Court Says Telenor Doesn't Need To Block The Pirate Bay

from the onwards dept

I'm heading over to Norway in the next few days to give a talk at the Nordic Music Week event, and it's nice to see that the courts in that country seem to recognize how silly the IFPI's demands that major ISP Telenor block access to The Pirate Bay are. Telenor was smart enough to fight back, and the courts have now said that Telenor is not liable for what its users do, and should not have to block access to a site like The Pirate Bay. From TorrentFreak on the ruling:

The court ruled that Telenor is not contributing to any infringements of copyright law when its subscribers use The Pirate Bay, and therefore there is no legal basis for forcing the ISP to block access to the site.... In making its decision, the court also had to examine the repercussions if it ruled that Telenor and other ISPs had to block access to certain websites. This, it said, is usually the responsibility of the authorities and handing this task to private companies would be "unnatural."

Good to see a court recognize that the entertainment industry doesn't own the internet, and shouldn't be the one to determine what is and what is not legal online.

Filed Under: blocking, norway
Companies: ifpi, telenor, the pirate bay

Court Tells Pirate Bay Founders They Can No Longer Work On The Pirate Bay

from the yeah,-that'll-work dept

You can't say the entertainment industry isn't persistent in their attempts to shut down The Pirate Bay (though, a portion of the site's popularity can be attributed to their neverending campaign against the site). While the industry won its lawsuit against four of The Pirate Bay's founders earlier this year, the ongoing appeals process is taking too long for the industry -- and the court had not issued an injunction against the site, so it's still running (though, plenty of users have since bailed out due to concern about the failed attempt to sell the site). Still, the entertainment industry has been trying a bunch of different ways to shut down the site in the meantime. Initially it got an ISP serving the site to stop, which caused a brief downtime. However, the latest, as pointed out by brokep, is that the industry appears to have convinced the court to bar two of the defendants -- Gottfried Svartholm-Warg and Fredrik Neij -- from doing any work on the site (Google translation from the original, so would appreciate any detail corrections if the translation isn't accurate).

It's difficult to see what this accomplishes. Brokep points out that the two aren't involved with the site in the first place, and don't live in Sweden any more as well, so it's not clear what this does. On top of that, even if they were involved, it's not like others wouldn't quickly take their place anyway. The whole crusade continues to be a massive waste of time and resources by the entertainment industry for no clear gain.

Filed Under: copyright, fredrik neij, gottfried svarthold-warg, lawsuits, sweden
Companies: the pirate bay

Dutch Court Orders Pirate Bay To Delete Torrents

from the yet-again dept

Earlier this year, a Dutch court issued a default judgment against The Pirate Bay, ordering it to delete certain torrents and block Dutch web surfers from reaching the site. The Pirate Bay's founders protested the ruling, noting that they had not been properly informed of the case in the first place, and that other items in the lawsuit were highly questionable -- including what appeared to be falsified documents submitted by BREIN, the Dutch anti-piracy agency.

The court has now annulled the original default judgment, but the new ruling is basically the same thing. The founders were told to delete torrents and block Dutch surfers from at least part of the site. The court also rejected the claim that the founders do not still own the site, saying they presented no evidence that the site had actually been sold to another entity, or any evidence of who now owned the site. While I still think it's questionable to force the site to block results of what is really a search engine, there is a point about who owns the site. I recognize why The Pirate Bay has done what it's done, but it almost feels like they're trying to be too cute about the ownership issue.

Filed Under: blocking, copyright, netherlands, torrents
Companies: brein, the pirate bay

File Sharing Sites Team Up To Help Promote Indie Films

from the no-legitimate-purpose? dept

While some continue to insist that there's nothing good or legal that comes from file sharing sites, many content creators who have embraced those sites have found them to be wonderful tools for distribution and promotion. Now, it looks like a bunch of them are teaming up to do even more. Mininova, The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, Miro, Vuze and Frostwire have all agreed to work with a new project called Vodo, which will help promote indie films. Filmmakers can offer their films through Vodo and get promoted on the various file sharing sites -- and the system is designed to let people easily donate. While I'm not a huge fan of a pure "donation" business model, it should be interesting to see how Vodo evolves over time. Certainly, it could be a valuable tool to indie filmmakers who recognize that obscurity is a much bigger threat to their efforts than piracy.

Filed Under: file sharing, films, p2p, promotion
Companies: frostwire, isohunt, mininova, miro, the pirate bay, vodo, vuze

Pirate Bay Appeal Lay Judge Employed By Spotify?

from the a-bit-of-bias dept

There have been all sorts of questions about unfair bias in the Swedish trial against The Pirate Bay and its founders, and the latest claim is that one of the "lay judges" on the appeal is employed by Spotify, currently a music industry darling trying to set up a licensed, authorized online music streaming system. Given that Spotify could reasonably see sites like The Pirate Bay as somewhat competitive, and that it counts major record labels among its ownership, it's hard to see how allowing an employee to be on the lay judge panel (sort of, but not really, the equivalent of a jury) is even close to fair.

Filed Under: bias, copyright, lawsuits, sweden
Companies: spotify, the pirate bay

Pirate Bay Appeal To Be Heard By Judge Tied To Copyright Group As Well

from the well,-that-seems-fair... dept

As The Pirate Bay gears up for the appeal of its trial in Sweden, it's worth noting that the judge chosen to hear the trial happens to be the same one who was removed from reviewing the fairness of the original trial because she happens to belong to the same pro-stronger copyright group as the original judge. How is that fair?

Filed Under: bias, copyright, sweden, trial
Companies: the pirate bay

GGF Shareholders Approve Pirate Bay Buy... But No One Knows Where The Money Is

from the still-sketchy dept

We're among those who think it's quite questionable as to whether or not the acquisition of The Pirate Bay by GGF will ever really go through. GGF's CEO Hans Pandeya has had a lot of trouble answering basic questions ever since the deal was originally announced. The company has had trading in its shares halted twice now, and many of the "big name" people that Pandeya used to show he was legit have separated themselves from the company -- often questioning Pandeya's ability to do this deal. So, lots of people are interested in the news that GGF shareholders have apparently "approved" the deal. But, that's somewhat meaningless as there still remains little evidence that GGF can actually scrape together the money needed to complete the purchase. This whole thing has been pretty questionable from the start, and there's nothing yet that suggests there's a real deal here at all.

Filed Under: hans pandeya
Companies: ggf, the pirate bay

Is Assisting With Assisting With Assisting With Potential Copyright Infringement Illegal?

from the perhaps-in-Sweden dept

With a Swedish court trying to shut down The Pirate Bay by forcing what it thought was the site's main ISP to block it, many folks are talking about how quickly the site came back, and the site's rather defiant response to the attempt. There's also some buzz about the fact that an antivirus company, Avast, has started blocking The Pirate Bay as being "malicious." While Avast defends the decision, it certainly makes me question Avast's competence as a security company (Update: Avast now says it was a false positive and has been fixed -- but that wasn't what the company said originally). It should be looking at actual malicious behavior -- not just blocking a site that you could go to where you might possibly if you did something dumb get some malicious files on your computer. Why not just do what a security product is supposed to do and stop the actual maliciousness from occurring, rather than blocking the entire site?

But, more to the point, this highlights one of the slippery slope problems with The Pirate Bay ruling and others. When you start to blame the tools for the problem, where do you stop? Peter Sunde made this point with a short Twitter message about the order against the ISP (I think that's what it's about):

It's now decided that Assisting with assisting with assisting of eventual copyright infringement is a crime.

Indeed. This is the problem when you allow for some sort of "inducement" or "contributory copyright infringement" standard. Where do you stop? The Pirate Bay itself doesn't infringe on copyrights. It's the users who do. But, the courts blamed The Pirate Bay. And when that didn't work, it went after the site's ISP, who is so tangentially related to the actual infringement that it's ridiculous to put the burden on it. Who's next? Already we have the entertainment industry trying to get individual ISPs to block their customers from The Pirate Bay. Basically, it seems like anyone in the chain, no matter how loosely connected can now get pulled into this as potentially violating copyright law.

Update: A separate point raised in the comments: apparently the court only told the ISP to block access to a small list of specific content, but without being able to do that, it just blocked the whole site.

Filed Under: copyright, inducement
Companies: the pirate bay

Swedish Court Get The Pirate Bay Taken Down

from the sunk? dept

When the original ruling came out against The Pirate Bay's founders, one odd part was that there was no injunction forcing the site to stop doing anything. The entertainment industry quickly filed for one -- which seemed a bit odd, considering that the case was under appeal. The latest, however, is that a judge has ordered one of the main ISPs servicing The Pirate Bay to stop, making the site largely inaccessible. In the meantime, the gov't agency that was responsible for getting the founders to pay up has basically found that they can't find any money to collect, which aligns with what the four guys have been saying all along (that they don't own the site and don't make money from it).

Either way, congrats to the entertainment industry for temporarily wac(k)ing another mole. Considering the whole mess with GGF, it seems like most of The Pirate Bay's users are already migrating elsewhere, and a few people are setting up clone sites. Again, this certainly isn't condoning their behavior, but at what point does the industry realize that it's not helping matters. It's just further distributing the problem, making it that much more difficult to do anything legitimate. Update: And, of course, it only took a few hours until the site was back online. Keep on mole hunting, Hollywood.

Filed Under: sweden, take down
Companies: the pirate bay

No Surprise Here: Pirate Bay Acquisition Falling Apart

from the and-there-it-goes... dept

Back at the beginning of July we expressed our doubts about GGF's "acquisition" of The Pirate Bay ever actually happening. The quotes from the CEO made very little sense, and he was clearly hedging his language. Some have suggested that the whole thing was just a pump & dump scam (and, in fact, there were early questions about insider trading). As more details came out, the "plan" behind the acquisition just didn't make much sense, and those on the inside started bailing out.

Greg Sandoval's been on the story, and has a few more updates that make the whole deal seem quite unlikely. First, remember how the same day GGF announced a plan to buy the company Peerialism, which would be the key component to making The Pirate Bay function as a legit service? Yeah, well, apparently GGF hasn't actually followed through on that deal at all, and Peerialism notes that GGF hasn't lived up to its contract terms or delivered any of the promised money at all -- and that no development work has been done. Then, this morning, trading in GGF shares was suspended again, as more doubts are being raised about the whole effort. From all this, plenty of people are now starting to realize there's as good chance that the deal itself is never going to happen.

The real question, though, is whether or not it was ever really expected to happen?

Filed Under: hans pandeya
Companies: ggf, global gaming factory x, the pirate bay