by pawal on 12/14/17, 7:48 AM with 310 comments
by cup-of-tea on 12/14/17, 10:34 AM
I was there when a UK music tracker called OiNK's Pink Palace was shut down. The police raided the home of the site owner before dawn and even the home of his father who had no idea what his son was up to. Copyright industry writers wrote the news article, claiming it was "extremely lucrative" and included gems such as "Within a few hours of a popular pre-release track being posted on the OiNK site, hundreds of copies can be found".
The site's owner was found not guilty in court several years later, but not before the copyright industry essentially ruined his life.
But how does this happen? If you talk to most people they don't understand copyright at all. They think it's some kind of privileged status that you have to pay for, like a trademark or something. Most people are not even aware that they hold copyrights. And why would they? Can the average person summon the police to help protect their copyright? Of course not. It's not even a criminal matter. The police being involved seems nothing short of corruption.
by coldtea on 12/14/17, 9:53 AM
Typical, not so subtle, blackmail.
One wonders what would happen if, say, the leader of some disclosure website was residing in Sweden and a superpower wanted him...
(From a comment below on TPB case: "The judge was Thomas Norström. Swedish public radio revealed that the judge, Thomas Norström, is a member of several copyright protection associations, whose members include Monique Wadsted and Peter Danowsky – attorneys who represented the music and movie industries in the case. According to the report, Judge Norström also serves as a board member on one of the groups of which Mrs. Wadsted, the Motion Picture Association of America’s attorney, is a member." -- hurray for independent justice in any case..)
by ckastner on 12/14/17, 11:03 AM
Movies, while extremely popular, don't generate that much money: in 2016, total box office results in the US were under $12bn [1]. That's the entire industry.
Apple alone makes that much money in three weeks' time.
Amazing, that you can apply such pressure to politics, with so little.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/187069/north-american-bo...
by jakobegger on 12/14/17, 9:10 AM
So much money wasted on futile attempts to suppress a website...
by ploggingdev on 12/14/17, 9:17 AM
One of the founders of TPB, Peter Sunde started:
* Njalla (https://njal.la/) - a privacy focused domain registration service
* Flattr (https://flattr.com/) - a tipping/micropayment service to support content creators
* A VPN service - https://ipredator.se/
Another link that you might find interesting, his interview with Vice : https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/qkjpbd/pirate-bay...
by beloch on 12/14/17, 12:35 PM
Well, how do you feel about your government blackmailing, extorting, or otherwise "strong-arming" other sovereign nations in order to foist its laws upon them and then hiding that from you? (It really is a minor miracle this cable was released at all.) Is it truly worth stooping to such measures to ensure that Micky Mouse remains copyright protected for all time everywhere? Don't other nations have the right to make their own laws? How would you feel if some other nation foisted it's laws on the U.S. in such a manner? Why does the U.S. government go to such extremes for private enterprise anyways?[1]
Piracy is bad. What the U.S. government has done in response is worse.
[1]I suggest you google the United Fruit Company's history the next time you're eating a Chiquita banana for a real eye opener.
by realusername on 12/14/17, 8:53 AM
(edit: spelling)
by thomastjeffery on 12/14/17, 6:32 PM
The only thing thepiratebay.org, what.cd, kickasstorrents.cr, etc. did or continue to do is the same that a forum or news site like reddit or hackernews does: provide a community with a purpose.
While hackernews is a community for discussing news or interesting things, etc. WhatCD was a place for discussing music, quality releases, and sharing good encodings, rather than the transcoded lossy->lossy formats you see flying around most places. Naturally, WhatCD's as a community wasn't concerned with things like copyright owner's profits, etc., even though many of its users certainly were, but simply couldn't find an alternative, as a lot of music is not even to be found, let alone sold in particularly high quality lossless formats.
When what.cd was taken down, none of the copies of copyrighted content were deleted. The community was broken up.
If piracy is to be considered such a serious crime, taking down torrent trackers is like going to a meeting of known criminals, and - rather than arresting them - evicting them. It has only a minimal effect, as they are free to gather elsewhere.
What bothers me the most is that the only thing being dismantled is the thing that clearly contains the most value to individuals, and society at large. Community is a good thing.
When WhatCD was taken down, a countless amount of valuable data that could be found practically nowhere else was suddenly destined to be hidden from society at large, and the community it had cultivated was scattered, without a care for what that meant.
Sure, quite a few people find that, while using copyright enforcement as a business model, piracy significantly detracts from sales. Sure, there is a culture that undervalues creators, but it is not a black and white problem, and most popular solutions have serious consequences that go practically ignored.
by pferde on 12/14/17, 9:49 AM
"2. Summary. In a visit to Sweden last month to raise the growing concerns about Internet privacy in Sweden, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPA), together with ..."
by upofadown on 12/14/17, 11:50 AM
So these days the list is meaningless and is roundly ignored by Canada. Sweden probably should of did the same thing.
by fsloth on 12/14/17, 9:17 AM
It's more autobiographical than a research document, and has some unproven claims, but no one has punched holes in the important claims there AFAIK.
by jesperlang on 12/14/17, 8:48 AM
by dghughes on 12/14/17, 2:00 PM
Convenience is the real reason people went to websites such as the Pirate bay not stealing, people don't buy fast food for their health.
The rise of cheap and reliable streaming video websites such as Netflix changed that. That's all anyone wanted a convenient reliable way to legally watch and pay a reasonable amount.
by wimagguc on 12/14/17, 9:04 AM
In Germany, as soon as you start a torrent client, your traffic is being monitored by bots and agents, and if you upload something inappropriate you (or your host) will get a letter from a law firm with a heavy fine. (I know of two friends who had to pay $600 and $3000.)
by vinceguidry on 12/14/17, 2:39 PM
The content industry punches above its weight in getting the government to protect it overseas for this reason.
by koliber on 12/14/17, 11:44 AM
The name of the employee in the wires has been redacted. I wonder if the physical size of the redacted box, together with the fact that this is a name, together with a database of public employees, could be used to uncover the identity of the person.
By comparing the size of the redacting box with the lines above and below, we can guess that 6-9 characters are masked out (including the space). This is an a rough parallel to a timing attack used against crypto. The DB of public employees could be thought of as a list of candidate inputs.
Weak redacting?
This reminds me of a law in Poland where a person accused of a crime can not be named. Media will blur out photos and state something to the effect of "Mark W. an executive at XYZ Corp., stands accused of ...". If the accused is a well known actor with a unique first name, this becomes a running joke.
by ksk on 12/14/17, 6:02 PM
by thriftwy on 12/14/17, 12:17 PM
I mean, this is known point of vulnerability.
Maybe it's because owners of popular bittorrent software don't want that feature?
by belorn on 12/14/17, 11:13 PM
“However, it is not clear to us what constraints Sweden and even U.S. authorities would be under in pursuing a case like this when the site is legally well advised and studiously avoids storing any copyrighted material.”
A focus by the prosecutor was the claim that the founders did not have well legal advice. The idea was to prove to the court that the accused did the infringement knowingly and was aware that what they did was illegal. Here we can read that this supposedly obviousness of wrong doing was not so clear to the very high paid lawyers arguing it.
"Both Bodström and Eliasson denied any direct involvement of the Justice Ministry with the work of the police and prosecutors in the Pirate Bay case."
That they surely did. It is very illegal for them to directly act in any specific legal case. If it ever was proven it would directly end any political carer. When similar document was earthened it was said that just because the US believe they influenced Swedish politicians it still doesn't mean that they did it, so no proof of foul play has been made.
by implosificated on 12/15/17, 6:27 AM
You can harp on how there’s no accounting for taste, but the truth is that the industry this sort of thing protects certainly does account for taste, and only invests in the kind of lowest-common-denominator/mass-appeal trash that makes them the most money.
And so, we are left to suffer the guilt trip that because we don’t adhere to an honor system of donating funds for better artists (paying and not pirating, copying, stealing, sharing, music and movies), we get the artists we deserve. But that’s clearly not true, because the money made off the garbage produced today, doesn’t make it into any kind of honor system that benefits the interests of better artists.
How about producers of bad music and movies demonstrate that they are willing to donate into the honor system first?
The profits that the industry sees are not reinvested. The artists, mysteriously, continue to worsen.
by spodek on 12/14/17, 12:59 PM
The industries formed by these government-granted and defended monopolies have removed most of their limitations and keep growing. We see the benefit to them. They make big blockbusters that people enjoy watching, so we see that benefit.
The costs keep growing too, such as this article and the deprivation from the public domain of nearly a century of work. Meanwhile, technology has lowered the costs of production and distribution, making investment for most works unnecessary, obviating the need for a monopoly.
Have the costs grown to outweigh the benefits? The monopolists' power can maintain the monopolies past when that point so it's hard to tell, and people with different values will disagree, but this article points in that direction.
by Feniks on 12/14/17, 12:16 PM
I'm from the generation that grew up with digital piracy. I am accustomed to have all media available. From nineties anime shows to strategy guides for videogames.
by frabbit on 12/14/17, 8:16 PM
Is this undercover, spy-type work as opposed to public, legal actions carried out by a legitimate government agency?
by louhike on 12/14/17, 8:43 AM
by l33tbro on 12/14/17, 9:12 PM
Not necessarily proud of this, just something I've noticed.
by casualtech on 12/14/17, 11:55 PM
by kwhitefoot on 12/14/17, 2:50 PM
I don't think improvement is quite the right word.
by parski on 12/14/17, 3:29 PM
by paul7986 on 12/14/17, 8:56 PM
by scopecreep on 12/14/17, 3:42 PM
by ketsa on 12/16/17, 7:25 AM
by antigirl on 12/14/17, 10:21 AM
by ronjouch on 12/14/17, 8:41 AM
by redm on 12/14/17, 5:12 PM
I'm tired of the same conversation for the last 20 years.
by jmull on 12/15/17, 1:12 AM
Eh, f--- Pirate Bay and everyone else who makes a living stealing the efforts of others.
(And F-you too if you're a supporter/user of theirs.)
Of course the various governments were stupid, clumsy, ham-fisted, and in the pockets of corporations. So what else is new?
How does that make it OK to steal stuff?
People want to talk about what total hipocrite jackasses they are (which is true) to deflect attention from the fact that they are casually and constantly taking stuff they don't have a right to (also true, come on why don't you want to talk about that?!?).
If you don't like the terms, prices, availability, etc, of the Taxi reruns they are selling, well, then, don't watch the Taxi reruns. Trust me, despite Danny Devito, you aren't missing much. Likewise for all the pop music, old software, movies and virtually all the other content people are stealing through PB and similar.
Is this the stuff you really what you want to sell your integrity out for? Think about it.
If you all were mainly -- well, even just somewhat sporadically -- taking enlightening, high-quality stuff with an ounce or 1/2 of cultural importance that was otherwise too expensive, then I might be able to understand. But no. You're just mainly swiping bad superhero movies and video editing software that you'll never learn to use.
I think we need to proceed on all the right paths here:
1. yes, the governments and their associated law-enforcement, and regulatory bodies are a-holes who are beholden to petty, stupid, obsolete, obnoxious corporate ip holders.
AND
2. Stealing is wrong (and that doesn't change if you are stealing from 1.)
by wildmusings on 12/14/17, 10:56 AM
Very large portions of the US economy are dependent on international enforcement of copyright and patent law. If the US isn't using its leverage over other countries to make them enforce intellectual property laws, then it is failing to protect its citizens' economic security.