain other areas, it is in fact possible to have a company with not just anonymous ownership, but NO owner. You can structure a company such that all stock works something like a bearer bond: whoever happens to hold the piece of paper is the owner.
- pyre 17y ago> Now how they can be continually discussing a sale of TPB if they don't own it? So far as I know none of the people that are being charged here stand to gain any money from the sale of ThePirateBay. The company that owns it is the one that stands to profit. This was my impression ever since I heard about the possible sale.
- tjogin 17y agoYou don't have to own something to discuss a sale of it.
- berntb 17y agoCharging people in courts far away... the defendants not even knowing about it (or even two courts with hearings at the same time!) Isn't that what the Scientology church do?
- dschobel 17y agoIt happens. You can even serve legal notice "by publication". So if you can't track someone down and the judge approves it, it's perfectly legal to serve notice by posting an ad in the local newspaper (which of course the recipient will never see). If this weren't the case, screening your mail judiciously would be the ultimate legal defense against all civil litigation.
- pyre 17y agoIsn't that why there is a business to serving subpoenas? Couldn't this be utilized in the same way?
- paul9290 17y agoAny US citizens use Pirate Bay less? I applaud them for forcing media's hand which prompted great sites like Hulu and Justin.TV(lol - best of the bunch). It maybe time to throw in the towel; downloading no longer cuts it for me, prefer streaming.