thepiratebay.org trial

[quadz]

Been reading some articles on The Pirate Bay court trial...

Thought this was some interesting info they released about where most of their users are located:

http://blog.telecoms.com/2009/02/11/ya-har-the-pirate-bay-busts-some-piracy-and-peer-to-peer-myths/




Also, though I can't agree with piracy in general--after all I make my living writing and selling software--I also can't help but smile at the irreverant replies thepiratebay guys have made to the blowhard cease-and-desist threats they routinely receive from lawyers (who often don't seem even to realize thepiratebay is a search engine and doesn't actually host downloads directly.)

http://thepiratebay.org/legal.php   <- 

[peewee_RotA]

is about PLN50-60 (USD14-USD16.75). while the average wage in Poland is only PLN800-1200 per month.

That's $224-$336USD of average wage. 

[The Happy Friar]

is about PLN50-60 (USD14-USD16.75). while the average wage in Poland is only PLN800-1200 per month.
That's $224-$336USD of average wage. 

when the govt provides most services, why do you need $$ to pay for anything????   

anyway...  just like intel's big pentium bug in the mid 90's that put the name on the tongue of every average consumer, holywood/RIAA/etc put "free movies/music/etc" on the tongue of every average internet user thanks to all their public battles vs piratebay & others.

My dad didn't know what they did was illegal (just that he heard about them via word-of-mouth from people who read about them) to get stuff from piratebay until I told him if it's copyrighted it's illegal.  In essence, the huge PR against piracy made people aware you could get stuff for free vs paying.

[|iR|Focalor]

First there was Napster, which was the only time I bought an MP3 player which had 32MB internal memory and I eventually bought a 32MB SmartCard for a total of 64MB. The thing is pretty huge too, about the size of a mini-walkman cassette player and runs on one AA battery. Pretty wild how they have mp3 players about twice the size of my thumb nail that hold upwards of 1GB and run for days and days on a watch battery. I haven't bought one, and probably won't until this thing finally dies.

Anyway, first there was Napster. Then Scour came along right about the time Napster got sued. Scour was cool because you could share movie files too. Then Scour got canned. Kazaa came along. Kazaa got canned for the most part, you couldn't find ANYTHING anymore. Then the wonderful world of torrents came along.

It seems like every time one gets shut down, something pops up in it's place, and each time they get better at it and offer people some new realm of data to pirate. I have to wonder what will come along when torrent trackers finally get disabled. What new and exciting thing will I be able to download then? Hopefully disposable 19 year old French contortionist sex slaves. That would be really nice.

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Swedish prosecutors dropped charges relating to "assisting copyright infringement" leaving the lesser charges of "assisting making available copyright material" on trial day two.

Pirate Bay co-founder Frederik Neik said it showed prosecutors had misunderstood the technology.

The music industry played down the changes as "simplifying the charges".
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7895026.stm


 

[quadz]

Swedish prosecutors dropped charges relating to "assisting copyright infringement" leaving the lesser charges of "assisting making available copyright material" on trial day two.

Pirate Bay co-founder Frederik Neik said it showed prosecutors had misunderstood the technology.

The music industry played down the changes as "simplifying the charges".

Speculation as to why those charges were dropped:

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/02/prosecution-dro.html

The move may have been prompted in part by the defendants' opening statements. On Monday, Pirate Bay co-founder Fredrik Neij discussed so called "trackerless torrents," which use a Distributed Hash Table, or DHT, and don't rely on a torrent tracker at all.

"We believe he dropped charges after having googled all night about DHT," an upbeat Peter Sunde, one of the defendants, told Wired.com later.

Also, kind of amusing attempts at an analogy in the comments section here:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/02/charges-droppedmaking-available-now-focus-of-tpb-trial.ars#comments

It took several iterations to get someone's "library analogy" to fit the internet model of a torrent search engine:

<gmat>

I have never understood how making something available is a criminal act. If I go to a public library and remove a copyrighted book from the shelf and then illegally Xerox a copy. Is the library responsible because it made it available?

<Stewcanoe>

I like the whole public library analogy.

If I go to the public library, (which I have) and use the provided card file to find a book, (I have done this also) then take that book from the shelf and use the copier, (also conveniently provided by the library) to make copies from the illustrations in the book, (I plead the fifth) which I then frame and hang on my wall as art, (I am still pleading the fifth), is the library responsible for my, (alleged) copy write infringement?

<Zakharov>

The library, much like the VCR, the tape deck, the technology of bittorrent, youtube, google, and all the other analogies trotted out to defend TPB has significant LEGAL uses.

A truly proper analogy would be a "LIBRARY" that calls itself "Free Books FTW", lets you come in and "borrow" a book, provides a free copier and paper, but does not allow you to read the book there, or take the book out of the library (thus preventing others from using it simultaneously.) A tortured "analogy" but analogies always suck for this issue.

<ProfMobius>

The analogy is nearly correct. The library "Free Books FTW" don't provide you with actual books, but with the address of people who have the book, and an address to a copy machine. It just keep a huge listing of all the address, and this is the only thing you can borrow out of this library.
What you do with the addresses once you borrowed it is not of their concern anymore, as they are just pointing somewhere you can maybe get what you are looking for, or not, or you may don't go to the addresses at all. (More like a knife seller don't have to check you are not using your knife to kill anyone).

[The Happy Friar]

someone on another forum I frequent said that, in theory, getting your stuff pirated is a great business model.  Example: I make a crappy movie/song/game/etc,  I pimp the HELL out of it, it tanks.  But because nobody will buy it but they WILL pirate it, I find as many pirates as I can & sue the heck out of them.

[|iR|Focalor]

Ahoy mateys! The Pirate Bay hath returned!

I remember I was in the process of trying to download pretty much every Clint Eastwood movie ever made back in early December when the site went down because Swedish authorities raided the place and made off with their servers I guess. You'd try to go to the address and it just wouldn't do shit. Then a little bit later something came back with a countdown ticker counting off to February 1st I think. I always download all the TV shows I keep up with just in case at a later season I wanna go back and binge-watch the whole thing over again to-date to get refamiliar with everything going on. But anyway I forgot to check back there on the first like I had planned until today when I was trying to download the latest episodes of Workaholics and Duck Dynasty. And it's back! Doesn't look like the newest stuff is getting posted up by as many people though. Usually I download Duck Dynasty in larger sized (1+GB) higher quality MKV format. Couldn't even find last night episode of DD posted there yet, had to get it off KickassTorrents, and it's a lower quality smaller (200-ish MB) MP4. Hopefully before long the traffic will come back to where shit's getting posted like gang busters again.

Hollywood's gotta be super pissed at these people by now. They've done everything they can possibly do to get them shut down, and they just absolutely refuse to die.

[adz1La]

fuck tpb, that silkroad kid getting jammed the fuck up...ahahaha

[Th0m@s29]

Yeah it is fucked UP.... Silkroad is controversial but that Guy who Ran Filefront went to Prison for 50 Years more then Cocaine dealers or rapist or child molestors basically he was made an Example Of.

[|iR|Focalor]

Sad news if you're a thieving prick like me. Kickass Torrents is kaput. The owner got arrested in Poland this past week.

Not long after it happened, there were clones of it popping up. But it now looks like there's an "official" new domain for it at KAT.am.

edit: It's there, but it looks like new stuff isn't getting posted. Was just looking for last nights UFC on Fox and nothing was listed past UFC 200 which was 2 weeks ago I think.

Kinda funny. There's a link to a change.org petition seeking to release the owner.

This morning the founder of kat.cr was arrested in Poland. It's another attack on freedom and rights of internet users from all around the world. This is unacceptable!

In the world where terrorist attacks is a monthly issue, where global corporations are swimming in money and millions dying because of diseases and hunger every single year, do you really think torrents deserve attention, money and human resources you spend on them? Do you really think it's the most important thing on our hands right now?

Our freedom to share is the human right which Artem Vaulin has been providing to millions of users. By arresting him our rights are violated.

Eh. Some really awful wording there, haha! Basically their argument is, "You should worry about diseases and ISIS and don't worry about data piracy. You're violating our rights by not letting us break the law." I download shit all the time. But I don't have the balls to claim that I have the "right" to do it.