Pirate Party Starts Hosting The Pirate Bay
from the well-this-might-get-interesting dept
Many people who don't follow these issues closely have long assumed that The Pirate Party and The Pirate Bay were somehow connected. That's never been true, even if the people involved in each were philosophically aligned on certain issues (but not on all issues...). Either way, it's a bit of a surprise to find out that, following the injunction against The Pirate Bay's bandwidth provider, that The Pirate Party has agreed to become the new host for The Pirate Bay. It's unclear exactly what this means, as The Pirate Party must be getting its bandwidth from another provider, who, one would imagine, is also soon to be a target for an injunction. Still, it seems like the Pirate Party is basically begging for a lawsuit to challenge these types of fourth party injunctions...Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Filed Under: bandwidth, hosting, sweden, the pirate party
Companies: pirate party, the pirate bay
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I have never used the Pirate Bay...
I am under the impression that the Pirate Bay now has backups in a slew of countries and that they have determined to make it impossible to be shut down.
So far, that seems to be the case...
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Uh oh...
Sweet Jesus, I sure hope so. Otherwise this is just an incredibly stupid move....
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Then again, it could just be a publicity stunt to get more people aware of the pirate party, even if they lose?
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If they win: Judicial Precedence limiting nth-party liability.
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Kinda like how we read our history books of the allies vs the the Axis and what various strategic moves each side took and how eventually the allied forces won. All of this will make history one day.
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I suppose that works in most European political arenas, where the PP is one of a myriad of political parties. The problem with this move is obvious however when you consider the likely response from a limited party arena like we have in the United States.
Here we have two parties that pretend to be on opposite ends of the political spectrum (I won't get into why I think this is just a facade). What you'll notice is that neither party really spends all that much time competing for the far spectrum votes because they can already count on them (although the Republicans have changed this to a small degree). The votes that matter are in the middle. That's why you hear about Reagan Democrats and Clinton Soccer Moms. Those are the votes that count.
And to the masses, all they're going to see is a headline or soundbyte of how a political group called the Pirate Party is directly befriending a maligned website that's been sued a bunch of times successfully in more than one nation and has something to do with these weird things ominously named "torrents" (first thing I used to think of was a storm, or a torrent of blood, a phrase found in plenty of novels). This move loses not just one side of the medium voter, it loses almost all of them.
For those of us in the States that thought the Pirate Party might be a viable platform for supporting consumer rights, as is their stated charter, this is disappointing....
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If they are not seen in the media The Pirate Party cannot the middle voters anyway, so the media exposure is the key and this gives them that and also provides something that make people engaged in these kinds of issues.
I'm not sure if it's a good move in the long run, but it is quite likely to rally up some extra support for PP now in the election times.
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looks like
I do love the image the pirate bay has up now, and the Dr.LOLCATZ press release.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns_and_Dope_Party
oh wait . .
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and the fact that they can have so much political clout/impact, money, and votes despite the fact that they are focusing only on one issue and the mainstream media practically ignores them only emphasizes the important nature of this one issue they are focusing on.
Yeah a court may rule against them on this one, but that's hardly the end of the war and a court ruling is hardly going to change public opinion. Public opinion will continue to hate intellectual property, that sentiment will grow, and the people will force politicians to reflect public sentiment (ie: either via votes, which is the most likely case; or via a revolution consisting of massive protests).
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And if people start being booted from the internet, which is considered a 'human right' in Europe, it will be a single issue with widespread interest.
Europe also has a grand tradition of 'single issue' candidates and parties, because we have a political structure that actually caters for it (see DH above).
By the way, would you also ignore other 'single issue' elements? Like 'the economy' or 'immigration'? Way to over-simplify!
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Media exposure
So this move will give the Pirate Party (PP) lots of well-needed media exposure. Furthermore, it could be somewhat of a headache for the MPAA and IFPI who now can only attack The Pirate Bay at the cost of increasing the chance of the PP entering the parliament due to the reactions. Also, I think that the PP uses Bahnhof (mentioned in these two Techdirt posts) as their ISP and have tried to make themselves a name as an ISP that stands up for user rights (eg. the right to privacy). So it could both be difficult to attack the secondary ISP and if they manage to successfully do that then the only option for them would probably be to cut all access to the Pirate Party which would be interpreted by many as a form of political censorship.
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That's not how a debate works. Striking down one point does not deconstruct an entire argument. Particularly considering you just attacked the last least important point the person made.
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That's a nice fantasy. In reality the ISP would be dealing with IP-only restrictions within a single customer's address space. Soft filtering is, of course, easily mismanaged at the ISP level and even more readily defeated by relocation and proxy within the customer's network.
And, of course, soft-filtering is just another way to degrade the service for all of the ISP's customers, not just the PP. Blocked traffic still uses bandwidth on the ingress, and filters use CPU time on the routers.
BTW who is going to pay for all of the fantastical management software and unplanned capacity that the entertainment industry wants?
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It didn't occur to you that the media will probably contact him for a comment since they don't know who else to contact?
He just offered a general comment. Anyone could have said the same thing.
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How much money does the entertainment industry mold into a huge hammer to take down The Pirate Bay, only for it to pop back up hours later.
Though amusing, I'm sure the money and time could be better used elsewhere.
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I have to wonder the rationality of the legal threats. Do they honestly think taking out TPB will put a dent in the flow? It brings publicity, challenge to people with nothing better to do than simply try and overcome The Man.
Fun to witness play out, however.
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Fill the Need?
Put up a private tracker with current releases, charge people monthly access fee's (or even $5.00/movie and say $0.50/song) and people would flock to it.
Bye-bye Pirate Bay.
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Hell just do what Netflix does and allow streaming, I don't need to own the damn movie if I can access it whenever I want. I couldn't share it on P2P that way either, but no, no Netflix or Hulu in Canada. Damn Canadians, such pirates! We should be on the special 301 watch list! Oh wait...
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this is the smartist move
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TPB
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