Developer Puts Game On The Pirate Bay Because Steam Key Resellers Are The Bigger Evil

from the gifts-for-the-poor dept

Leaving aside the AAA publishers for a moment, the video game industry is actually starting to get really good on recognizing better ways to react to copyright infringement other than pounding their fists on their tables and knee-capping their customers with DRM. This still occurs, of course, but we've also seen stories of publishers treating pirates as potential customers with whom it's worth connecting, giving away Steam keys on torrent sites, or just playfully messing with pirates instead of screaming at them. These efforts generally are done to the tune of great PR and the humanization of a content company that can only help their businesses.

And, thankfully, it's not a trend that is slowing down. Acid Wizard Studio, publishers of the game Darkwood, made some recent news by deciding to put its own game on the Pirate Bay.

On torrent site The Pirate Bay, typically the domain of illegal rips of media, one username among dozens uploading the horror game Darkwood stands out: the game’s publisher. Today, the Poland-based Acid Wizard Studio uploaded their own game for free with “no catch, no added pirate hats for characters,” their torrent description reads.

Now, why Acid Wizard Studio did this is somewhat unique in these kinds of stories. In part, the studio says it did this because it doesn't want to keep the game from those who truly cannot afford it. It aimed this message particularly at children who game at the pleasure of their parents' credit card bills. But while we've seen that sort of thing done before, the studio also did this because it believes the Steam key reselling business is the greater evil compared with piracy.

Acid Wizard saw a comment from someone who refunded the game because they didn’t want their parents to get stressed out over the bill, Acid Wizard writes on Imgur.

“If you don’t have the money and want to play the game,” they say, “we have a safe torrent on the Pirate Bay of the latest version of Darkwood.” They explain that a flood of emails asking for free Steam keys helped bolster their decision to upload a free Darkwood torrent to The Pirate Bay, and asked that those who can afford it later buy it discounted on Steam. It’s an interesting move that spits in the face of shady key-selling services like G2A, where Acid Wizard figures a lot of the free keys they’d send out would go. “This practice makes it impossible for us to do any giveaways or send keys to people who actually don’t have the money to play Darkwood,” Acid Wizard writes. “Please, don’t buy it through any key reselling site. By doing that, you’re just feeding the cancer that is leeching off this industry.”

The replies to the studio's message were almost universally positive, with many promising to try the game out via the torrent and buy it afterwards if they liked it. How many of those people ever would have tried the game out at all, illlicitly or otherwise, is impossible to determine, but it seems obvious that the amount of additional sales revenue that will be generated because of this is not zero. In other words, the publisher gets the good PR of treating people well, gets to make a point about a key-reselling industry that is genuinely pretty scummy, and picks up some indeterminate number of sales in the process.

That's the kind of nimble response to piracy the AAA publishers should recognize as a winning strategy.

Filed Under: darkwood, piracy, resellers, steam, video games
Companies: acid wizard studio, the pirate bay

Dangerous Copyright Ruling In Europe Opens The Door To Widespread Censorship

from the bad-news dept

The EU Court of Justice (CJEU) has been issuing some seriously dangerous copyright rulings recently. Last fall, for example, there was the ruling saying that mere links to infringing content could be direct infringement, rather than indirect (or not infringing at all). Even worse, that ruling argued that posting hyperlinks on a site that is "for profit" requires an assumption that the platform is sophisticated enough to make sure the links are not to infringing content. As we warned that would lead to problematic results, such as a followup ruling in Sweden that merely embedding a YouTube video can be seen as infringing.

Given that background it is not surprising, but still rather unfortunate, that the latest CJEU ruling on copyright takes this to the next level. It basically ignores the clear safe harbors of the EU's Copyright Directive -- which note that platforms should not be responsible for infringing actions of their users -- and says that the Pirate Bay is liable for infringement by its users because it has made infringing works "available."

In today’s judgment, the Court holds that the making available and management of an online sharing platform must be considered to be an act of communication for the purposes of the directive.

That's... a very dangerous interpretation of the law. It undermines two very important concepts in just one sentence. The first is the basic concept of intermediary liability protections -- which say that a platform should not and cannot be held liable for the actions of its users. This should be common sense. If the users break the law, go after the users, not the tools they use. This ruling does the opposite. The second concept that is undermined here is that for infringement to actually occur, distribution (i.e., actual copying) has to happen. Instead, this ruling embraces the twisted notion that merely "making available" a work is somehow infringing. And, here, the court not only gets both of those important concepts wrong, but merges the wrongness together, such that a platform that people use to make works available is suddenly liable for the theoretical infringement of those works. That's... bizarre.

And, of course, the end result of this is that the CJEU is basically clearing the way for courts to order ISPs to block the Pirate Bay entirely (even non-infringing content on TPB). The folks over at TorrentFreak have the background details on the case, which involve attempts by the Dutch anti-piracy organization BREIN to demand that ISPs block all access to TPB. This ruling clears the way for that to happen.

There are other problematic parts of the CJEU ruling (the full text is not yet out, but this is from the press release from the CJEU explaining the ruling). Here, for example, the Court tries to justify ignoring the intermediary liability protections that should be afforded to a platform by trying to argue that TPB somehow does more, which makes it deserving of being liable:

Whilst it accepts that the works in question are placed online by the users, the Court highlights the fact that the operators of the platform play an essential role in making those works available. In that context, the Court notes that the operators of the platform index the torrent files so that the works to which those files refer can be easily located and downloaded by users. ‘The Pirate Bay’ also offers — in addition to a search engine — categories based on the type of the works, their genre or their popularity. Furthermore, the operators delete obsolete or faulty torrent files and actively filter some content.

But think about that for a second. That's the kind of thing that basically any platform does. Indexing what users post on your platform is a standard thing. I mean, our search here has indexed what uses post in the comments, but that shouldn't magically make us liable for what users post in the comments. Second, the fact that they "delete obsolete or faulty torrent files and actively filter some content" shouldn't magically make them liable. In fact, this is exactly why, in the US context, we have a section of CDA 230 that explicitly says that moderating some content shouldn't make you liable for that which you left up. That's because the end result of reading the law this way will be the exact opposite of what most people want. That is, based on this ruling platforms should not moderate any content at all because the court says that doing so suddenly makes you liable for that which you did not moderate. Thus it actually actively discourages content moderation.

The other problematic part from the press release about the ruling is this:

Moreover, the operators of ‘The Pirate Bay’ have been informed that their platform provides access to copyright-protected works published without the authorisation of the rightholders. In addition, the same operators expressly display, on blogs and forums accessible on that platform, their intention of making protected works available to users, and encourage the latter to make copies of those works. In any event, it is clear from the Hoge Raad’s decision that the operators of ‘The Pirate Bay’ cannot be unaware that this platform provides access to works published without the consent of the rightholders.

Again, this should not and cannot be the basis for liability. Again, within the US context, we went over this in the Viacom v. YouTube case. It's one thing to know that some infringement happens via your platform. It's another thing entirely to know which content is infringing. That's not as easy to figure out as some people insist. Again, this kind of thinking would outlaw things like the VCR. Yes, the makers of VCRs knew that some infringing content would be viewed or recorded via the devices, but the device makers were not held liable for that. This CJEU ruling seems to break with all of that.

And while representatives from The Pirate Bay are laughing off this ruling (quoted in the Torrentfreak article above), it won't be a laughing matter for many other companies who may face expanded liability because of this mixed up ruling. It also, likely, will depress entrepreneurship and innovation in the platform space in the EU. All because the legacy content industry is so infatuated with The Pirate Bay that it won't focus on improving its own offerings instead.

Filed Under: censorship, cjeu, copyright, intermediary liability, making available
Companies: brein, the pirate bay

Cogent Accidentally Blocks Websites In Global Ham-Fisted Piracy Filtering Effort

from the scorched-earth dept

Last week, reports began to emerge that internet users were unable to access The Pirate Bay and other BitTorrent-focused websites. Ultimately it was discovered that this was courtesy of transit provider Cogent, which was blackholing an undetermined number of IP addresses allegedly linked to copyright infringement. The IP addresses in question didn't belong to the websites -- but to popular CDN provider Cloudflare. All told, Cogent's blockade impacted around twenty different websites -- but the impact was global, with ISP users worldwide unable to access these IP addresses if they traveled the Cogent network.

Initially, Cogent wouldn't comment whatsoever on why this was occurring, but later confirmed to Ars Technica that the company had received a Spanish court order (it's not clear if it's the same 2015 order demanding Cogent block access to music streaming website Goear.com). Cogent was vague about the order itself, but did confirm that The Pirate Bay was blocked -- despite it not being a target of the court order. Subsequent routing checks confirmed the impact was global across Cogent's footprint.

As we've seen time and time again, actual pirates with just a modicum of technical knowledge utilize a variety of tools (VPNs most specifically) to tap dance around such restrictions, making these filtering efforts ham-fisted "solutions" that cause more problems for the internet and end users than they traditionally solve. In talking to Ars, Cogent acknowledged the potential "collateral impact" that such orders and filters can cause, especially when applied globally at scale to multihosting transit operators like Cloudfare, where one IP address may be home to multiple, unrelated websites:

"Cogent went on to say that “as a general matter, courts may require Cogent, as an ISP, to take certain actions with respect to a third-party website, an IP address or block of IP addresses. If Cogent’s customer decides to commingle traffic from the website that is the target of the court order with the traffic of other websites, the other websites that point to the same block of IP addresses may be adversely affected. When a Cogent customer controls the affected IP addresses, Cogent does not have the ability to know ahead of time what other websites may be affected or to control the collateral impact on these other websites. When collateral effects occur, we do work with our customer to try and mitigate the effects on others websites."

While U.S. net neutrality rules do prohibit network providers from blocking specific websites, exceptions were carved into the rules governing copyright infringement. Cloudfare, which helps websites improve performance and fend off DDoS attacks, can manage its IP addresses in such a way to help Cogent comply with court orders more narrowly. But this becomes arguably untenable when dealing with multiple court orders, all dealing with different websites and ISPs at global scale. Take the kind of filtering collateral damage we've long seen, and apply it globally in disjointed chorus.

Cloudfare often pops up as an entertainment industry bogeyman simply because its services often obscure the real origin server from the end users. But Cloudfare's General Counsel Doug Kramer was quick to complain that these sorts of orders, especially if poorly crafted and targeting core transit networks, can have a broad impact on the general health of the internet:

"This is part of the danger you get into when you start to censor the Internet or you get orders to pull things down,” Kramer said. “It may not be so easy to limit access to a specific domain," or to make sure a block applies only in a certain country. Cogent, and not Cloudflare, is the company that had to implement the block, but Cloudflare is “trying to set up a technical system where Cogent can respond to the order that they’ve been given, but within the narrow scope of that and not have impacts that go beyond that," Kramer said."

Kramer also pointed out that it might be important to understand how the internet works before you set about chopping giant holes in it via court order:

"It’s important for courts to understand how Internet systems work so they can write orders that don’t end up having unintended consequences,” Kramer stresses. "As a company, Cloudflare believes strongly in an open, free, and secure Internet. And it is also our policy to fully comply with legitimate court process," Cloudflare’s General Counsel says. "This can be challenging at times, especially when courts target backbone providers and don’t understand fully how they work. Cloudflare takes steps to make sure those court orders don’t lead to unintended impacts."

Take the non-transparent, ham-fisted, and ultimately futile filtering efforts we've come to know and love, and apply them at global scale, with little to no real concern about the obvious unintended impact on the health of the internet itself. What could possibly go wrong?

Filed Under: blocking, censorship, copyright, piracy
Companies: cloudflare, cogent, the pirate bay

RIAA Demands Takedown Of ThePirateBay.org, But EasyDNS Refuses Over Lack Of Due Process

from the wac-that-mole dept

You may have heard recently that after switching many domains, a few weeks back ThePirateBay returned to its original thepiratebay.org domain. It's basically an ongoing game of wac-a-mole, where the entertainment industry freaks out and scares registrars into taking back whatever domain and TPB just moves on. It's unclear what good this does for anyone, but it keeps happening. And with the return to .org, it appears the entertainment industry has basically lots its mind. First, it had one of its lobbying front groups, the Copyright Alliance write a hellishly misleading post attacking Public Interest Registry (PIR), the organization that currently runs the .org top level domain.

It is shocking that a domain name registry in the United States – one that is dedicated to “the public interest” – is allowing a blatantly illegal site to have a home on the .org domain. This is especially disturbing given that the operators of The Pirate Bay have been found guilty of criminal copyright infringement, The Pirate Bay domain names have been seized or suspended around the globe, and even its co-founder, Peter Sunde, has walked away from it. Despite all this, The Pirate Bay seems to have found a sanctuary here in the United States by PIR.

As far as I can tell, there is no court ruling in the US that says any of the above is true. While it's true that a few former operators were found guilty, they served their time in prison and as far as I know, none are involved in the current site. And, as has been pointed out over and over again, the site is basically a search engine. Accusing it of "criminal infringement" makes no sense. Furthermore, while the Copyright Alliance fought hard to get SOPA passed, it failed. US law does not currently require registrars or registries to remove domains just because the Copyright Alliance or the RIAA dislike a site. Sorry: you didn't get the law you wanted, so don't pretend you did.

Torrenfreak further points out that while the Copyright Alliance points to PIR's abuse policy, it conveniently ignores that said policy does not apply to intellectual property disputes, which require actual due process.

Meanwhile, as the Copyright Alliance was whining publicly, the RIAA was sending a letter to PIR basically saying the same thing, and asking it to take down the .org domain. The letter lists other countries where various TPB domains have been blocked, and then notes:

With respect to the U.S, please remember that the infringing nature of The Pirate Bay has been noted in each of the Notorious Market Reports issued by the USTR for the past several years. Per the Google copyright transparency report, over 400,000 infringements have been identified on www.thepiratebay.org, with over 50,000 since The Pirate Bay moved back to its .org domain. This is in addition to the over 3,000,000 infringements identified on its previous alter ego, www.thepiratebay.se. It is well known that The Pirate Bay does not take action in response to notices. In addition, there have been numerous reports recently of malware and other abuse occurring via The Pirate Bay at its various domains.

Of course, it's a bit weird to use Google's transparency report as part of its argument, since that just details accusations, rather than actual evidence of infringement (and, again, I don't know how many times this needs to be pointed out, but TPB doesn't host any content). And, again, the RIAA supported SOPA, but it lost. It should stop pretending it won.

PIR, in turn, forwarded the letter on to TPB's registrar, EasyDNS. EasyDNS then contacted TPB to discuss the possible policy violations, and got back reasonable answers that it was not actually in violation. On the question of copyright, TPB claimed that it now abides by the DMCA:

TPB is DMCA compliant and if TPB receive any DMCA complaints from RIAA they will be investigated and removed if found to be valid. We have not revived[sic] any DMCA complaints from RIAA at all so far this year.

Some may point out that TPB, in the past, regularly ignored (or mocked) the DMCA, noting that as a non-US company, it was not subject to US laws. Whether or not TPB still ignores DMCA takedowns could, arguably, impact if it's abiding by registrar policies, but without a court weighing in, it's difficult to see how a registar should take the RIAA's word for it without more evidence.

The RIAA's letter also notes TPB distributing malware, and so EasyDNS asked about that as well, to see if it violated its terms of service, and again TPB insists that the RIAA is being misleading:

As with every site that are displaying 3rd party advertising trough external ad-networks, sometime bad and corrupt ads slips by, it happens to everyone, here is an example:

http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/03/big-name-sites-hit-by-rash- of-malicious-ads-spreading-crypto-ransomware/

As soon as it is discovered/detected on TPB, the ads will be taken down, or the entire ad-tag from where the malware comes, until the issue is resolved. Usually with the help of google webmaster-tools to track down the exact source of the malware.

It has happened twice during 2016, both times when adding new ad- networks, They were taken down directly when detected.

Based on that, EasyDNS properly notes that it has no legitimate basis to takedown TPB's .org domain.

At this time we find no violation of our AUP. Absent either a specific proceeding pursuant to our accreditation as a .ORG registrar or a legal finding in a competent jurisdiction to the Province of Ontario, there is nothing for us to do.

easyDNS will of course always: comply with our contractual obligations - both to the registries we operate under and to our customers; comply with the laws under which govern our jurisdiction (the Province of Ontario, Canada) and enforce our own Acceptable Use Policy.

Thank you for bringing this matter to our attention.

In a blog post, EasyDNS President Mark Jeftovic explains the due process rationale here:

Our opinion in these matters continues unchanged. As a Registrar or as a DNS provider unless there is a clear violation of our AUP or net abuse (which we are competent to detect), taking action against domains based on content or at the behest of third-parties, regardless of their altruism or noble intentions, amounts to having us adjudicate international law. It's not reasonable to expect us to do that and you don't want your domain registrar doing that.

This is the key point. Whatever you believe about TPB -- and many people see it as being horribly illegal, obviously -- due process has to mean something. The RIAA and its friends should not just be able to point to something and say "illegal, kill it!" because they have a fairly long history of being totally wrong about such things. In the past, they've argued that nearly every innovation is illegal, from player pianos to radio to cable TV to the photocopier to the VCR to the DVR to the MP3 player and to YouTube. And over and over they've been wrong about those things. And that's why due process is important, and why it's good to see EasyDNS (and PIR) recognizing this.

Jeftovic, by the way, separately highlights that no one should think of EasyDNS as being "friendly" to bittorrent site operators, as he expects it won't be long until there will be sufficient due process to take down those sites:

We should also mention our Open Letter to Bit Torrent operators, wherein we predict a near-future where due process across borders catches up with technology and when that happens it will be relatively quick, easy and painless for a law enforcement agency in one country (i.e. Sweden) to have the requisite order issued in another country (like Canada, eh) and cause a domain that appears to be flagrantly violating copyright and freeriding on content creators efforts to be shut down.

Ahead of that day, if I were a filesharing site operator I'd be using my time wisely in concentrating my efforts on legitimizing my operations. This would include negotiating blanket licensing agreements with mechanical rights agencies.

In other words, contrary to what some will claim, this is not EasyDNS standing up for torrent sites. It's EasyDNS standing up for basic due process. You'd think that the Copyright Alliance and the RIAA would support due process, but apparently that's too difficult.

Filed Under: copyright, domains, due process, sopa, takedowns
Companies: copyright alliance, easydns, riaa, the pirate bay

Topsite Operator, Who Admitted To Operating Servers With Tons Of Pirated Movies, Gets Off With Just Probation

from the compare-that-to-the-pirate-bay dept

TorrentFreak reports on a somewhat unexpected end to a criminal case against an (oddly unnamed) 50-year-old Swedish man who was accused of and admitted to running the servers for the topsite known as Devil. As anti-piracy folks always like to remind us, topsites "sit at the top of the piracy pyramid" in the warez scene, as that's where pirated content is usually first leaked, before making its way out to the wider internet. In this case, investigators seized the actual servers with 250 terabytes of content and arrested the guy who ran all the servers out of his home. Slam dunk case, right? So that's the odd part: He ended up receiving just probation and some community service.

Given the scale of the case it was expected that punishments would be equally harsh but things did not play out that way.

Despite admitting that he operated servers at his home and in central Stockholm and the court acknowledging that rightsholders had suffered great damage, the man has just been sentenced to probation and 160 hours of community service.

The article admits that the guy may still face civil trials which could come with huge damages, but it's instructive to look at the results of the criminal case here and compare it to another case.

Remember, this is the same country that sued four guys who were no longer associated with The Pirate Bay -- which hosted no infringing content and was more of a search engine -- and not only found them guilty, but gave them jail sentences and millions of dollars in fines.

That seems... weird. The case against this topsite operator seems like exactly the kind of case that's actually a slam dunk. It's not going against a third party or intermediary. It's going against the people actually doing the infringing. One can question whether it's a worthwhile business strategy, but the legal strategy against this guy seems to make perfect sense -- as compared to the weird nonsensical legal strategy against The Pirate Bay -- which, again, hosted no infringing content and only acted as a search engine.

So why the different results?

If you've ever watched the documentary about the trial, TPB AFK, it quickly becomes clear that a big part of the trial against the four people loosely associated with the site was more about the fact that they didn't "respect the system." The situation with Peter Sunde is particularly striking. He had really, really strong legal arguments for why he was innocent. Beyond the fact that the site didn't host any infringing content, his role was as a spokesperson for the site, and he had little to do with the site's actual operations. But -- and this is the important part -- he recognized the whole trial was a joke and treated it as such, making fun of the proceedings and of the lawyers and judges for not understanding very basic things about how the internet worked.

To some extent, you could argue that he and the others were convicted for being smartasses in responding to the "very serious" lawsuit from a bunch of lawyers who clearly didn't understand the technological issues at play.

However, in this case -- involving an actual infringer where it was quite clear that he was, in fact, breaking the law -- things were different. This guy cooperated and treated "the system" with the deference it thinks it deserves:

According to Mitti.se, two key elements appear to have kept the man’s punishment down. Firstly, he cooperated with police in the investigation. Secondly – and this is a feature in many file-sharing prosecutions – the case simply dragged on for too long

The Pirate Bay case dragged on for quite a long time as well. Yet it still ended with huge fines and jail time. It's hard to look at the results of the two cases as anything other than the tax one pays for actually calling out a ridiculous system for being ridiculous, rather than sucking up to the system whose own credibility is called into question.

I'm a big supporter in the idea of an impartial judicial system with due process, and especially the idea that the judicial system is "blind" to all but the facts before it. But we all know that's an ideal that is too frequently not met. The widely different results in these two cases further highlights that divide. Play along with the system and get a slap on the wrist -- even if your actual activities clearly violate the law. Don't play along and mock the system, get a huge sentence -- even if your actions don't actually violate the law. In the end, all that seems to matter is the "proper respect" for a system whose own actions shows it deserves none.

Filed Under: copyright, crime, devil, prosecution, sweden, topsite
Companies: the pirate bay

Entertainment Industry Demands Swedish ISP Block The Pirate Bay; ISP Says No

from the see-you-in-court dept

There has been an increasing push by the legacy entertainment industry to get "full site blocking," in which companies can declare sites they don't like as "rogue" and order ISPs to block all access to them. This was the whole point of SOPA. And while that law failed in the US, the entertainment industry is still interested in figuring out other paths to making it happen. Courts in many other countries have been much more receptive to this form of censorship -- and have regularly ordered ISPs to block sites. This is true in Sweden as well, but it appears that one ISP, Bredbandsbolaget, is going to fight back for as long as it can, according to Torrentfreak:

“It is an important principle that Internet providers of Internet infrastructure shall not be held responsible for the content that is transported over the Internet. In the same way that the Post should not meddle in what people write in the letter or where people send letters,” Commercial Director Mats Lundquist says.

“We stick to our starting point that our customers have the right to freely communicate and share information over the internet.”

Of course, this means that they'll be going to court later this year. Torrentfreak notes that the MPAA is pulling the strings behind this, of course:

Internal movie industry documents obtained by TorrentFreak reveal that IFPI and the Swedish film producers have signed a binding agreement which compels them to conduct and finance the case. However, the MPAA is exerting its influence while providing its own evidence and know-how behind the scenes.

Also of interest is that IFPI took a decision to sue Bredbandsbolaget and not Teliasonera (described by the MPAA as “the largest and also very actively ‘copy-left’ Swedish ISP”). The reason for that was that IFPI’s counsel represents Teliasonera in other matters which would have raised a conflict of interest.

Meanwhile, we're still left wondering how any of this encourages people to actually spend more money to support content creators.

Filed Under: blocks, censorship, filters, sweden
Companies: bredbandsbolaget, the pirate bay

Senator Whitehouse Is Very Angry About A Made Up Google Search And A Made Up Pirate Bay

from the something-must-be-done dept

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse was a strong supporter of the SOPA/PIPA approach to breaking the internet to appease Hollywood. Even as lots of others bailed out on their support of the bills, Whitehouse refused to change his position. It appears he'd like to push such a solution again. On Wednesday, the Senate held hearings for the nominees for both the head of the US Patent and Trademark Office, Michelle Lee, as well as the new "Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator" (IPEC), Dan Marti. Marti is a bit of a wildcard, with most of his legal practice related to intellectual property being focused on trademark, rather than copyright. So it was worth paying attention to what he had to say in response to the questions. However the most bizarre and ridiculous question came from Senator Whitehouse, who proved to be rather confused about how both the internet and copyright law worked. You can see the full video here. Whitehouse begins talking around the one hour, 35 minute mark. He kicks it off by displaying his ignorance. First, he refers to Marti's predecessor, Victoria Espinel, and how he had asked her to do more to stomp out piracy, and then launches into a statement almost entirely devoid of factual statements:

I can remember Ms. Espinel coming here, some time ago to talk about the progress she intended to make in dealing with the criminal activity that steals American intellectual property, particularly entertainment content, and provides it to viewers, and that they were going to work really hard, with other American corporations that were supporting that activity to try to knock it down.

So while we were having this hearing, I picked up my iPad, and I went to Google, and I Googled "pirate movie." And Google gave me "The Pirate Bay" [holds up his iPad] which is an illegal enterprise, operating out of Sweden. And if you go to the page where you would get access to the pirate content, it says "get access now" and underneath it you have the flags of Visa, of Mastercard, of American Express, of Cirrus and of Paypal. And below that it tells you all the devices it works on and shows you the logos of Apple, Android, and so forth.

It looks to me like this criminal activity is still being wrapped around with the apparent support of a wide variety of American corporations. [Incredulous expression]. Explain to me how there's been progress made.

Almost everything Senator Whitehouse said in this statement is either wrong or totally clueless. It does not speak well of him as a Senator to be so misinformed about some rather basic things. First, there are the basics. A search engine is not and should not be illegal. Yet, Senator Whitehouse doesn't seem to understand the different role of a system like The Pirate Bay from a site that actually hosts or uploads infringing content. Second, at the time of the hearing, the Pirate Bay is down, so his claims pretending to show the site are clearly a lie. It's been in the news a lot that the site is gone. You'd think some staffer would have told Senator Whitehouse not to use that example.

Third, a Google search on "pirate movie" does not link to The Pirate Bay at all. Here's the search done on Google: Note that it actually highlights a 1982 movie, and even points people to Amazon where they can purchase it. Nowhere on the page does it point anyone to The Pirate Bay or any other site from which you can download infringing content. Not even close.

Senator Whitehouse appears to be flat out lying about what happens when you do such a search on Google, and then compounding it by lying about going to The Pirate Bay. On top of that, his description of what he claims he saw on The Pirate Bay appears to be totally false as well. And while some of my critics may find this difficult to believe, I've never used the site (other than occasionally reading some of its blog posts) so I reached out, via Twitter, to multiple people who had used the site regularly to see if his description was accurate. None could ever remember seeing credit card logos or Apple/Android logos. And, why would they, really, since the content found on The Pirate Bay was usually just pure files and available for free. So there would be no need to post credit card logos or even device compatibility, since that would depend more on the kinds of apps you used to view/listen/read the files obtained. Yes, there were tons of ads on the site, people point out, but they tended to be for crappy porn sites and the like.

In other words, almost every detail of what Senator Whitehouse describes is a lie. He may be describing some other site, but he didn't find it with the search he described and it wasn't The Pirate Bay. And even if there were logos from American companies, anyone can set up a website with such logos and it means nothing about whether they're complicit.

And then he demands that something must be done?

Marti barely gets half a robotic sentence out in response, saying that "criminal actors, criminal enterprises have no limits" when Whitehouse cuts him off with some more nonsense:

They actually do! [Holds up iPad again] There are ways in which these companies could go to court and try to knock this stuff down. There are ways in which prosecutors can have discussions with companies about aiding and abetting offenses and about being accessories to offenses. There's a lot that can be done in this area, it seems to me!

Marti points out that he was talking about something entirely different -- that sites will of course put up logos to make themselves try to look legit (though he doesn't go so far as to point out that Senator Whitehouse's suggestion that because a site puts up a logo, that doesn't mean the company whose logo was put up isn't "aiding and abetting" a damn thing).

Even more to the point, Whitehouse's claim that companies can "go to court and try to knock this stuff down" also makes no sense. Under what law? What legal issue is there in the (fake) circumstances that Whitehouse describes? At most, there might be a trademark violation, and does he really think it's worth company's time to go after such fly-by-night sites for trademark violations? And the whole "aiding and abetting" claim is ridiculous. Is Senator Whitehouse honestly claiming that if a site that offers up infringing works notes that the works can work on Apple or Android that Apple or Google are "accessories" to a crime? Isn't a Senator supposed to understand the law?

Whitehouse then turns to Michelle Lee, who used to work at Google, but on patent policy, not copyright, and asks her if Google could stop this. Though, again, he's flat out lying about what Google is supposedly doing. It's a bizarre question. And Lee just says she doesn't know the answer to that question (how could she when it makes no sense). Whitehouse gives a sarcastic "Hmm!" in response, as if he's discovered something -- other than actually revealing his astounding ignorance. He further claims that because Lee was a deputy general counsel at Google (again on patents, not copyright issues) that it shows that Google didn't really care about this issue. Really?

Finally, he appears to attack Marti for not having done anything, despite the fact he's not in the job yet, and then claims that all of this proves that the "voluntary" process that Espinel championed (like the ridiculous "six strikes" agreements between some ISPs and the legacy entertainment companies) is not enough. He seems to clearly be hinting that we need more government action, or more SOPA-type laws, based on an entirely false scenario that either he or his staffers (or some... lobbyists) made up and handed to him. Instead, all it shows is him getting angry in a manner that displays his near total ignorance of the topic at hand.

Is it really too much to ask that the people who make the laws impacting technology not be totally ignorant about both the laws and the technology? Frankly, Senator Whitehouse owes Marti, Lee and basically all internet users an apology.

Filed Under: copyright, danny marti, ip czar, ipec, michelle lee, search, senate, sheldon whitehouse, sopa, voluntary agreements
Companies: google, the pirate bay

What Comes After The Pirate Bay Is A Lot More Important Than Whether It's Up Or Down

from the what-comes-next dept

As noted, a police raid in Sweden took down The Pirate Bay yesterday and that's getting lots of attention. In addition, Peter Sunde, the former spokesperson for the site, is getting plenty of attention for a blog post he wrote in which he notes that he's happy it's down and he hopes it stays down forever. Lots of news sites are picking up on this, but everyone's focusing on Sunde talking about being happy the site is down and complaining about The Pirate Bay. But that's not new. Sunde's been saying that for years. We quoted him saying the same thing more than four years ago.

What's much more interesting, but apparently less headline-grabbing is the larger point that Sunde is making, which is that as bad as The Pirate Bay has gotten, what comes next is much more important. As he noted four years ago, and again yesterday, TPB basically became complacent and failed to innovate:

TPB has become an institution that people just expected to be there. Noone willing to take the technology further. The site was ugly, full of bugs, old code and old design. It never changed except for one thing – the ads. More and more ads was filling the site, and somehow when it felt unimaginable to make these ads more distasteful they somehow ended up even worse.

Rather, it's what comes next that's important:

But from the immense void that will now fill up the fiber cables all over the world, I’m pretty sure the next thing will pan out. And hopefully it has no ads for porn or viagra. There’s already other services for that.

I'd go further than that. It's not about the ads, but what the new technology will enable. For years, TPB has been more of a symbol of things, rather than an actual "thing." It's a product of the last decade that really showed where the world could go in the wake of Napster being killed. The world doesn't need that any more. It needs something that takes culture, free speech and the like further. There are plenty of folks attempting things, but it's high time that "the next big thing" really takes off.

Filed Under: peter sunde
Companies: the pirate bay

Swedish Law Enforcement Delivers Long-Awaited Pirate Bay Raid Sequel; Seizes Servers And Knocks Site Offline

from the TPB-Raid-II:-Sony's-Revenge dept

For whatever it's worth and for however long it actually lasts, The Pirate Bay is down. After a hiatus of nearly a decade, the long-running bane of the MPAA/RIAA's existence has again been raided by Swedish law enforcement.

The Pirate Bay portal went down Tuesday morning after Swedish police raided a server room in Stockholm over alleged copyright violations. In addition to its file-sharing section, Pirate Bay’s forum Suprbay.org was also down.

“There were a number of police officers and digital forensics experts there. This took place during the morning and continued until this afternoon. Several servers and computers were seized, but I cannot say exactly how many,” Swedish prosecutor Fredrik Ingblad told Radio Sweden.

This follows the arrest of the last Pirate Bay co-founder, Frederik Neij, who was picked up last month near the Thailand-Laos border. That last arrest may have been a boon for Swedish authorities, but this raid may have been prompted more by a recent high-profile hacking than a culmination of the long battle against the Pirate Bay.

Today’s raid comes after Pirate Bay was found to be hosting some of the leaked movie files stolen from Sony Pictures Entertainment in its recent hack. It’s unknown if the raid and takedown were instigated by the distribution of those Sony files.

That the Pirate Bay is indeed down is still somewhat surprising. As Wired points out, the operators claimed to have moved their operations to the cloud and away from centralized servers. Not only that, but its ditching of torrents in favor of magnet links essentially makes any takedown more symbolic than useful. And while there have been reports that the site is back up under a new domain, it appears those reports are exaggerated for the time being.

Hollywood -- and the law enforcement agencies that run interference for it -- will take all the symbolic victories they can get, though. The endless attempts to block the Pirate Bay have been completely ineffective. And while the very occasional raid usually manages to knock a target completely off the air, it's rarely, if ever, permanent.

Not to restate the obvious, but every action taken against the Pirate Bay only sends it more traffic when it inevitably returns to life. High-profile raids carried out by local law enforcement seemingly at the behest of American studios does little to raise the estimation of either entity in the eyes of the general public.

Filed Under: police, raid, sweden
Companies: the pirate bay

Hollywood Insiders: Directors, Actors, Producers, Camera People And More Demand Peter Sunde Be Freed & Treated With Dignity

from the total-overreaction dept

While we've written plenty about Peter Sunde, the former spokesperson for The Pirate Bay, we didn't cover his eventual jailing earlier this year. Given all the coverage of his trial and efforts post-trial to have the results revisited, the fact that he finally ended up going to jail didn't seem like much of a story. However, the way in which he's been treated in jail is simply inhumane. He's been put in the equivalent of a maximum security prison and basic requests for more humane treatment have been rejected. The latest outrage was that Peter's father recently passed away, and while prison officials have said they'll make arrangements for him to attend the funeral, he'll have to wear handcuffs. TorrentFreak says he'll have to wear handcuffs while carrying his father's coffin -- but from Peter's brother's quote, it seems clear that the prison officials were actually saying he can't even carry his father's coffin. The handcuff remark was just their way of saying "fuck you."

“But I will carry my father’s coffin,” Mats’ reports Peter as saying.

“You can not count on it,” the guards responded. “You will be wearing handcuffs.”

In response to this, a bunch of more open-minded Hollywood insiders, including actors, writers, directors, producers, camera people and others have quickly put together a video in support of Peter, asking that he be freed or, at the very least, treated with some dignity. The video was put together by Lexi Alexander, a Hollywood director who has gotten some attention in recent months for her outspoken criticism of the way traditional Hollywood has attacked the internet and file sharing in particular. Views like hers are not uncommon in Hollywood -- we frequently hear from insiders telling similar tales, including this one from an industry lawyer who talked about how those working in studios often encourage piracy for their own benefit. But, it's still rare for those in Hollywood to speak out about it, because of the prevailing view among the old guard.

TorrentFreak has some details about who's in this particular video (some chose to remain anonymous, while others agreed to go public), and it's interesting to see that one of the participants was a writer on Sons of Anarchy, since that show's creator has been one of the most outspoken (if extraordinarily confused) of the old guard, attacking anything online he doesn't like and blaming piracy for everything bad that's ever happened in the world.

That said, what still amazes me is that Peter is in this position at all. It seems to come from a sort of "file sharing tunnel vision" that some copyright maximalists have at times, in which all perspective and nuance goes out the window. They know they hate The Pirate Bay. They know that Peter was associated with the Pirate Bay, and thus they automatically assume that horrible things should happen to him. What amazed me throughout the whole situation was that if you actually stopped and looked at reality, Peter should never be in such a situation at all. To be honest, part of the problem may go back to Peter himself, as he never really seemed to take the trial against him that seriously -- and while the joking around and mocking of the trial while it was going on may have been fun at the time, it may have hurt the defense and actually further contributed to the tunnel vision against him. Those making the judgment could only see "these guys lack respect for authority" and thus they must have done something criminal.

But it's still difficult to see how anything Peter did was actually criminal in any way, shape, or form. He worked for a site that did not infringe on any copyrights directly, but acted as a conduit for people to share files, many of which were unauthorized, but plenty of which were also authorized. And he was the site's spokesperson. Yes, he mocked those who threatened and attacked the site, but that's just speaking freely. It's difficult to see how anything he did should be criminal at all, let alone deserving of many months in a maximum security prison reserved for violent offenders.

Anyone who's actually taken the time to get beyond the tunnel vision thinking of "Pirate Bay = Evil" kind of thinking, or looks past Peter's proclivity to mock authority (a useful trait), can clearly see that he's always been a very thoughtful, philosophical observer of humanity, technology and economics. For years, he's worked hard to help artists do more online, not to hurt them. Even at the Pirate Bay, he made efforts to help artists understand how to embrace it for their own benefit, and then later created and helped build Flattr as a tool to help creators make money. The idea that he's been treated as on par with a violent criminal is, frankly, disgusting.

Even if you absolutely hate The Pirate Bay and think it's the worst thing that's ever happened to the entertainment industry (a ridiculous view, but nonetheless...), the idea that the legal recourse against it should have been criminal, rather than civil charges, is mind-boggling. The idea that the site's spokesperson, who had little to do with the actual operations for the site should be criminally charged and convicted is equally ridiculous. And then the fact that he's treated at the same level as a violent criminal, and treated with such little respect and dignity concerning his own father's funeral is a travesty of justice. The lack of perspective from some who see piracy and think "lock him up and throw away the key" is immensely troubling.

Copyright should never be a criminal issue at all. The treatment of Peter Sunde just puts a massive, if terribly troubling, exclamation point on that statement.

Filed Under: copyright, criminal, hollywood, lexi alexander, peter sunde, prison
Companies: the pirate bay