The Pirate Bay goes down after legal pressure | Hacker News Reader

The Pirate Bay goes down after legal pressure

torrentfreak.com

83 pointsadamhowell34 comments

'goes down' in the title kind of makes it sound like the site is down for good, which isn't the case.

The Pirate Bay is suffering some temporary downtime as their bandwidth provider has stopped passing through traffic. A week ago, Hollywood got an injunction to effectively shut down the Pirate Bay by threatening its provider with huge fines. The Pirate Bay team is currently working on a solution.

They'll be back.

They'll be back. We've been here before. Also, it's their provider that shut them down, the pirate bay has little to do with that.

Weren't they their own provider?

Meanwhile if you are looking for the torrent of some linux distro, there is always http://torrindex.com/

What's the real purpose of shutting sites like TPB down? People won't rush to stores to get the movies they want to see if they can't download them.

Same purpose as scheduling a department meeting -- it feels better than doing nothing.

Serves as a deterrent effect. If there were no enforcement ever, lots of people from sites like HN would be thinking of fun, clever new ways to post/share stuff. Since there is, only a smaller segment of the hacker population is willing to put up with the legal hassle.

Thing is, there's nothing wrong with thinking of fun, clever ways to post/share stuff. If nothing else, you can do it to anticipate what the bad guys might do, on the same principle as any other kind of attack research.

On the other hand, it also adds to the publicity, doesn't it?

They probably assume the deterrent effect has a greater impact than all the press and the buzz about banning and shuting down?

Funny thing is I would actually prefer downloading from official (maybe more legal) sources if I would find way to do that in my country, with my favorite OS, without stupid DRM restrictions and warnings and maybe for sane prices. But living in Germany and using Linux - such a movie-download service does to my knowledge in 2010 still not exist and is also not in sight.

Something like eDonkey but at the cost of lets say 1€ per GB and I would be happy. Then a DVD would be same price like cheap DVD's in a shop and I can decide to go with lower-quality if I don't want to spend as much.

I don't even know why producers don't just do that. Or maybe they do in other countries?

http://www.eztakes.com/

I haven't tried it yet. 5000 titles. Decidedly non-mainstream.

Oh wow. You proposed a great business model I hadn't even thought of. Guess it goes to show that there is plenty of room for innovation in the digital download market. Companies like movie studios and record labels just need to get a bit more creative and just come to the realization that the old business model isn't going to cut it these days.

>Funny thing is I would actually prefer downloading from official (maybe more legal) sources if I would find way to do that in my country

You're not the only one.

http://www.news.com.au/technology/download-culture/internet-...

Title is "Most pirates say they'd pay for legal downloads"

Good strategy. People aren't going to care about the politics of file sharing until they can't get what they want for free anymore. Taking the Pirate Bay down is the first step towards organized dissent that removes the laws that the media companies are relying on in the first place.

Also, an injunction without oral arguments? That will last, oh, maybe a few hours...

It's not a strategy; they didn't shut down voluntarily and it's only for a few hours.

I was using the word "good" sarcastically and was applying it to the media companies' strategy.

I always see sites that decide either they allow everything or they shut down. Why is obfuscation never an option?

What if you had separate sites dedicated to each of the following steps:

1. Start a bt site, advertised as a site for baking recipes. Seed the site with tons of existing videos on baking, to increase legitimacy.

2. Create a translator site for each baking-related keyword. For example, "muffins" = "Lost".

3. Write a browser plug-in that translates the baking site into the real torrent site.

Who would one sue then? Would it not work simply because the __AA would constantly request torrents to be taken down?

I know TPB has a political agenda, so they might not want to do this.. but sites like mininova could have.

It wouldn't work because the first site would still be facilitating copyright infringement, and thus still subject to legal pressure. Calling it by a code-name doesn't remove its copyright, nor does hiding it amongst legally redistributable torrents.

Simply put, you'd sue everyone involved in the creation of that infrastructure. The second site and the guy who wrote the browser plugin may be able to escape unscathed, but the first site would be in exactly the same predicament as The Pirate Bay, Mininova, etc., except with the added bonus of trying to hide what they were doing. That wouldn't go over well in court.

The hot plate bay

Reminds me of the Napster pig latin stunts:

http://www.celticguitarmusic.com/Mland_napster.htm

Probably wouldn't last that long...

latest from www.twitter.com/tpb http://newteevee.com/2010/05/17/the-pirate-bay-forced-offlin...

There are many torrent spiders/indexers that host torrents from many websites. e.g. http://www.torrentz.com/ and nearly all torrents use DHT and multiple trackers. Taking 1 site down temporarily doesn't affect anything.

Torrentfreak seems to be down, too. Just getting a blank page. Edit: looks like it was just my ISP.

Anyway, here's the Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/may/17/pirate...

Torrentfreak is not down for me (France).

up for me (US)

I've been on TorrentFreak a few times today. No issues here.

If I remember correctly the original TPB guys claimed that servers are out of their control now, which is why they can't take it down. But now I read there's "Managing Director Sven Olaf Kamphuis". Is there some official ownership of TPB again?

Kamphuis is the managing director of the hosting company

It makes sense now, thanks.

The TPB guys really just spew out rhetoric for the masses.

"the Pirate Bay crew claims that they themselves have no idea where the servers are located. After the raid on their servers in 2006, they decided that it was better not to know where they are. One thing is sure though, they are not hosted in just one country."

http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-is-safe-080131/

They need to switch to a complete distributed architecture. Where the site, the tracker, everything is hosted by users. This way, no corporate tools can target them.

The "how" is much more complicated though.

Maybe the diaspora guys can tackle this in the fall after they've knocked out their distributed fb

In the fall? Next month. With Ruby® on® Rails®, building a Facebook clone will take mere minutes!

Poisoning is arguably harder to deal with in a distributed architecture.

Call me crazy, but I dislike piracy. Back when I was at my first startup, we found that people pirated our own software, and it stunk.

So I don't want to pirate other intellectual property.

And now they are back.

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