Dutch Pirate Party Refuses To Shut Down Proxy Service Based On Demand From Anti-Piracy Group

from the standing-its-ground dept

The Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN is somewhat famous for its overreaching efforts. While it succeeded in getting ISPs to block The Pirate Bay's website, it's been going after a bunch of proxy sites that have helped people get around the block. Its latest move may run into some difficulty however. The Dutch Pirate Party has its own proxy offering, and BREIN is demanding they turn it off. The Pirate Party, however, is standing its ground. As TorrentFreak reports:

Last week the local Pirate Party also received a letter from BREIN, demanding the shutdown of their Pirate Bay proxy site hosted at tpb.piratenpartij.nl. However, unlike the site owners that were previously contacted by the group, the Pirate Party is not caving in. They would rather fight the case in court.

Today the Party informed BREIN that the proxy site will stay online. To show that The Pirate Bay can be a useful communication tool the Pirate Party sent the letter through a torrent file, hosted on the BitTorrent site at the center of the dispute.

“The demands are ridiculous,” Pirate Party chairman Dirk Poot told TorrentFreak.

“A private lobbying organization should not be allowed to be the censor of the Dutch internet. We were also amazed to find an ex-parte decision attached, threatening Dutch minors with €1000 per day fines for operating their proxy. If we would have yielded, their trick would immediately be played out against numerous other private citizens.”

The larger point in all of this, of course, is just how completely and utterly useless BREIN's game of whac-a-mole is. There are so many proxy sites out there, and many are used for perfectly legitimate reasons. Trying to block every single one of them is a fool's errand. Those who want to go to TPB will figure out ways to get there.

Filed Under: anti-piracy, brein, proxy, whac-a-mole
Companies: the pirate bay

Highlights Of The Pirate Bay's 'Physibles' Section: The 3D-Printable Chris Dodd

from the internet-infamy dept

The other day it occurred to me to have a look at the Pirate Bay's 'Physibles' category for 3D printer plans, to see what's been added since it launched with a 3D pirate ship model earlier this year. Among the odds and ends (both useful and just-for-fun) like a whistle, a stylus for touch-screens and a Guy Fawkes mask, there is one particularly amusing item: a 3D-printable portrait of MPAA CEO Chris Dodd:

A crude little 3D printable portrait of a crude little man - Chris Dodd emblazoned with the 09F9 AACS encryption key.

Print it, and behold the visage of yesteryear.

Yay Physibles!

As many will recall, the AACS encryption key (used in decrypting HD DVDs and Blu-ray discs) was at the center of a controversy in 2007, when aggressive MPAA takedowns of the hexadecimal series sparked a massive Streisand Effect that plastered the key all over popular websites like Digg. While this was hardly the only time that Dodd and the MPAA have clashed with the Pirate Bay community, it has since been commonly used as a symbol of the unstoppable nature of information online.

So if you have a 3D printer and would like a constant reminder of "the visage of yesteryear", go ahead and extrude yourself one today. And if you're a former Senator who took over a major lobbying organization despite your promise not to become a lobbyist, go ahead and continue waging war with the internet community—they'll just keep finding creative ways to rub it in your face (or a 3D replica thereof).

Filed Under: 3d printing, aacs, chris dodd, printables
Companies: the pirate bay

Microsoft Spying On Live Messenger Messages, Censoring Any Pirate Bay Links

from the even-legit-ones dept

It's really disturbing how some companies overblock certain content and feel that they have the right to insert themselves into your ability to communicate. A few years ago, we noted that Facebook had blocked any and all links to The Pirate Bay. When asked about this, the company said that due to the "controversy" around the site, it was going to assume that all TPB links were infringing and violated the site's terms of service. It looks like Microsoft is going down a similar route. Apparently you can no longer send a TPB link via its Live Messenger instant messaging tool. I've never used Windows Messenger so can't test this, but it's pretty ridiculous. Even more ridiculous is the explanation, as it apparently tells people that the site was "reported as unsafe."

As TorrentFreak points out, the whole thing makes little sense since lots of other content is perfectly shareable via Live Messenger:

Whatever Microsoft’s reason for monitoring private conversations and then swallowing Pirate Bay links, the Redmond-based company’s censorship policies are not very consistent. All of the other large BitTorrent sites remain unaffected, even though they offer content that’s identical to The Pirate Bay.

This is troubling on a number of fronts. First of all, a link by itself should never be considered infringing. There may be content at the end of a series of links that is infringing, but blocking at the link level is really extreme and dangerous. Second, of course, is the fact that not all TPB content is infringing. Yes, an awful lot of it is almost certainly infringing. But automatically deciding that all of it is and not letting people share such links is extreme and dangerous. Cutting off legitimate speech should never be an option. Finally, the really scary part is the realization that Microsoft appears to be monitoring content being shared in private communication between two individuals in an instant messenger conversation. It seems like a pretty strong reason never to use Microsoft's Live Messenger.

Filed Under: censorship, instant messaging, links, monitoring
Companies: microsoft, the pirate bay

File Sharing Drones Proof Of Concept Already Built

from the fly-drone-fly dept

There was a fair bit of discussion recently about the story of The Pirate Bay exploring using drones to build a flying file sharing system -- with many insisting that such a thing was a completely ridiculous-to-impossible notion. They might want to think again. It seems that a proof of concept had already been built by a different group, who had no idea that TPB was considering this idea. Liam Young from Tomorrow's Thoughts Today already built what's basically an implementation of the what the Pirate Bay described, which you can see below: Of course, the key here is that these are just setting up a drone-based local-area network, rather than one connected to the wider internet, but that's easy enough to add at some point (especially as wireless technology improves). There's still a long way to go towards a full-scale system such as what the Pirate Bay guys envision, but the technology itself isn't that far fetched.

Filed Under: drones, file sharing, international waters
Companies: the pirate bay

The Pirate Bay Claims It's Going To Host The Site Via Drones Flying Over International Waters

from the the-pirate-ships-continue-to-go dept

One of the more amazing things about the recent moves by the entertainment industry to put in place stricter laws around the globe to attack file sharing, is that they still don't realize how pointless this is compared to the only real solution, which is to offer more of what consumers actually want, rather than trying to force them into some old way of doing business. For every "victory" the industry declares, we see more and more evidence that the file sharing just moves further away from what the industry can control (and keeps growing). The Pirate Bay, of course, has always been one of the leaders in mocking the legacy entertainment industry as it continues to operate, despite years-long efforts to shut it down. And even as there are reports of new raids pending, the organization has shifted to magnet links, meaning that taking it down will be even more meaningless than in the past.

Even so, the folks involved in TPB are still trying to go further. As highlighted on TorrentFreak, the latest plan from TPB is to see if it can serve the site from GPS-controlled drones flying over international waters:

One of the technical things we always optimize is where to put our front machines. They are the ones that re-direct your traffic to a secret location. We have now decided to try to build something extraordinary.

With the development of GPS controlled drones, far-reaching cheap radio equipment and tiny new computers like the Raspberry Pi, we're going to experiment with sending out some small drones that will float some kilometers up in the air. This way our machines will have to be shut down with aeroplanes in order to shut down the system. A real act of war.

We're just starting so we haven't figured everything out yet. But we can't limit ourselves to hosting things just on land anymore. These Low Orbit Server Stations (LOSS) are just the first attempt. With modern radio transmitters we can get over 100Mbps per node up to 50km away. For the proxy system we're building, that's more than enough.

Whether or not they can actually pull it off is a totally different question, but as we've been discussing recently, drone technology is getting cheaper, and the potential disruption of the Raspberry Pi should not be underestimated. While such things might not really be ready yet to do what TPB hopes to do, it's not difficult to project these trends out just a little ways to see that not only will it be possible in the not-too-distant future, but it would be a surprise if we didn't see setups that go way beyond what TPB is currently proposing before too long.

Filed Under: drones, file sharing, international waters
Companies: the pirate bay

The Pirate Bay May Get Blocked In The UK; That'll Stop The Infringement

from the and-people-will-magically-start-buying! dept

Now that the UK has decided its fine and dandy to censor websites because they might help someone somewhere find some infringing content, they continue to try to broaden that censorship ability. The latest target, not surprisingly, is The Pirate Bay, who is likely to be blocked following a ruling that slams the site for failing to make any efforts to stop infringement (though, it's not clear why it's TPB's responsibility to fix the entertainment industry's broken business model).

The full ruling is an interesting read, though it notes that no one from TPB was there to defend the site. It also appears to get basic facts wrong -- on information that is widely, publicly available, such as in claiming that Carl Lunstrom was an "operator" for the site. He was not. That said, it seems totally pointless to block TPB, because the site can (and will) spring up with its entire same contents on another domain (or many, many domains) minutes after such a block is in place. It's not just a game of wac-a-mole, it's encouraging more moles and more holes. It makes you wonder what the point of this really would be.

Filed Under: blocking, censorship, copyright, uk
Companies: the pirate bay

The Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde Questions Why We Let Dying Industries Dictate Terms Of Democracy

from the seems-like-a-reasonable-question dept

Peter Sunde, a very thoughtful and insightful guy, who's been completely demonized by the entertainment industry for his role with The Pirate Bay, has written up an interesting piece for Wired UK where he not only goes over highly questionable issues related to his conviction, but raises a larger question about why we, as a society, allow one obsolete industry to have so much power in government and policy issues. The connections between those involved in his prosecution and the entertainment industry are simply too numerous to be fair:

The Swedish prosecutor sent out a memo in 2006 saying that TPB wasn't guilty of "main" crimes -- at best it aids and abets (he also mentioned that the people running TPB were very clever). But Hollywood was not happy with this and forced the Swedish Minister of Justice to visit the White House and talk about it. The United States told Sweden that if they didn't get rid of the site, they would not be allowed to trade with the US!

The minister (illegally) told the prosecutor what had happened which forced him to raid TPB -- only a few weeks after sending out that memo about how legal it was.

Evidently, Warner Brothers felt that the investigation was taking too long. The studio contacted the police officer in charge of the investigation (one person that worked mostly by himself) and before I had even been questioned by him, he interviewed for a job with Warner Brothers.

When we found out he'd been hired (by him changing his employer from "Polisen" to "Warner Bros" on Facebook) the reply we got was that it was proof that Swedish IT police are of such high caliber that even the big US companies would hire them.

I got promoted from "witness" to "suspect" a week after the job was promised.

During the trial it turned out that the judge was the chairman for the Swedish pro-copyright society, one lay judge ran a record company, another one was formerly the chairman for the songwriter lobby organisation. I could go on.

It's stories like this that raise significant questions about the prosecution. Even if you believe that Sunde was guilty of what he was charged with, I would think you should be able to admit that the list of things above should not have happened under any circumstance. When you read that... and then realize that the guy leading the prosecution against Megaupload for the US DOJ used to work for the industry as an "anti-piracy" exec -- you see the same pattern happening again and again. People who have too close connections to industry are making decisions on these issues designed to protect their industries, rather than looking at the actual impact on society and the economy. That's a pretty big problem, and shows how "regulatory capture" can sometimes become "judicial capture" as well.

Filed Under: communications, corruption, democracy, peter sunde, sweden, technology
Companies: the pirate bay

Supreme Court Denies Appeal For The Pirate Bay Founders

from the jail-time-may-be-imminent dept

Despite significant questions raised on some of the specifics of the lower court's ruling against the folks behind The Pirate Bay, the Swedish Supreme Court announced today that it would not hear the appeal in the case. In theory, this means that the four individuals may face jail time pretty soon -- though, as Torrentfreak notes, it's pretty standard in Sweden for cases that have gone on this long to take 12 months off of the sentences, which might mean no actual jail time. One of those still facing jail time, Peter Sunde, who has since gone on to create Flattr (a service that has helped many, many content creators -- including us at Techdirt -- make lots of money), has written up a post highlighting just how questionable the entire process has been:

We’re not surprised by this. The previous court cases has been filled of corruption. From having the minister of justice pressured by the US to illegally make a case of TPB, through the police officer responsible for the investigation (Jim Keyzer) “just happened” to get a job at Warner Brothers the weeks before I myself got promoted from a witness to a suspect, to the judges in the court cases being either board members, or in one case the actual chairman of the board, for the swedish pro-copyright society, it was clear to us that the supreme court – where many of the judges make a lot of money on their own copyrights – would be hard to persuade to take the case. Even though most of the public would want the case tested there. Even though it’s one of the most important cases for all of the EU.

Another view worth reading comes from my friend Martin Thornkvist, who is from Sweden, and ran a record label in Sweden and has worked with a bunch of Swedish artists. You might think he'd be against The Pirate Bay, but he's quite upset about this ruling, noting that it makes him both sad and angry. He points out that it makes him sad, because the entertainment industry is still fighting their fans. He notes that when they stop fighting their fans -- as the record labels finally realized with Spotify -- piracy almost disappears. Though he also points out that without The Pirate Bay, Spotify almost certainly would not have existed. And that's the part that makes him angry. Despite helping to push the world forward, the thanks they get is jail time:

I’m angry because the founders of The Pirate Bay don't get the recognition they deserve. For pushing the development of new services further and forcing the media industries to distribute their content in a manner that people want, (ie not plastic discs and windows policies).

Meanwhile, the site itself has moved to a .se domain, assuming that the US government is likely to seize their .org before too long. Because, you know, that'll really stop file sharing...

Filed Under: appeals, copyright, corruption, peter sunde, sweden
Companies: the pirate bay

Dutch ISPs Refuse To Block The Pirate Bay Without A Direct Order

from the good-for-them dept

While some Dutch ISPs have been ordered by a court to block access to The Pirate Bay (after fighting it in court for years), the order only applied directly to two ISPs: xs4all and Ziggo. BREIN, the local anti-piracy group, had then demanded that other ISPs also start blocking access. However, it appears that KPN and T-Mobile are refusing, saying that they will not do so without a direct court order:

“KPN sees the blocking of websites as a drastic measure for which a court order is required,” KPN said in a statement, adding that innovation is needed to curb piracy.

“KPN doesn’t believe a blockade is the right solution. What is needed are robust, attractive business models that are easy to use and offer a fair deal to both producers and consumers of content.”

T-Mobile also said that it will only respond to court orders, while it emphasized the value of an open Internet.

“T-Mobile strongly supports an open Internet and is fundamentally against shutting off access to websites. Dutch law is very clear when it comes to blocking access to the Internet. T-Mobile will only respond to a court ruling, not to demands from a private party such as BREIN.”

It's good to see that these ISPs are standing up for the right to an open internet. Of course, I do wonder how such block orders work under Netherlands' (first of its kind) net neutrality law.

In the meantime, the two ISPs who were subject to the court order have begun the blockade, with Ziggo pointing users to an information page... in which they tell users that it's easy to get around the blockade.

Filed Under: blocks, isps, netherlands
Companies: brein, kpn, t-mobile, the pirate bay, xs4all, ziggo

The Pirate Bay Introduces 'Physibles': Napster For Physical Objects

from the kicking-the-hornet's-nest dept

A little over a year ago, we wrote about a fascinating paper from Public Knowledge with the splendid title, "It Will Be Awesome if They Don’t Screw it Up: 3D Printing, Intellectual Property, and the Fight Over the Next Great Disruptive Technology." It was written by Michael Weinberg, who recently recorded an interview going over much the same ground, if you prefer to listen rather than read. At the heart of both is the concern that once 3D printers become better and cheaper, and people start posting digital blueprints for commercially-available physical objects on the Net, then the manufacturing industries will recapitulate the war on sharing currently being waged by the music and film companies.

The output quality of 3D printers may still leave something to be desired, but the second part of the equation – freely swapping digital blueprints of objects without too much concern for any intellectual monopolies that are infringed upon – just became much easier thanks to The Pirate Bay:

We believe that the next step in copying will be made from digital form into physical form. It will be physical objects. Or as we decided to call them: Physibles. Data objects that are able (and feasible) to become physical. We believe that things like three dimensional printers, scanners and such are just the first step. We believe that in the nearby future you will print your spare sparts for your vehicles. You will download your sneakers within 20 years.

That's probably true. Whether you will risk prosecution for doing so depends on how the post-SOPA legal landscape turns out.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

Filed Under: 3d printers, file sharing, infringement, physical objects, sharing
Companies: the pirate bay