RIAA to .ORG Registry: Take down ThePirateBay
blog.easydns.org
blog.easydns.org
The internet contains and promotes everything.
(That doesn't make it reasonable to do so; just noting the current state.)
Google is not setup explicitly for the purpose of finding pirated material.
The pirate bay is. And it's pretty obvious from the name too.
I don't see how their logic is "skewed".
About the name: Yes, it contains the word "Pirate". It doesn't mean that the actual pirates are there. Also, Amazon is a legitimate online store, not a river with a surrounding jungle. Kayak does not sell kayaks, and Apple is not about apples at all.
Providing metadata is now sufficient to be infringing? If I SHA256 hash my entire media library and post it online, is that infringing?
How would you like if someone found your address and posted detailed instructions about how to get to your house, what hours of the day you're not there, and what type of security (if any at all) is installed? Maybe along with other "metadata", such as information about your neighbours, your job, your family members, etc. Enough to enable someone to perform social engineering on your neighbour or relatives to get them to open the door for them when you're not there.
Never forget the list.
An infohash is not exactly revealing metadata. Similar to publishing just your name and nothing else.
Of course, it's still a pretty crazy stretch because a name reveals even more than the infohash does.
All what you mention I can find legally in free databases and Facebook, not to mention legal but pay-to-access sites too, or simply firing a PI.
Just give me your full name and age (I don't need exact DOB) and bitcoin me 20 bucks for a few paid sites and I will delivery you a full detailed portfolio on your persona that will be 50 pages thick.
Posting that could violate some other laws, maybe it could constitute harassment, depending on where you live - but it's not a violation of copyright, and if you would file a DMCA request to take that down you would be rightly declined.
You can post a lot of things on the internet that might be bad, illegal, or both - but only a narrow subset of that is a violation of copyright, and all the rest, including magnet data, private address information, stolen credit card data, etc are out of scope for DMCA.
There is some caselaw about what happens in that case (e.g. Grokster) but it's more complicated than "if you link to The Hollywood there is jail."
Half the inventions of modern society wouldn't be legal if the criteria were instead "can be used for illegal purposes."
The commenter you're responding to is being slightly coy, yes, but they're not really wrong in that there is a difference between purpose and ability, both legally and in terms of plain common sense.
Thepiratebay can be used for piracy, and personally, there is little doubt in my mind that piracy is what many users go to the site for. However, the mechanisms by which TPB operates are by no means exclusive to piracy nor do they encourage it. That is, to the best of my knowledge, there is no payout for having a popular link on TPB. The TPB folk do not actively seek any specific type of content, nor to the best of anyone's knowledge do they have agreements with actual pirates to have said pirates release their content on TPB. Their website does not encourage users to download pirated content, nor does it intentionally direct them towards it. (Recent/Top100 links are algorithmically determined, not intentionally curated by TPB staff, so I posit this is not directing users towards pirated content, even if sometimes that is the end result)
Like the above poster wrote, TPB is a search engine that is restricted exclusively to their database (the tracker). To call such a broad idea "piracy" is really poor from any legal or common sense standpoint, as the very act of searching in this manner is not in and of itself a crime.
I understand that you're frustrated that the poster is refusing to outright say people use TPB primarily to pirate, but the entire basis of the argument for TPB is the same as virtually any other aggregate site; they are not purposefully or willfully collecting pirated content, and as long as they are DCMA compliant, which according to both easyDNS and TPB is true, I see no reason why they should be removed.
If the law changes and further defines the legality of what is and is not allowed on a website, then there will be at least legal grounds for removing TPB. As it stands, the legal attempts to remove TPB are very grand and sweeping, and outside of when they were ignoring takedown notices (which early on were from jurisdictions foreign to where the operators and servers were hosted), there is very little justification to "shut down the site" like the RIAA is requesting. These organizations have a legal venue, and it is the DCMA and all of its already over-reaching power. The fact that these organizations have to do their job is not a reason to further restrict content online, be it in the name of stopping piracy or not.
If you were honest, you would say "I don't care that 1% might be using it for legitimate torrents"
100% of hashsums on TPB are legal. These are genuine numbers. They don't even uniquely identify the (supposedly illegitimate) contents on users' computers since different sources can produce identical hashsums.
If I post this here: a4c5fd525f15cf929d6a38b0ccb854b4f88b2385 what can you claim about that hash?
Edit: Why am I getting downvoted? Have you clicked on this page: https://www.thepiratebay.org/top/all
Wtf is the point of acting like TPB is a legit site where the main focus is not to spread copyrighted material? Are you that fucking daft?
semi-convoluted analogy time!
I want to start off with a statement of empathy and understanding for people who have their name slandered online when someone reviews their shop/eatery. Now lets say someone comes onto that shops site, and leaves a bitter unsightly comment, I don't think anyone would argue that they are within their right to delete that from their site, as much as they could leave it up and respond to it at their discretion.
Now lets say, that someone comes onto your site, and leaves a comment about this persons shop. your site could be a review site, or just a general discussion site. Either way, when the shop owner comes to you and asks you to remove the comment, you have every right to do so, or to decide not to.
If I see someone come along and FORCE someone (you) to take down a review or comment, I would be very upset about that. I mean, its not my site, but when I see your rights get trampled on, even though I empathize with the trampler, I have to take your side on this.
All this to say, people who take obvious black and white issues and use those to further their agenda do not reserve the right to be unchallenged in process.
We all agree that killing people is terrible, but we don't all agree that abortion is wrong. We all agree that giving to people is great, but we don't all buy into a universal basic income. We all agree copyright protection is there for the artist, and that stealing things is bad, but some people think that the argument of what constitutes data you can control and can't has farther reaching consequences than piracy.
We all know what TPB is for.
And maybe that you seem to not be aware of the legal content available on TPB.
Google indexes both legal and illegal content, and the same goes for TPB. Some examples:
Legal: https://thepiratebay.org/torrent/14396611/ubuntu-16.04-deskt...
Illegal: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=game+of+thrones+s06e07+goo...
Illegal: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=1080p+google+docs
The difference is that the DMCA says it's okay as long as you take it down when you get a DMCA notice, which Google, but not TPB, does.
I realize that the idea that something is out of reach of US supremacy is a tough pill to swallow for some kinds of people, but come on.
What they claim is irrelevant.
Do you really think the DMCA embodies some universal moral code? That's the only way what you're saying would make any sense.
I'm not sure you even understand why someone would object to this, so I don't think we need to discuss this any further.
Their response to "take down links to this hash" is "you don't own that hash" which is true.
Which has not been established by any precedent yet, as far as I've been able to tell.
>Their response to "take down links to this hash" is "you don't own that hash" which is true.
That's not the responses they've given before. (see http://beebulletin.com/hilarious-pirate-bay-legal-responses/)
Those hashes are not what they have ownership of.
Now if you meant hat they want to expand that law... well yes, but that's different.
Why not use the official downloads and torrents? Seems like you're exposing yourself to unnecessary risk like this, unless you're religious about checking every download signature against the official ones.
When it comes to piracy, Google's situation is exactly opposite of TPB's: TPB is primarily designed to facilitate piracy, does not comply with DMCA takedown requests, and has incidental noninfringing uses. Google is not primarily designed to facilitate piracy, does comply with DMCA takedown requests, and only incidentally facilitates piracy.
It's an American law. The fact that it implements WIPO treaties does not change that fact, in other words, being DMCA compliant is not something that entities outside of the USA should have to be.
And, in any event, their response to DMCA take down requests (http://beebulletin.com/hilarious-pirate-bay-legal-responses/) and efforts to evade U.S. jurisdiction (not that it helped them much given their serious legal problems at home in Sweden) is pretty good evidence of their intentions--though it is hardly the best evidence available. A business that was not intentionally facilitating piracy would probably just comply with the DMCA takedown notices and, as a bonus, not have to spend all its time hiding its servers.
I strongly disagree. Look at how many big name American companies have fake HQ's and other such arrangements in other countries in an effort to pay less American taxes. Companies in general try to get out of all kinds of things (taxes, responsibilities, etc) all the time, and doing so is not any kind of admission of legal transgressions.
If I had an American company and I was getting legal threats from an organization in another country that was citing their country's laws, you can bet I'd do everything I could to avoid having to comply... regardless of whether or not I was actually breaking any laws at all.
Maybe this is true as a statement about what you would do in this situation. But it does not much resemble the behavior of most actual organizations engaged in a legitimate line of business. (To be sure, some may try to avoid the U.S. market entirely. But TPB has not done that. They're content to serve U.S. users, just not to obey U.S. laws.)
Attempting to avoid taxes through legal loopholes is exactly the behavior of many large business: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement#Compa...
In case you think taxes are a completely different scenario (an opinion which I would take issue with), companies trying to avoid other laws in other countries also happens very often. See Google vs. Spain, for example, where Google fought to not have to change their practices to comply with local (Spanish/EU) laws.
Complying with laws in another country often means having to change how a company does things. Change almost always means costs for the company, either in rebuilding things, retraining people, or general loss of revenue. Therefore it's often in a company's best interest to resist such change, if they think they have a chance they can.
With taxes, on the other hand, there is, as you say, conclusive evidence that companies bend over backwards to avoid (e.g.) U.S. taxes. This is because those taxes are burdensome to very many (probably all) businesses. Most businesses with the resources to do so will therefore go to great lengths to avoid those taxes.
The evidence of companies' efforts to avoid DMCA obligations, on the other hand, is tellingly different. Unlike taxes, most companies do not go to great lengths to avoid DMCA obligations. This includes foreign companies with large user bases, and sites that facilitate the sharing of media such as YouTube, Flickr, Tumbly, Vimeo, etc. But TPB does. This tells you that DMCA is more of a burden on TPB than on most companies. I wonder why that might be...
I genuinely cannot believe we are still debating whether a primary purpose of The Pirate Bay is to facilitate piracy. Of course it is.
I'd love to see something that backs this up.
> I genuinely cannot believe we are still debating whether a primary purpose of The Pirate Bay is to facilitate piracy. Of course it is.
I'm not debating that at all. I'm just arguing that someone trying to avoid a foreign law that (at least debatably) does not apply in their country is by no means an admission of any sort of shady intentions, but is in fact simply common and sound business practice.
Not that they should be, mind. Domain registry needs to be a neutral ground and absolutely should not be subject to any kind of takedowns. A domain name points to an IP address - go after that. If it points to another country, your job just got harder, but that doesn't make it my job.
How do you submit a takedown for a "file" when there's no files to speak of?
The Pirate Bay is the worlds largest bittorrent indexer. Bittorrent is a filesharing protocol that in a reliable way enables big and fast file transfers.
No torrent files are saved at the server. That means no copyrighted and/or illegal material are stored by us. It is therefore not possible to hold the people behind The Pirate Bay responsible for the material that is being spread using the site.
I'd appreciate a copy paste of the specific text that says they are setup with the purpose to find pirated material, otherwise it's implied and it's very different.
Some days are more dystopian than others.
If you run over someone with your car by accident, it's at worst manslaughter (and probably no crime at all). But if you did it intentionally it's murder. I could come up with examples like this literally all day.
This is simply not relevant. They do not have to explicitly say anything for it to still be indisputable that they are set up primarily to facilitate piracy.
> In fact they explicitly state otherwise
Nope! The quote you posted only says that they do not store copyrighted material themselves. That is entirely consistent with being set up primarily to facilitate piracy through BitTorrent. In fact, the awareness that your quote suggests of the copyrighted material TPB makes available (note that I'm not saying "storing") is perhaps weak evidence for the opposite conclusion: they know that they're promoting piracy, but think they can get away with it because they aren't actually storing the files. (They are, of course, completely wrong. You can intentionally facilitate piracy without actually pirating works yourself. Remember Napster and LimeWire?)
I have a problem with his logic too. I use Pirate bay for finding free non copyrighted PDFs and bunch of non profit free to public copy videos and TPB search engine is the best and the fastest one.
I don't recall using it to search for illegal stuff even once, just because it has Pirate in its name. Federal Express has "federal" in its name, but it doesn't mean its a government entity...
But they are. It's like a place where you go to meet people to transact shady business, even if the actual transaction technically takes place elsewhere (ie outside the back door).
Moreover, most times the magnet links their users posted there worked great and I used them to successfully connect to other users who shared their contents with me.
Huh? TPB: AFK is a film.
For example, it is not because a dictionnary has a definition of the word "murder" that suddenly it creates murderers.
There is no causality.
A better analogy IMO would be a website that gave you directions to get information as to where there was a gap that you could use to access a private beach, both are giving information that allows you to later commit a tort. Such a website would be any search engine.
As Far As I Association of America?
MurderBay technically already exists in the form of Craigslist, Backpage, and other more local classified posting sites. Whether they be jokes or serious offers/requests, postings for murder, drugs, human-trafficking, and prostitution occur hourly on legal websites, many hosted within the US. Backpage in particular has been targeted by human rights groups as it has had multiple cases where human trafficking and child pornography were arranged/traded through the site. The website, to my knowledge, was compliant with law enforcement to the degree required by law, and the sites still exist to this day.
The reason is that, like with other websites that collect user submitted content, as long as the operators are compliant with the law in regards to the content, they're not liable in the way most people think.
So no, unless MurderBay is seeking out assassins and murders, you should not expect law enforcement to take it down. You probably can expect quite a few phonecalls and emails though. Likewise, unless ThePirateBay is seeking out pirated content and pirate groups, it should not be expected that it be taken down.
[1]probably still does; I can't access it through regular web browsing due to a legal ruling...
I get it: you think sentiment should be conclusive, and in many cases you could say that it is in practice, but it's hard if not impossible to make a case against a disfavorable entity solely on that basis.
And the RIAA has certainly disparaged defendants in many if not all cases. Hard to say how much effect it really has, though.
Maybe this kind of sophistry could work on some lawyers or policemen, but it's really not a convincing argument.
And the pirate bay is hosted in a country where the DMCA isn't law.
I definitely don't agree with that. But companies wouldn't have sued YouTube asking for over a billion in damages if they wanted to do business with them.
A spurious lawsuit will cost the defendant millions of dollars to defend from even if they win, so filing one and then offering to withdraw it in exchange for large concessions is actually a somewhat common negotiating strategy for soulless kitten-eating behemoths with no regard for fairness or their own reputations.
You can have a look at this, which was posted a couple days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11836291
http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/04/riaa-still-hates-the...
http://www.completemusicupdate.com/article/trends-the-music-...
Bear in mind, these are the same people who tried to argue that 30 second ring tones are a public performance and wanted royalties from them.
We all know nothing escapes the Internet once it's on there.
BuzzFeed, being BuzzFeed, decided to make a big deal out of it (gotta get those eyeballs).
More often than that, they refer any reports to the owner of the IP address the domain is pointing to. The "entry point" for almost all abuse (DMCA/phishing/whatever) reporting is whomever holds the abuse contact for the owner of the IP addresses. They simply do a lookup on the IPs with ARIN (or APNIC or RIPE depending on where the IPs are managed), and then email that abuse contact.
We've had plenty of issues with this approach, now that Neocities hosts a lot of sites. I've recently acquired an IP block largely for the purpose of having control over this abuse contact, so that we can directly receive abuse emails. Some providers also do SWIP, which allows you to be the contact for a specific IP address in their block, but not all providers will do this (Ramnode does - DigitalOcean does not. I don't think Google Cloud or AWS do this either, but let me know if they do). Bigger organizations that need this level of control go this route - you'll note that even companies like Uber use their own IP addresses instead of throwing it up on a cloud providers'.
If you're planning to host a lot of user submitted web sites or content, this isn't the easiest/cheapest route, but it's the route you want to seek. I'm available for consulting on this if you'd like to pursue this for your organization, I've become quite the expert on the topic out of necessity. :)
I thought they explicitly weren't. See http://beebulletin.com/hilarious-pirate-bay-legal-responses/, or https://torrentfreak.com/completely-ignoring-the-dmca-an-opt... (from earlier this year) "The Pirate Bay has refused to take anything down on copyright grounds from day one and yet it remains up today."
Is there any other indication that TPB has begun obeying DMCA requests, or are they lying?
They may not be subject to DMCA, but then they're "not DMCA compliant, for good reason".
I like the point @redthrowaway made. "I don't serve food to the public out of my office. Thus, I am trivially in compliance with food safety laws." In the same way, TPB are compliant with the DMCA (and also compliant with food safety laws).
Sure, it might seem like a silly defense, but it's true and it works.
This argument has largely not held up in court. See Isohunt.
I've asked elsewhere in this thread for a single example of this argument (for a torrent site) working in US courts, and nobody had one. Do you know of any?
https://torrentfreak.com/isohunt-shuts-down-after-110-millio...
There's some more detail in the Wikipedia page:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IsoHunt#Legal
As far as I know there are two issues: 1) whatever the technical details, if it can be shown that the intent is overwhelmingly to fascilitate unlicensed copying - then any search engine could be held to be illegal.
b) These other cases are old; there are technical differences between indexing magnet links and storing torrent files, not to mention running torrent trackers. While intent is still important, I'm not sure the technical differences don't matter now.
As far as I know linking to illegal content is (mostly) legal.
>While intent is still important, I'm not sure the technical differences don't matter now.
I'm not sure of this either, but the "DMCA doesn't affect hashes" argument hasn't been tested, and it's sufficiently murky that I don't think it can be pre-judged with confidence.
When The Pirate Bay falls under US jurisdiction, your request will matter.
If the laws of their country change in a way that forces them to comply with the DMCA as it is, they're still not infringing. That they aren't obligated to comply with the DMCA as it sits is kind of irrelevant to the conversation, considering the follow-on point is also true.
This is not a constructive way to have a discussion, and is unwelcome on HN.
>We don't store any patient data thus we are HIPPA compliant?
Yes, trivially so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuous_truth
From your link: "For example, a child might tell his or her parent 'I ate every vegetable on my plate', when there were no vegetables on the child's plate to begin with."
You might piss off whomever your contract is with when you tell them you've been deleting data instead of storing it, and there may be grounds for a different lawsuit. But they can't say you're not HIPPA compliant. [0]
[0] I don't 100% know the specifics of HIPPA, so I'm not sure if this would really apply, because I know you need to keep detailed audits and logs of various things.
Isohunt and others used similar arguments and lost.
This is your opinion. So far I haven't seen any US precedent for this, and it's by no means obvious that it's not infringing.
^ Am I obviously infringing as well?
Your comment I would classify as obviously non infringing. Two obvious differences (not the only two): you haven't linked to anything, and you aren't being paid any money for your comment.
Did you know TPB founders have gone to prison for copyright infringement? I think the judge did not feel their actions were "obviously not infringing".
If that's not linking, then the pirate bay doesn't link either. They supply a description and a SHA1. You have to locate the content yourself. You have to locate the people that have the content yourself.
What if TPB didn't have ads?
Then it's more complicated, and depends on other distinctions I alluded to above.
The internet is global. If N. Korea shouldn't be able to extradite you for promoting democracy, the USA shouldn't have any legal power to influence DNS.
The situation is kind of like headshops in the US. A headshop is legal if it sells "tobacco related products" but illegal if it sells "pot related products".
Just like headshops, TPB skirts prosecution by being an agnostic tracker despite everyone knowing what it's all about.
No. Founders of TPB have gone to jail, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirate_Bay_trial.
I think you instead meant to imply some sort of intent test. That gets very difficult very quickly. Figuring out how to write the RIAA's perpetual money-machine into law while not destroying section 230 or accidentally banning photocopiers is your next task.
Here is the magnet link for a zero length file.
magnet:?xt=urn:ed2k:31D6CFE0D16AE931B73C59D7E0C089C0&xl=0&dn=zero_len.fil
978-0262510875 "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs - 2nd Edition"Gun manufacturers are murderers in such a world.
;-)
"We aren't talking wikileaks here, this isn't a free speech or a whistelblowing issue, it's a due process issue. Bittorrent sites expecting some kind of safe refuge on easyDNS believing we would approach the situations they get us into under the former would be severely mistaken."