Music Industry Pushing For BT To Block Pirate Bay 175
First time accepted submitter mariocki writes "British music industry body BPI has requested BT block access to Pirate Bay. In response, BT say they will only do so if they receive a court order. But after BT recently lost a court case forcing them to block Newzbin, it looks like it's a case of when — not if — this will happen."
Alternate DNS/routing. (Score:3, Informative)
Methinks alternate DNS and routing methods are about to get a lot more popular in the UK.
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Not even... See this.
http://revk.www.me.uk/2011/11/secret-to-accessing-newzbin2-from-bt.html [www.me.uk]
Re:Alternate DNS/routing. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Alternate DNS/routing. (Score:5, Insightful)
It was in fact the court that ordered BT to use the Cleanfeed filtering system to block the Newzbin2 domain, IP and any others they start using. This is partly because BT argued the cost of setting up and maintaining a new system to do all-port IP range blocking would be too expensive, and was an unwarranted expense to impose on them considering they're (BT) not actually doing anything illegal.
But you're entirely correct that this validates the concerns that any censorship system will eventually be expanded. Now the courts have decided Cleanfeed is suitable for trying to block sites accused of assisting copyright infringement - and will no doubt add the piratebay to the list, how long before they also agree to order BT to start blocking sites accused of promoting terrorism, racial hatred or even just accused of hosting libelous statements? UK courts have already shut down such sites that were UK hosted, now they've a mechanism for doing so for foreign hosted sites.
That it doesn't block ports outside of 80 - including https! - means it's an entirely worthless exercise for the technically savvy, but the same doesn't hold true once political blogs or forums that the less savvy might read start getting blocked.
(Note for the non-UK residents - BT internet are the biggest consumer ISP, with about 1/4 of all internet users in the UK. BT also runs the copper telephone line infrastructure, and has the vast majority of POTS customers. A number of other ISPs resell BT internet access, and some of them also subscribe to Cleanfeed, the child-porn filter. Virgin and TalkTalk, the next two biggest ISPs have also been involved in the court cases, but have not - yet - been ordered to block newzbin 2)
Re:any censorship system will be expanded (Score:2)
First Pastor Niemoller warned us, but we forgot about him. Then the nerds warned us, but we called them Tin Foil Hats. Then when they come for your favorite site there will be no recourse left.
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Which means I won't start to care until the day I can't reach Demonoid anymore!
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I don't know anything about Cleanfeed, but if what you say is accurate then this is a blessing in a way.
Being a web blocker Only, we can assume it only blocks certain ports.
80 and 443 for sure. Maybe 8080 any some such non-standard ports?
All the pirate bay needs to do is change their SSL server from port 443 to operate on both 443 and 10000 and 12345 etc.
Then we can keep clickable links such a:s https://thepiratebay.com:10000/
With a pre-proxy on the pirate bays end, they could even make ALL ports from 1024
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No, BT's [virginmedia.co.uk] range [tiscali.co.uk] of [orange.co.uk] competing [o2.co.uk] ISPs [talktalk.co.uk] will get a lot more popular. Virtually everyone who can get BT can get one of those and be switched over to them in two weeks (just switched to O2 from BT, best move I ever made - BT are retards).
I'm no particular fan of TPB, I think they're a bunch of dicks, but for christ's sake blocking access is not the answer for the British record industry. Legal downloads, although markedly less profitable, are still something of a money-spinner for them, and given some of the shite [youtube.com] t
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Both wrong, sadly - BT floated BT Cellnet as mmO2 (t/as O2) back in 2002 or so, making them totally independent - then they were bought by Telefonica.
The present day O2 has nothing to do with BT, other than using their physical infrastructure for "last mile" connectivity.
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This makes zero sense.
It's so easy for consumers and site owners to use alternate addressing. Wasn't this explained to the judge? If the internet is like water flowing down a hill, putting a rock in the way won't do anything except reroute traffic in the same way that water will flow around the rock. If you build a dam, sure, you'l change things but building huge dams just to protect an outdated business model makes no economic sense; and it doesn't solve the fundamental problem that people still can still
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well he did actually!
he said the Music Industry does not need to come back for a court order to block any new "Newzbin2" sites.
quote from http://torrentfreak.com/uk-isp-bt-given-14-days-to-block-newzbin2-111026/ [torrentfreak.com]
"
According to the Judge, the MPA and BT were in conflict over the extent of this flexibility.
The MPA preferred the block to encompass “any other IP address or URL whose sole or predominant purpose is to enable or facilitate access to the Newzbin [2] website,” but BT wanted “and any
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Well in my case I download TV shows from the US that are like 7 weeks behind the UK. What honestly is the difference between downloading and watching it on TV a few weeks later? If it's good anyway I'll buy the season boxset.
Anyway, DRM is a massive no-no. If I can't sample something I'm not going to buy the full thing, that ranges from Music to games to TV shows. And I ain't waiting 6 bloody weeks for the UK to catch up on a TV series, anyone understand me?
Re:Alternate DNS/routing. (Score:4, Funny)
Oh my god, four thousand years?? Your life must be horrible!
Seriously, I pirated them before because here they never showed them at all because it would take an infinite amount of time for them to reach us. Four thousand years is nothing.
(Posting from the event horizon of a black hole)
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Oh my god, four thousand years?? Your life must be horrible!
Seriously, I pirated them before because here they never showed them at all because it would take an infinite amount of time for them to reach us. Four thousand years is nothing.
(Posting from the event horizon of a black hole)
Hey, me too. Aren't you just disgusted at the current Ansible rates? I can only download 10Gb before they downgrade me to slower-than-light. I'd say this is worse for piracy than any of those judicial measures.
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However, using TOR, third party VPN or what I plan to do, use my phone's 3G tethering to get a torrent file then switch back to BT once I have it should all work fine I imagine.
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If you have an android phone, uTorrent remote is a good app. You can download torrent files, open them with remote and BAM, it's downloading on your PC :)
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No, those teenagers will just go to the guy they know to download the shit for them, and sneakernet will reemerge as the most common method of distribution once again.
I made a fair amount of money in the early days of Napster making people mix discs, and the more they clamp down, the more valuable my abilities to find almost anything online become.
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Yes, because one could go buy mix discs filled with different songs by artists across multiple record labels that are personally tailored to the listener in any record store...
Just as today, the vast majority of people back then wanted to listen to specific songs by specific artists without having to skip through their entire catalog. This was particularly lucrative for me as portable MP3 players were barely coming to market and generally sucked ass, meaning that they were going to be listening to CDs on t
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Most of our friends take portable hard drives with them when visiting now to swap media of interest.
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Nowadays you just need the Magnet link. Bookmark it, sync bookmarks with desktop/laptop, open them all.
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Re:Alternate DNS/routing. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's still pilfering someone's hard work for free.
I was given to understand that Beyonce is one of the "girls (who run the world)" I wasn't informed that this meant coal mining to keep the record industry going.
No, honestly? Hard work? You really have no idea how media distribution works now, do you? The record companies have a 80% margin on their product 95% of that stays with the record company and only 5% goes to the signed artist (and that is when you stroke a good deal).
So, no. You are not stealing from the artist and since the artists is the only one that could be considered working (via a proxy producer/choreographer/prman usually) You are not stealing by copying that album of the Internet.
If you want to help an artist make money go support a band on kickstarter or buy off some indie band's web shop etc. Also, that's where You usually will get good bang for Your money (limited edition vinyl + flacc downloads, etc).
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The market? (Score:1)
The market is deciding right now. People want "convenient" and "cheap" and they're apparently not getting it in sufficient quantity to avoid copyright infringement. It's not like people go out of their way to download illegally just to spite the *AAs of the world. (Well, some do, but they're a tiny minority.)
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"If people truly wanted what you describe, they'd stop using the big media companies altogether. Which comes back to my original point - taking something because you disagree with the content or distribution model doesn't make it right.
You haven't provided a coherent argument against that. No-one does - because they can't."
ahah you are wrong. there is the notion that 'nothing can be owned' usually for religious purposes.
we can see how well that worked for native americans, though.
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Your question is futile. Information flow was very hard to control before, but the internet made this so easy that it's now all but impossible. Already, back in the days, CD burners made it very commonplace.
Music (and movies, books, photographs, etc...) are just information. As a result, the business of selling these goods is becoming an increasingly complex one to sustain. The entire copyright business is based on the (now) false premise that data distribution can be controlled. It cannot.
Now that the shit
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Look we are basically on the same side here. Our difference in opinion bases on that I see natural evolution in the Internet changing how we perceive arts and such and You apparently would like the new distibution model be a much more precise and well defined platform. There is not telling which is the correct position and which is not. Therefore joining into heated debates about what is the right thing might be counter productive.
Truly you cannot judge a theory only by its theoretical assumptions, you have
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Last week Time Warner announced third-quarter profits of $822 million [latimes.com]. If the little people working on Warner films (i.e. those who aren't stars or executives) aren't being paid enough, and are "suffering", it isn't because of copyright infringement. And that's before you take into account the wonder of Hollywood accounting [techdirt.com]. The little person is likely to be screwed whatever happens, if their employer is bringing in $3bn a year and doesn't have a conscience.
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tower heist? or is that too much a generic action movie for you?
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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Yep, freetards gotta have their freebees.... Bring on the DRM I say.
How are those boots tasting? Lick harder, I want a good polish.
Re:Alternate DNS/routing. (Score:4, Funny)
Haha, what's that? Couldn't hear you over the sound of my money accruing. By the way, you missed a spot.
Re:Alternate DNS/routing. (Score:5, Insightful)
I just bought some music last week. It had no DRM whatsoever. I had already listened to the music dozens of times on Youtube. If I had checked on TPB, I'd probably have found it. The album artist asked customers to set their own price with no minimum, and I paid $10 for the album. That artist chose not to treat his paying customers as his enemies, and accordingly I joined them. Over the past year I spent some $300 on digital media, which is roughly what I can afford.
0.00 of those dollars went to cartels that view their customers as an enemy by pouring millions into developing technologies that hinder their legitimate and non-violating actions with music they paid for - millions that came out of these customers' own pockets, to further the irony.
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I think it's much more complicated than that. It's indeed a generation problem, but one that runs far deeper.
The core group of people who would be the customers and consumers of content have always been the group of the 14-35 year olds. And they are now the ones that could be considered the digital natives. People who had a computer their whole life and could not imagine a life without. And we're about to see the ones that aren't used to the internet as part of their life, the ones that didn't grow up in a
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The difference is only in the technology, and the ease of use.
I'd personally go a little further - there is also the (perceived) anonymity and freely available nature of the required equipment.
* Everyone (more or less) has the necessary PC and internet connection nowadays - previously shelling out for the 8-track _and_ the record player was a larger barrier to entry and along with the required physical effort and time made the activity non-casual.
* Trading physical things vs the internet p2p model offers some perceived anonymity. It's not really the case (unless you a
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That wasn't so different back in the good ol' days. You'd swap records and CDs with your friends. Granted, no anonymity, but also nobody who'd care to tell on you. Also, the technology investment wasn't there. Either you had a stereo kit that included a record player and a tape station or at least one of your friends did who would let you use it. Top price, a copy of the record for him.
The main difference actually is speed of propagation and ease of access. It's today way easier to access any kind of music
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Yep, freetards gotta have their freebees.
And I'm not interested in the whole 'but p2p isn't stealing, it's copyright infringement'. WE KNOW. It's still pilfering someone's hard work for free. If you don't intend on paying for it, don't use it. It's quite simple.
But we've got a generation who expect something for nothing nowadays....
Bring on the DRM I say.
Excellent one dimensional thinking, citizen!
I love watching this game. It's funny as hell seeing the IP crowd spin their wheels so fast that they dig themselves into a hole they'll never climb out of. The sooner they go out of business, the sooner the rest of us will get some peace and quiet, and can get on with our lives without all that annoying screeching in the background.
When my friend in some other part of the world buys a DVD to send to me for a present, and that DVD won't play in my equipment, the
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If you don't intend on paying for it, don't use it. It's quite simple.
So you admit you are OK with people pirating when they DO intend to purchase?
That right there is enough people to still justify the pirate bay existing!
(A fraction of billions of people is definitely "justification", and you can't argue out of that one)
After getting burned by crappy software companies twice now, I refuse to purchase any application that has a very significant chance of not working nor even being an application.
If software companies didn't violate that trust so often and frequently, this mig
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Actually, there are several bases for property rights. The classic Lockean property rights were based on the idea of having earned the right to possess the fruits of your labor. That is not a market-based theory, but it certainly has a lot of popular appeal.
First possession is another. Accretion is another. Laws defaulting property rights to the state which lowers transaction costs is another (and is the most efficient--suggesting we should have open sharing and some kind of society-based remuneration f
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Writing music, performing it, recording it, and mastering it all takes time, effort, and skill. Since the product can be duplicated indefinitely with minimal cost, each unit trends toward zero value as the number of units approaches infinity. Congratulations, you just used a small bit of your high school education, applying calculus improperly to the real world.
You are missing the fact that the initial investment in the production of that data was not zero. Those involved in its creation need to be paid
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Everyone who downloads paid for content without paying for it posts their:
If they want to post it, then they can. No one is going to stop them or force them to. But I don't see how information can "want" anything.
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consider for a moment. in the 'wheel of time' series there are ter angrel that have rules of use. ergo no musical devices. to understand such a rule, one who knows how can easily play music and tell stories and gain great wealth easily... well, in the actual story it wasn't so easy and the life of a wondering bard wouldn't attract many, yet why have such a rule? the time these devices were created in there were great cities and likely for that reason musical instruments were barred. because they would allow
File trading is the radio of the 21st century (Score:2)
Re:File trading is the radio of the 21st century (Score:5, Insightful)
You really forget one very important fact:
The Music Industry doesn't want you discovering new music! They are afraid that, in doing so, you might actually find the good stuff and stop buying Britney Spears.
Now it's the pirate bay, tomorrow they will want to shut down all the indie bands!
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Exactly, they just want you buying the same album over and over again. I bought Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon on vinyl back in the 80's, on cassette twice (car ate the first one), and on CD three times (the regular CD released way back when I got my first CD player, a remastered one at some point in the late 90's, and a 5.1 SACD of it).
I'm not buying it again, I absolutely refuse. Any new releases of this damn album come out, I'm downloading them with a clean conscience. They've already gotten over
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Exactly, they have bought off radios to play the same 10 songs all the time, but they can't do this with file sharing.
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The core difference is that the radio was a sales vehicle. Payola still exists, just much better veiled. That doesn't work that well with the internet, since you, and not the radio station, decide what you listen to.
And that's something the studios are really afraid of. Since their only reason to exist anymore, in a world where publishing yourself has become trivial at worst, is that they control the means to get your music heard by the masses. YouTube stars and phenomenons are rare, and they are usually qu
Buy the department of justice (Score:3)
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Not a good idea in the UK.
The UK is far behind the USA when it comes to political corruption and accepting corporate control of our courts and politicians.
Our equivalent of the US Department of Justice is staffed by largely independent career civil servants who will happily leak attempts to buy policy. They stay when the actual politicians come and go and are resistant to political interference with their day to day work.
We have the equivalent of rabid ferrets for a national press who love nothing more tha
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You don't have to be corrupt to be swayed by someones arguments...
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1) In the USA you cannot get sent to jail for expressing hateful speech such as denying the holocaust.
2) In the USA you cannot get sent to jail for making racist statements.
3) In the USA I am not aware of ANY websites that are blocked by a court or government order. Even the RIAA and MPAA have not been able to acco
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And it was done without court orders.
Not exactly a race... (Score:2)
If it takes several months to get a court order to block a site, and only a couple of days to set up a new torrent tracker (piratebay is just the best known out of a dozen or so), it's not hard to see it's a lost cause for the industries, which instead should focus on finding ways of making it easier to pay for content. But what they are doing is trying to cling to their outdated business models of artificial scarcity and market segregation.
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As a casual pirate, forcing me to type "pirate bay replacement" into Google is not enough of an inconvenience. The only thing that would stop me from using bittorrent is if American TV series episodes could be legally downloaded in Europe on the same day as they air in the US. I don't mind paying, but having to wait a year is not an option.
With music it's not a year, but it can be a few weeks from a song starts playing on the radio until I can have a legally purchased copy.
What the entertainment industry ne
Also a matter of cost... (Score:2)
Compare the cost of getting a court order to block a site, and the cost of the site switching domain name and IP address. Then they just need secondary sites, like torrentfreak, to list what the site is called this week.
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Not to mention they are unlikely to block the biggest torrent finder out there: adding "type:torrent" to a Google search...
What is BT? What is BPI? (Score:1)
Not everybody lives in the UK. What is BT?
You may write the abstract like this as well:
"British MI body BPI has requested BT block access to PB. In response, BT say they will only do so if they receive a CO. But after BT recently lost a CC forcing them to block NB, it looks like it's a CoW — not if — this will happen."
Re:What is BT? What is BPI? (Score:5, Informative)
The oldest telecom in the world, with 100k employees in its current state, traded on both LSE and NYSE under the name 'BT'. Part of the FTSE index.
It used to be part of the post office. It was owned by the crown until fucking thatcher came along.
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Please don't stick the words "fucking" and "Thatcher" that close together, it's enough to give any man nightmares for life.
A month eh? (Score:2)
You guessed it! A month.
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Er, each time I've moved it's taken 3 days, although the official time period is 7 days.
Where did you get a month from?
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AT&T had the same deal, and it was private, although regulated. I guess it's probably more related to stodgy old ways than anything else.
Hence acoustically coupled modems, and that sort of fun.
The nice part about leasing the phones was they were domestic made, brick shithouses, not like today's basic phone. They also double as an excellent bludgeoning tool. Designed specifically to reduce service calls, I guess.
In my region, we have a state owned POTS/mobile/internet carrier, they seem to compete well,
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BT - A telecoms company formerly known as British Telecom. It is the largest and the incumbent operator similar to AT&T and the Baby Bells in the USA.
Sauce for the goose... (Score:4, Interesting)
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BT is a very large ISP and phone company; the former state monopoly one. BT is their name- they used to be called "British Telecom", but they aren't any more- they're just called "BT". In the same way as "AT&T" is their name- nobody translates it to "American Telephone & Telegraph" any more.
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I was confused as to why and how the music industry could be pushing for BitTorrent to block Pirate Bay.
Cue the Chewbacca defense.
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This is exactly what I thought...
They're asking BitTorrent to block Pirate Bay?
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What is a colonial? :)
Actually, I am from a European country where obscure acronyms are not used without explanation.
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I saw that as sarcasm about American English versus British English. Granted, some Americans can't write correct American English either.
Useless (Score:5, Informative)
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Their entire approach is useless. They could buy the entire government, write all the laws and criminalize all forms of sharing, sue and arrest millions, spy on everyone, shut down the Internet, force manufacturers to DRM everything, brainwash half the public, and still not stop piracy. Might as well try to outlaw sex and knowledge. Swapping flash drives in proverbial back alleys and unlocking hardware are just 2 ways of sharing that would be practically unstoppable even under such an extreme environment
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No they are looking into this, we've seen the stories before on Slashdot.
Right response from both parties ... (Score:2)
BT is correct in insisting upon a court order.
On the other hand, it is also completely appropriate to request the block on The Pirate Bay. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that this site facilitates the distribution of materials against the rights holders wishes. Which is kinda illegal.
Actions like this are, in my opinion, much better than more clandestine approaches since it utilizes information that is made available to the public. (The Pirate Bay openly displays which torrents are available. A
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There is very little sense in wasting resources to tackle piracy by those who will never buy their product.
Thus explaining why the RIAA sued so many college students.
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On the other hand, it is also completely appropriate to request the block on The Pirate Bay. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that this site facilitates the distribution of materials against the rights holders wishes. Which is kinda illegal.
So is a denial of service attack, which is unarguably what the court is ordering them to implement against thepiratebay.org.
I may be implying my support for the illicit activities that TPB is allegedly facilitating, but I am also strongly disagreeing with the methodology that the courts are implementing. In essence, the courts are agreeing that there is no legal basis for attacking TPB explicitly, so they are going to attempt to remove them from the "map" of the internet as an end-run around the judicial pr
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It doesn't take a genius to figure out that this site facilitates the distribution of materials against the rights holders wishes.
So does Google.
TPB is nothing but a more specialized version of Google. They don't host any of the content, and don't run a BitTorrent tracker. When someone downloads the latest "Harry Potter" the only thing involving TPB is searching for it. Google does exactly the same thing, but also happens to index a lot of file types other than torrents.
Eventually, somebody is going to build a full Internet search engine that has a "filter out all the non-torrent stuff" setting that is configurable like Google's "S
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Who still uses Pirate Bay? (Score:2)
I quit using them long ago after they made news headlines. There are plenty of other places to go. It's kinda like the "war on drugs". For every dealer you bust, a new one emerges.
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According to Alexa ( http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/thepiratebay.org [alexa.com] ), it's the 79th busiest website in the world, visited by around 1.2% of internet users per day, which is an increase of about 1/3 over the last two years. Additionally the number of internet users as a whole has grown over the past two years. As a techie that reads Slashdot, you are likely ahead of the curve. The general population is still catching on to this torrent thing, and the other methods of getting content, which includes the l
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Getting around the blocking (Score:2)
Like blocking the site will do anything. They will simply invent a new name, get a new domain and be back. It could be like the different spellings of "VIAGRA@" in spam emails. One possibility could be "P1RATE BAY", I'm sure that they could get quite inventive. Of course, the new spelling could be quickly spread around the internet. It's like the game "Whack a Mole".
Fracturing the net (Score:2)
Allowing nationstates to interfere with the Internet in ways like this will lead to the fracturing of the global network.
I do not want "pirated" material (Score:2)
I do want to be able to go to whatever website I want to, when I want to. I do not consider it satisfactory that some sociopath in a suit tells me what I can do - even if I have no wish to do any different.
If that does not sound coherent, let me try and rephrase it.
I will decide what my computer is capable of doing. Any organisation that treats the general public as criminals is not an organisation that I want to have any controlling influence upon me.
I suspect that it would require something like Tor to