How the US Pushed Sweden to Take Down the Pirate Bay | Hacker News Reader

How the US Pushed Sweden to Take Down the Pirate Bay

torrentfreak.com

701 pointspawal310 comments

The copyright industry has had far too much power for many years now. But when I talk to people about this nobody cares. For most people the products of this industry are just "content" which they use to waste their time so I suppose it makes sense that they don't care too much about it. The tragedy is that the copyright industry controls a large and continually growing part of our culture and their power is only increasing.

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.

He was running a website that revolved around violating millions of copyrights. Why shouldn't he go to jail? What gives you the right to take someone else's painstakingly created artistic creation and give it away for free to thousands of people, depriving them of the exclusive right to sell their own work.

Copyright is both a criminal and civil matter. The civil court system is useful for many things, but it is limited to monetary damages, which is not very helpful when the damages are in the millions and the defendant isn't very wealthy. The penal power of the criminal system is not appropriate for individual people downloading music, but it certainly is for a sophisticated operation involving the illegal distribution of millions of copyrighted works to hundreds of thousands of users.

== Edit ==

Some responses, since I'm rate-limited:

>In most cases i read about it's more a matter of the current copyright holder versus the facilitator. Not a matter of the creator versus the actual downloader.

Two points.

1. How do you think the current copyright holder got the copyright? They acquired it from the creator by either paying in advance or after the fact or as part of some ongoing deal.

2. If you run a market that you know is used almost exclusively by people selling contraband, do you think that's legal just because you're not the buyer or the seller? In case you don't know, it's not, and you'll go to jail just as if you had sold the contraband.

>If the defendant isn't wealthy after distributing all that content, is the content worth millions? Or is the government-enforced business model worth millions?

Yes, intellectual property isn't worth anything without government enforcement. But we've decided to, as individual societies and as an entire world by treaty, to provide such enforcement, because we think recognizing such property rights is good for our society.

And as for the first point, how much you make by violating other people's rights isn't that relevant. If I steal a truckload of iPhones and give them away for free, I still stole them. I realize IP is very different from physical property, but the profit of the crook isn't that relevant in either.

Surely if what you say is true, the courts would have found him guilty, no?

>Surely if what you say is true, the courts would have found him guilty, no?

What are you actually arguing, other than pointing out that he was acquitted? A jury's determination of a person's guilt in a particular case doesn't tell you what the law is, or what it ought to be.

Edit: gnode, that’s not true. Only determinations of law, which are only made by judges, are precedent. A jury verdict, which only determines questions of fact, is not precedent at all.

In a common law system, findings of a court set precedent for future trials. So yes, juries do tell you what the law is by telling you how to interpret it.

"What gives you the right to take someone else's painstakingly created artistic creation and give it away for free to thousands of people, depriving them of the exclusive right to sell their own work."

In most cases i read about it's more a matter of the current copyright holder versus the facilitator. Not a matter of the creator versus the actual downloader.

That is exactly the weird paradox that has been going on, especially with the infamous Pirate Bay.

The users think they are a super server with super hero admins that "give back to the man".

The justice system thinks some super tech criminal is earning millions. They think that, because organisations like the MPAA give out an estimate on what "could have been earned if all those people would actually pay full price for the content they are now consuming".

Numbers are magic.. especially if there's a currency sign before them.

> ...depriving them of the exclusive right to sell their own work...

i.e., messing up their business model

> Copyright is both a criminal and civil matter.

Sure, but there's a strong case that copyright infringement shouldn't be felony.

> ...the damages are in the millions and the defendant isn't very wealthy.

If the defendant isn't wealthy after distributing all that content, is the content worth millions? Or is the government-enforced business model worth millions?

If the defendant isn't wealthy after distributing all that content, is the content worth millions? Or is the government-enforced business model worth millions?

I don't think he should go to jail, but this is an odd rebuttal. If I steal your car and sell it for $300, because I don't really need more money, will you claim just that amount as your loss?

Obviously copyright law pushes up the price, by introducing scarcity, but that doesn't really have anything to do with how much he made.

Isn't the corollary to your position here that as I can only afford about £6 per month on media that any claim for a greater amount in a copyright infringement case is thus wrong.

Yes in the analogy the person will claim for the cost of replacing the vehicle.

But a company claiming they lost media revenue to me of anything greater than what I can afford is also wrong. In a world of perfect copyright infringement prevention I'd just miss out on most of the mainstream social culture.

Usually these companies attack uploaders (even if just due to regular p2p seeding) or, as in this case, people who run systems that "facilitate" infringement. The claim is not based on what you should have paid, but on all the money that the people who got a copy from you would have paid.

In a fair system they'd have to prove those damages, but alas, copyright laws often include "statutory damage" provisions to help them avoid that requirement.

> If I steal your car and sell it for $300,

If you steal my car, I no longer have a car. I would need to go out and buy another car to replace it.

If you copy my data (a photo, a song, a film), I haven't lost the original. Only my business model has been affected, which was based on scarcity of the data.

But why does that mean the loss is bounded by how much money he happens to have made running the site? I'm not seeing the link.

> Copyright is both a criminal and civil matter

Oh yes? Copyright infrigement is pretty much a victimless crime - nobody is removed from any of their property - at most they might be losing some monetary compensation, but that's something that can be evaluated and compensated if that is the case.

Not sure how you can justify putting folks in jail based on that fact.

Couldn't you say the same for embezzlement or tax fraud?

Tax fraud is against the state, those funds that go towards the foundational things required by our society, such as electricity, drinking water, and access to other services.

Everyone is a victim.

So when you deprive government of funds everyone is a victim, but when you deprive a publisher of funds no one is a victim?

That's a false equivalence, and not the implication of my statement.

If you want to read something into it, nothing mentioned in this thread is victimless.

Embezzlement hurts the other employees of a company, tax fraud hurts the citizens of a nation, and piracy seems to hurt... A small group. (In fact, large companies seem to benefit from piracy in studies. Small companies can be forced to fold. Take it as you will.)

> He was running a website that revolved around violating millions of copyrights. Why shouldn't he go to jail? What gives you the right to take someone else's painstakingly created artistic creation and give it away for free to thousands of people, depriving them of the exclusive right to sell their own work.

Why should an individual be treated so differently to what a company would? When was Youtube's office raided? To this day, Youtube holds immense collections of music for which nobody has bothered to file even an automated takedown notice.

The point that the parent made is that copyright is only criminally enforceable if held by the moneyed few. The power that has been handed to large corporations by the back door is immense and there is very little symmetry; even when the magnitude of the damage is orders of magnitude greater.

In the UK they have effectively been granted the power to block domains for customers of the ISPs that represent a significant majority of the UK market. This is in a court that routinely allows pre-hearing legal costs of hundreds of thousands of pounds. Unless you work for the media companies and have insider knowledge, how can you even be so sure that the media companies are not acting with the complete contempt of due process that they have repeatedly demonstrated.

> Copyright is both a criminal and civil matter.

Only fairly recently, and not without controversy from the people that observed it.

I don't work there, but it seems naive to think that YouTube hasn't worked with law enforcement or these industries directly to remove these copyrighted works. If your rip is simple or obvious enough, YouTube blocks it immediately before it's published. That seems very different from hosting a site specifically for pirating copyrighted works.

Your argument is based on intent. YouTube shows their intent to not infringe by the effort they put into removing infringing content.

But the GP discards intent as a relevant point and says if you host it, you should be thrown in jail, regardless of intent.

Likely, somewhere in the middle is more reasonable. But the parent is correct in that the volume of infringing content on YouTube appears to be significantly larger than just about anywhere else, and no one is raiding their offices. No one is going to jail.

So the asymmetry is striking. If it were all purely civil rather than criminal, I'd get it.

>But the GP discards intent as a relevant point and says if you host it, you should be thrown in jail, regardless of intent.

I said no such thing to be clear.

I don't see how else to read this:

> He was running a website that revolved around violating millions of copyrights. Why shouldn't he go to jail?

You couldn't have continuously operated OiNK without the intention of enabling mass copyright infringement, which was clearly the raison d'etre of the site.

Does great Britain? I know the US has the DMCA which among many other things says people can't be held labial for infringing content hosted on their site if they respect and follow DMCA take down requests.

Good point about intent. That's something that seems lost on much of the general public. The entire notion of "mens rea" is overlooked by many, yet it is critical. It's what differentiates between different crimes or levels of crimes (i.e. degrees of murder) and it's what keeps hotel employees and landlords out of jail on aiding and abetting charges when they are unknowingly giving a fugitive a place to sleep.

The fact that GP discards intent as a relevant point makes his/her whole argument invalid - that's the whole point, in our society and law intent matters a lot, it's one of the most important things in determining whether something is a violation and if so, how severe it is.

An argument based on intent is an argument about the reality we live in, an argument that ignores intent might as well be about a fictional world and isn't relevant to ours.

>YouTube shows their intent to not infringe by the effort they put into removing infringing content.

I'd disagree, I think that Youtube shows their intent to allow infringing based on the gross amount of copyrighted content they allow on their website.

When I referred to repeated demonstrations of contempt of due process I was largely thinking about the over-zealous takedowns where fair use has applied and that it is just as likely that with being granted direct blocking of an ever-increasing number of domains that some claims are over-exaggerated to the court and the threshold for evidence lowered.

I acknowledge that youtube seems very different from hosting a site specifically for unlawfully distributing copyrighted works. But there was a time when Youtube arguably blurred the line and gave publicity to the "our users just posted it and we didn't know about it" defence.

There's a real societal risk to treating what would formerly be called culture as intellectual capital and granting extreme powers to owners of that capital. Though the costs of distribution have never been lower there comes a point where the cost of distribution exceeds the expected returns. Even if the work is distributed for free, there is still a cost.

If we're going to allow the whole one download equals 0 < x <= 1 lost sales thing that seems to be increasingly accepted now, then you are implicitly allowing that it is the lost sale that is the problem. As such, distribution of out of print material without fee is as damaging because if I listen to n hours per week of material then I am not buying that n hours of material and I have deprived a sale. The same can be said for any intellectual capital, even copyleft, that does not make money. Effectively, it becomes a divine right to have customers which is a bizarre line of thinking that seldom seems to be explicitly stated.

I have listened to works that I could not, even though I strongly desire to, buy on CD or obtain by lawful download. There are some who argue a particular line that has the corollary that the work should be lost forever and I should never have heard them. By the lost sale argument I definitely shouldn't have and should instead have spent money on new culture that personally I find quite grating.

There are books, games, software, songs, albums, movies and TV series for which the copyright persists but there is no lawful distribution channel. This effectively makes it civilly or criminally unlawful to distribute the work for free. In these cases I would certainly think twice before taking on the burden of becoming that distributor.

Legality aside, whether sharing copyrighted information is amoral or not is determined by one's own values. Some people, myself included, see a person's right-to-share to be far more important to humanity than the authors ability to employ an ill-suited business model to profit off his or her work. There are many ways to generate profit other than to infringe on others' right to share. Humanity does not owe you a successful business model, and certainly not at the expense of it's right to share.

> What gives you the right to take someone else's painstakingly created artistic creation and give it away for free to thousands of people, depriving them of the exclusive right to sell their own work.

Users sharing copyrighted work does nothing to prevent authors from profiting off their work. Conflating sharing and business is what got us in this mess in the first place.

Think about 3rd world countries. I'm relatively better off than my peers (2 cars, own a house etc.) but I can no way afford Hex Rays IDA Pro, Burp Site Professional, Navicat Premium or JetBrains and this list goes on... They cost more than my two or three months of rent.

My parents are both medical doctors and their medical books are not affordable if they were sold in US prices but they have 3rd world print editions and they can legally buy these copies. Software vendors have to adapt to tthis too. Gaming companies already adapted this and I've never pirated any games since Steam. I'm a paying netflix, spotify customer because they are priced for the country they operate and as you can guess I'm not torrenting music or movies either.

Internet is global but purchasing power is not. Ethically, I see no problem in torrenting. Human knowledge is "on the shoulders of giants" and in philosophical perspective -I'm not advocating this- even copyright is on shaky grounds (Property is theft! - Pierre-Joseph Proudhon)

Wow that is a name I haven't read or heard in years. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, father of modern anarchism.

> Gaming companies already adapted this and I've never pirated any games since Steam.

The first to adopt this, very successfully, had actually been Apple with their approach to selling mp3s.

While everybody was still busy trying to sell overpriced physical albums, complaining about the "digital thievery", Apple took this as an opportunity with iTunes. iTunes made buying music digitally as convenient as it was pirating it, at the same time iTunes allowed customers to only buy specific songs (at reasonable prices), instead of forcing them to buy whole albums.

Valve did something similar for gaming with Steam, that's true, but it took Steam way longer to get there than it did take iTunes. Imho Steam has also regressed quite a bit in that regard, it used to be a place for good deals but increasingly feels like a platform to shovel around shovelware for badges and trading cards.

>> Imho Steam has also regressed quite a bit in that regard, it used to be a place for good deals but increasingly feels like a platform to shovel around shovelware for badges and trading cards.

Well in fairness to Steam, app stores in general (including those run by Apple, MS, and Google) are platforms for shovelware.

Apple is an interesting case. While they may have flirted with 'legal' music as a revenue stream, the big bucks came from adding utility and simplicity to the ubiquitous collections of 'stolen' music. A very small subset of iPods were filled up with the plus +$10K cost of 'legal' music. No strong opinion, but it's a somewhat unique situation in the economics of IP.

> A very small subset of iPods were filled up with the plus +$10K cost of 'legal' music.

But they were actually filled with some legal music, prior to iTunes there wasn't really "one unified place" for purchasing digital music, most mp3's came from physical CD's people ripped privately.

A couple of flatrate services popped up before/around the same time, but these mostly turned out to be illegal offerings, so it was mostly iTunes which stuck around in the beginning and formed the market.

> While they may have flirted with 'legal' music as a revenue stream

They still have impressive market shares in digital music distribution, they have started to lose ground to streaming services like Spotify and music labels finally adapting to the digital age but afaik iTunes was and still is a major player in digital music distribution.

Certainly. I wanted to provide some insight to the dynamics of the iPod/iTunes situation.

Interestingly as you noted >A couple of flatrate services popped up before/around the same time, but these mostly turned out to be illegal offerings, so it was mostly iTunes which stuck around in the beginning and formed the market.

I think Apples success at creating this market was a byproduct of it being fundemental pairing for the iPod's sucesss. Without the iPod, iTunes would likely have gone the same way as the rest of the early legal digital music sellers.

Without the existence of a large collection of mostly 'pirated' mp3's sitting on home desktops and office networks across the globe, the iPod probably would not have taken off.

Apple provided great utility for those collections by selling the iPod. Apple only briefly had any barriers to allowing the seamless transfer/sharing of entire iPod collections of copyrighted music, before concluding it would be much more lucritive to embrace the prevelance of 'pirated' music collections by investing in software to clean & organize it, and simple to use hardware that makes it portable.

> Apple only briefly had any barriers to allowing the seamless transfer/sharing of entire iPod collections of copyrighted music, before concluding it would be much more lucritive to embrace the prevelance of 'pirated' music collections by investing in software to clean & organize it, and simple to use hardware that makes it portable.

True enough, and you most certainly have a point about the iPod also helping, that's something I haven't really factored in that much.

To me, iTunes was mostly a great example how usability, pricing, and ease of legal access to content matters. Much earlier versions of iTunes UI was very reminiscent of mp3 sharing clients popular at that time (Limewire/Napster/Whatnot) by sorting titles in long lists and making getting them as easy as pressing a "download" button right next to it.

The choice of pricing, single songs for $.99 [0], also felt like it contributed a lot to a paradigm shift how music is sold and consumed, acknowledging established trends in priacy by allowing legitimate customers more freedom in paying for only those songs they want.

[0] https://apple.slashdot.org/story/03/04/28/1723226/apple-intr...

>> Legality aside, whether sharing copyrighted information is amoral or not is determined by one's own values.

This can even be a gray area for content creators who care about copyright, but only for their own profession.

I regularly see stories of famous musicians improperly lifting photographers' work for their marketing or social media efforts.

I also see professional photographers using unlicensed music for slide shows.

It's really quite bizarre to see content creators fighting each other for not respecting each other's copyrights when they themselves should know better.

You do know he was found innocent.

On paper you are absolutely right. Does it make it right? Maybe so, maybe not.

"But we've decided to, as individual societies and as an entire world by treaty, to provide such enforcement, because we think recognizing such property rights is good for our society".

Remember Aaron Schwartz?

That's a pretty low blow. You can't just answer a suggestion that the criminal system has some value with this.

I didn't know the guy but I'm not sure that using his name to stifle debate is the best use of his legacy.

While we're here, I happen to disagree with what he did. I believe that publicly funded research should be publicly available but he went a lot further.

What was done to him was heinous and a terrible abuse of the US criminal justice system. And it rightfully brought it into disrepute. But it's going too far to say that it's the last word on the principle of criminal justice.

I do apologize if my response had such an effect. It was meant to express that things societies may have agreed upon in the past might need to evolve rather than keep enforcing them at all costs.

This "What gives you the right to take someone else's painstakingly created artistic creation and give it away for free to thousands of people, depriving them of the exclusive right to sell their own work." is a cynically spurious argument, and you know it. You are engaging in an Ajit Pai-like derailing of the actual argument, which is the ridiculously long copyright terms granted to content publishers. Well, we now know we won't run out of Ajit Pais.

Copyright hoarders (not necessarily content creators) consider anyone sharing the content they hold copyright to as competition and attack will full fury, destroying humans' lives and jamming the local jurisdictions. They use all available strategies - top-down (PB in Sweden), bottom-up (cease and desist letter plague in Germany). How anyone competent allows them for doing it is unimaginable, there must be fraud and corruption involved.

It's not all black and white though. Pirating torrent site realistically don't care if pirated stuff is from copyright hoarder or content creator. It's easy to say "those corporate money grabbers are evil" but in reality nobody cares who to pirate from. I've seen one writer who was relatively popular, beg his readers to buy his books instead of pirating it, because publisher was going to end his contract, because it was just not very profitable with all the pirating. I fail to see glory for pirating in that. One programmer I knew decided to do shareware in early 2000-s. His program became pretty successful in several months (2-3x times larger revenue than average salary in the country at the time), he could live off it. First time he got cracked and program went on pirating sites his sales were damaged considerably, he added some protection, new features etc. After some time he got cracked again and sales were damaged again. This time he said "screw it", stopped working on the program and got regular job. I fail to see glory for pirating in that.

Of course I understand the appeal of pirated content, sometimes it's the only usable way to get something, especially for some old movies/series. And it put pressure on large media companies for content delivery technologies etc. But it's not all fun and giggles, it's a complex issues requiring global discussion and compromises.

I agree. And this is why I no longer pirate stuff, if I can get it legally in a reasonable way. For me as a non-american though, there is a serious lack of content available to me, which means that if I want to watch something, sometimes the only available option is to pirate it.

Or when the legal way is unpleasant. I couldn't watch GOT on sky Atlantic with its ad breaks every ten minutes.

That's a much less sympathetic position. It's one thing if there's literally no way to consume a piece of content. The copyright holders aren't losing money there. It's another if there's a perfectly viable method available but you want to put on your toddler voice and say "but I don't want it that way."

I wouldn't call forcing ads in as "a perfectly viable way" to watch something, especially on an already paid service. Is it a perfectly viable way to eat dinner at a restaurant if the chef takes your plate away from you mid bite several times so that you can listen to his friend try and sell you shit?

If it's free + ads I could agree, but most content sellers are just trying to get paid twice

> I wouldn't call forcing ads in as "a perfectly viable way" to watch something, especially on an already paid service

US Cable television already fits that description. Almost 100 million Americans pay a monthly subscription for television content which still includes ads. For that matter, HBO itself is already an extra additional fee on top of that prior subscription.

Your restaurant comparison seems particularly disingenuous considering commercials are a pretty normal aspect of television consumption.

I don't know if you're aware, but cable was billed as an adless way to get the because you were _already_ paying for it. Then the companies flip flop Ed and started putting ads in. Just because they've gotten away with it for a long time doesn't make it ok. It's not ok for me to punch you in the face even if I've been doing it for 20 years with no consequence.

If we take your argument as well, then piracy is perfectly fine because people have been doing it for a long time and it's become a normal aspect of the consumption.

> sometimes the only available option is to pirate it

I once had to pay 500€ for torrenting an episode of The Americans that I had no way of buying legally, at least in my country at that time.

The only thing I regret? Using torrent and not some alternative where they can't get you for "illegal distribution".

Consider paying for a seedbox or VPS instead.

Nah, these days I mostly stick with DDL, I pay for 1-2 year subscriptions for 1-2 different providers and I'm pretty much set for all my needs.

I've developed my own golden rule: if something is 5 years or older its public domain.

TPB and digital piracy in general functions as a library of Alexandria. Nobody in our society gives a shit about keeping things available. It's all about NOW and MONEY. So much entertainment would be lost without the internet.

Are there other areas besides digital media where you think it's acceptable to take copies or something to which you are not legally entitled?

Are there areas other than digital media where you can make copies so cheaply and easily?

Does that question make sense outside the domain of media?

> legally entitled?

When discussing the validity of copyright laws, using legal entitlement as an argument is pretty circular, don't you think?

Some people really don't get the distinction between moral vs legal. I have actually seen a law student say that they were against legalizing pot, because smoking it is immoral because it's illegal. And he couldn't see how that argument made no sense.

While that argument may make no sense to you or me, it makes just as much objective "sense" as any other moral basis. Some people are strict utilitarians, some people have a deontological code, some people's morals come out of a holy book, and some people equate moral with legal. None of them are "correct" or "incorrect," and they absolutely do not make "sense."

It's about circular logic, not moral philosophy.

The other systems you mention may or may not be arbitrary, but at least they're not circular. The reasoning "It's immoral because it's illegal and it's illegal because it's immoral" is unsound because it's circular. Disagreeing over your base set of axioms is one thing, but circular reasoning is quite another.

Under a circular legal moral system, moral progress would hinge on new understanding of old laws or else nominally morally neutral changes to the law. The other systems more easily promote moral progress via new understanding. Utilitarians can have new insights into utility functions. Religious based morality can have life experience and new cultural understandings influence their understanding and consequences of their basic commands.

Everything you've learned in your life, in school or out;

Do you give proper credit to the creator/author/inventor/discoverer of that knowledge, or refrain from using it?

The question isn't whether this happens to be legal or not, the question is whether it should be, and to what extent.

Do you have any example which you were wanting to compare to, or was the question deliberately open-ended?

To -make- copies, not -take-.

And yes. Every photocopy a text book? Ever trace out a comic book panel or other image? Ever make copies of a photo (obviously more common digitally, but could be done in the film age too) that you didn't take originally? I've done all of them, they're all things I'm not legally entitled to do.

I feel like there is a key difference in all the examples people are giving. Taking a picture of a text book for personal use is a only a small part of the complete work closer would be scanning the entire thing. Further assuming you keep it to personal use it's also very different than spreading it to others.

Oh, I didn't say the textbook was -my- textbook. From the library or from a friend, getting the relevant bits we needed was super common, because the textbooks were infrequently referenced and super expensive for many classes.

But, to the OP's point, I totally agree digital changes the equation. But it should also change the law. Theoretically having an img tag that references someone else's site could be thought of as illegal, after all. I'm reproducing the work without authorization, and even making money from it (ad impressions on my site rather than the hosting site), -while costing the original site money- (since they still pay the hosting and bandwidth costs). Digital changed -everything-, because the cost to copy went to 0. The laws have not kept up.

France has this notion of private copy, where you can legally copy basically anything you want as long as you keep it to yourself, your family, and maybe some of your friends. Check your legislation. It may allow what you're talking about already. (Though I agree with you even if it doesn't.)

With the substantial limitation that the source must be "legal", i.e. you can't copy something from a torrent for example since it is likely the uploader didn't put it here legally.

Also I think this is a European law.

I'm not even sure the sources must be authorised to publish the works for you to be able to copy it from them without legal repercussion. Our Hadopi law doesn't punish download, it punishes upload (more precisely, the fact that someone uploaded something from your network). Definitely not a lawyer, though.

Since you mention France, what about taking a photo of the Eiffel Tower and publish it on a commercial site such as imgr/facebook/twitter?

I sometimes sing songs in front of people.

Yep, entire continents like Australia and North America ;)

Ever heard of a real library? They will order almost any book from other libraries. The ones in my county are free.

In my county library costs $150 per person per year in taxes. So not exactly free ;-)

Edit: actually it's ~$200 per household (depends on the value of the property)

What's the difference then?

Yes, I've been thinking about something similar. Some time limit for individual's liability might be a good compromise. If you could wait to get some things free for personal use later without being in danger of legal problems it can remove the pressure from people... And on other hand if you really, really, really want to watch that freshest movie of an audio album right now, paying for it seems reasonable? Those who ca wait probably wouldn't pay for it in the first place, so copyright holders won't lose that much, at the same time keeping happy "long tail" of people who don't want rare/old things to vanish without means to access it. I wouldn't say that it's public domain though, because I still don't think it's ok to profit from it, like just downloading a book/movie and selling it or something like that.

There are a lot of great artists who put out work that doesn't catch on until 5+ years after they make it. It seems like a large social problem if such creators can't be rewarded for their work; given that this kind of work is usually the most innovative, it could lead to a creative stagnation.

To some extent I think you're right.

But the problem, just like with patents, is that there a many kinds of actors in our modern world, including large companies who couldn't really care less. A company like Disney would, I think, be more motivated by a 5 or 10 year copyright period, as it would require them to keep on producing and innovating.

If we're talking about great, innovative artists, I think few of them actually benefit much from the copyright system anyway.

> If we're talking about great, innovative artists, I think few of them actually benefit much from the copyright system anyway.

This is a really stunning claim and one that needs a lot more defense than you're giving it. I can think of countless innovative musicians, film directors, and authors who benefit from selling back catalog that's 10-20+ years old. I'd be happy to furnish a list if such a thing is necessary, but as it is your statement seems absurd on the face of it.

olau: If we're talking about great, innovative artists, I think few of them actually benefit much from the copyright system

maldusiecle: I can think of countless innovative musicians, film directors, and authors who benefit from selling back catalog that's 10-20+ years old

I'd love to see more support for both sides of this argument. My guess would be that olau and maldusiecle may not have much overlap in the list of artists that they consider innovative. I'm probably closer to olau's position: while there are artists who benefit from copyright, they tend to be the ones who have chosen to concentrate on the commercial potential of their work rather than innovation. And I'd guess that most of those who are "doing art for art's sake" would do as well or better under a much less restrictive copyright regime.

That's a tiny minority.

Lets face it: if you haven't made your profit in 5 years you never will and the loss will have been written of.

Is your argument seriously that since innovative artists are a small minority, it's necessarily alright to harm them? You don't see any problem with that?

Van Gogh never got monetary reimbursement for his art. Are we all suppose to feel terrible for such an injustice?

As a budding musician. I am mentally prepare for my art to be a financial failure/setback. It comes with the territory.

Not very innovative if somebody expects to live the rest of their life on the royalties of one book or movie. And realistically who can do that anyway? In popular culture?

> It's not all black and white though. Pirating torrent site realistically don't care if pirated stuff is from copyright hoarder or content creator. It's easy to say "those corporate money grabbers are evil" but in reality nobody cares who to pirate from.

Some do, some don't.

I don't doubt your anecdotes, but I doubt it's true as a pattern.

Something being pirated 1M times never means 1M lost sales. It could mean 2K lost sales or it could mean 200K lost sales.

The book your writer wrote, did it build on a genre, area of expertise, setting that inherently draws inspiration from earlier works? Where do we draw the line on what you can borrow?

If copyright law was as established and enforced 400 years ago as it is today, Shakespeare wouldn't exist (in our knowledge). For two reasons: He wouldn't have read as much as he did, and he couldn't have borrowed as much as he did for his works.

We want some kind of middleground. Creators should be compensated, but complete all-encompassing DRM means only a fraction of people would've watched Game of Thrones to discuss it at the water cooler, Kanye West (regardless of what you think of his music) wouldn't be able to release most of his music, etc.

> Some do, some don't.

I've never seen a torrent site which wouldn't let torrents because "oh, it's individual developer's program, we don't allow those". I would say that overwhelming majority of people who created pirate sites (or created/sold illegal compact discs before that) didn't care about who to pirate from. And practically all shareware developers felt it.

> Something being pirated 1M times never means 1M lost sales. It could mean 2K lost sales or it could mean 200K lost sales.

I've never said it did, and of course it doesn't. And I think pretty much everyone here understands it. I don't know why you've put this sentence in your reply.

> The book your writer wrote, did it build on a genre, area of expertise, setting that inherently draws inspiration from earlier works? Where do we draw the line on what you can borrow?

I think it's ridiculous to compare outright pirating and "borrowing from genre", everyone sees the difference. If we put that arbitrary line at absurd 90% (less than that "borrowed" is ok), than everything on the torrent sites is still crossing that line, because everything there is full copy... And there's a lot of areas where it's hard to pin point the exact place for some dividing line, but everyone can see the difference between entities: like where you put exact line between colors on a rainbow? But you know that green isn't yellow and red isn't blue, you don't need to know where that line is exactly.

> If copyright law was as established and enforced 400 years ago as it is today, Shakespeare wouldn't exist (in our knowledge)

I don't how that would make Shakespeare read less, since he couldn't download a book on his phone anyway, and he probably read many books which weren't owned by him, since they were pricey and that price was mostly behind materials of the book and work to create this physical object. But he might or he might not exist, it's hard to say. It's not certain that writing would be less developed, if there were more effects of copyright. Being able to benefit from writing more could motivate more people to write, so it's hard to say what would have happen. Would we will be on the same level of technical progress if there were not patents (yes, there's a lot of ridiculous and bogus things about it now, but I'm talking about history) in previous 200-300 years, when inventors were motivated to create new things by legal protection of the right to benefit from it? Hard to say with certainty (though I incline to the "less advanced" answer).

> I think it's ridiculous to compare outright pirating and "borrowing from genre", everyone sees the difference. If we put that arbitrary line at absurd 90% (less than that "borrowed" is ok), than everything on the torrent sites is still crossing that line, because everything there is full copy...

No it's not. Mp3s are compressed, x264 rips are compressed, digital texts are not the same as books.

Do you mean that they are "almost a perfect representation of the original work"? Because that is closer to reality, and also telling.

Someone over a 100 years ago thought that a black and white movie sped up with just a few frames per second was a convincing representation of a train running towards you in a crowded cinema.

Some people think that bad covers of songs are good enough of a substitute over the real thing.

Stories told before writing was invented was basically transcoded and compressed and corrupted, and humanity would be immensely more stupid if we had not "allowed" that.

Please pay creative people and content creators, but locking down content to people who would otherwise not pay for it regardless is just regressive, on top of never actually working.

> > Something being pirated 1M times never means 1M lost sales.

> I've never said it did

You didn't provide any specific numbers, but seemed to be arguing with your two anecdotes that piracy (as opposed to simply natural market/product factors) caused so many lost sales it put people out of business.

> I don't know why you've put this sentence in your reply.

Perhaps for the same reason you replied to a post about copyright hoarders using stringent legal methods and talked about something else entirely; because, to quote you, things are "not all black and white".

I've always found it interesting that part of the issue gets ignored. Those people who are running around online downloading and uploading? They're beating the copyright holders at their job. The primary purpose for existence of publishers for centuries was to master the problem of distribution. Now, any clever 12 year old can run circles around these huge organizations in their spare time for fun. It's like if tomorrow kids became able to slap together Lambourghinis in their backyard. Except if 90% of our economy was based on producing Lambourghinis. Because distribution was the problem that drove the global economy. It was the reason why factories won out over village craftsmen. It's the reason we live in cities. It's the reason we educate our kids the way we do, why we structure companies the way we do, etc. Solving the problem of distribution was basically what our economy existed for for a century. And now... it's literally child's play.

This is quite a bit larger than copyright, but obviously media is the first place where it became very obvious that distribution is no longer a worthwhile problem to solve as it has been commoditized by computers and the Internet.

So how do we bring back money to production of media then, ensuring that the people who spend time producing it can afford a decent standard of living?

Prior to YouTubes efforts to destroy it, the model they were using is a great one (although there are substantial problems with its implementation). Patreon is emerging as a great way to support creators. People are more than willing to pay for the creation of media and that has not changed. What has changed is that there is no reason to enrich the people who distribute the media. Distribution was a Big Deal. It was the primary driver of the entire global economy for a century. Every big company fundamentally solved the problem of distribution. Sometimes they did other things, but it was all ancillary to distribution. Now, distribution is a solved problem. It's a commodity. Anyone can do it, and because newcomers don't have the burden of overhead and infrastructure and entrenched contractual entanglements that the old guard have hanging around their necks like a noose, newcomers can run circles around those giant companies. And if they had the integrity to stick to their claimed love of the market they held for so long, their companies would shrink dramatically.

The Internet makes it possible for creators to have a decent standard of living. A tremendous number of them can have that decent standard of living. As opposed to a handful of owners of distribution companies living in opulence. An entirely capitalist redistribution of wealth on a large scale. That is viscerally disgusting to many who see those very large companies as the pillars holding our society aloft. To them it looks like rats chewing through the pillars.

Reminds me of the case with TPB. The court argued for large sums of ad revenue and the founders were like: “no idea where that money went because we never saw it”

> But how does this happen?

IMO both the patent and the copyright laws, at least in the US, are broken. The original goal was good: encourage individual inventors to make technology that the whole society will benefit from at a price of some limitation on use by society for a short period of time. In the current system, "the whole society will benefit" part does not work because time limits are too high -- at the modern technology pace, in 20 years most inventions are obsolete.

I think the best way to fix it is to drastically shorten the time the invention is protected, which would require major compromises. Unfortunately, the discussion now seems very polarized: it seems to be "all information should be free" against "copyright everything and it needs to last longer, longer, longer" as major camps with little in the middle.

CGP Grey also did a fantastic video on the history of copyright and Disney's constant involvement. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tk862BbjWx4

CGP Grey's is short and easy to digest for most people, I imagine. What really made me think about copyrights, patentds and trademarks is Richard Stallman's excellent talk called Copyright vs Community. Many recordings can be found online. I wonder if anyone might recommend what the best recording of this is? It's also about two hours long when he gives it, I wonder if there is a shorter version?

>The original goal was good: encourage individual inventors to make technology that the whole society will benefit from at a price of some limitation on use by society for a short period of time

I know this is the common belief of the origin of patent law, but is there actually any evidence that this is the case?

As I understand patent law originated as a way for monarchy to maintain control over innovation and intellect:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_roll

The Congress shall have power...To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;

https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articlei#section8

Yes, patents existed before the US Constitution, but the reason the practice was formalized in the US was to promote progress.

Or at least that was the already well-known public justification put in the US constitution there at the end of a lobbying process.

There doesn't seem to have been much of a lobbying process. It was accepted with little debate, and other options to promote progress were rejected. Copyright was a well-established practice inherited from British common law, and viewed by Madison to be clearly in the public interest:

"The utility of this power will scarcely be questioned. The copyright of authors has been solemnly adjudged in Great Britain, to be a right of common law. The right to useful inventions seems with equal reason to belong to the inventors. The public good fully coincides in both cases with the claims of individuals. The States cannot separately make effectual provisions for either of the cases, and most of them have anticipated the decision of this point, by laws passed at the instance of Congress." Federalist 43

For more background: http://www.copyhype.com/2010/09/copyright-and-the-constituti...

At least with regards to copyright, it is pretty well known that Noah Webster was lobbying powerfully for it [1].

The quote you have from Madison no doubt reflects his real opnion, and well the established view in Britain. But the reason he needed to write it in his letters was that he had to argue against the opposite view among other founders.

You can guess which side Webster supported. And this is the kind of thing I mean about it being a "well-known public justification".

[1]: http://www.thejanuarist.com/noah-webster-father-of-the-ameri...

The Federalist Papers were campaign propaganda for the ratification of the Constitution; a comment in the Federalist Papers is not a basis for rejecting the possibility that the position put forward in that comment is a public rationalization rather than the real motivation, any moreso than would be the case for any argument put forward in any other work of political campaign propaganda.

Accepting the terms of copyright protection then is very different than from now. "Limited term" is no longer observed for anything of value to a large content publisher.

I think we should recognize there can be a strong misalignment between what’s written in a text and its actual purpose or how it will be enforced.

For instance the patriot act surely was filled with feel good vocabulary about protecting the public good, net neutrality’s repel “to increase investment”, and I’m sure the coming up “save the children” act that will aim at giving better education and critical thinking to younger generations.

That is not my understanding. The current use of the word "patent" has become rather ironic compared to its historical meaning.

"Patent" just means "open", in this case openly declared, not secret.

Ideally "patenting" an invention provides an alternative to an inventor hoarding a trade secret that dies with him or his company. The quid pro quo for the public good of making a technology open knowledge is a temporary government granted monopoly.

The ideal and reality seem to have parted company a long time ago...

The first intellectual property fight was over the ability to copy a bible. It lead to a multiyear war where many were killed and later to the schism in the church.

That is patents. While it may seem similar, patents actually are "some kind of privileged status that you have to pay for", or at least have to officially register (I'm not sure if you have to pay for a patent, doesn't matter).

Patents are troublesome, in particular software patents, and in particular in the US due to the way patent trolls work.

But that is an entirely different discussion. Different groups and people behind it, different power struggle. Let's focus on copyright.

Copyright. The way the US enforces it and exerts influence over it--which is what the article is about--makes it a worldwide problem.

Another weird thing is, even from the "copyright everything" camp, it must seem that the US is disproportionately represented+enforced. But you don't hear them about that. There's a few reasons for that, larger non-US studios/distributors often have deals with US studios/distributors. But those deals are mainly with the US, so on the whole it is still disproportionately represented.

I kind of wonder, but have never seen any clear evidence for this so this is just speculation: Even outside the US, a very large percentage of media (pop songs, films, TV series) are of US origin. At least in the Netherlands: Domestic films are considered "niche", the hit charts are dominated by US pop songs and the majority of TV series broadcast and/or watched are US-based. Of course a large driving force behind this phenomenon is that (in NL) we all speak English, but how do you think it became that way? It's not education; We also learn German and French in school, but the Dutch people speak way better English than they speak the language of our neighbours (Germany), let alone French. And such is the case for a large part of Europe at least (I won't try to speak for places that I don't have much knowledge about).

That's some strong cultural influence. It is power. The US probably wants to keep it that way, it's an amazing way to influence thought in western culture everywhere. Anyway it is power, so there must be forces that want to keep it.

But the anti-piracy movements seem kind of antithetical to that, right? They are restricting distribution. So how does that add up? There doesn't seem to be a (public) fight between the "global cultural influence" forces in the US and the "content industry" forces. Again, I'm just speculating, but I can think of a few reasons: It's not about restricting distribution per se, it's about controlling distribution, and control is power. Another way is that by restricting supply (and with a lot of show), it is perceived as valuable, which legitimises. But that doesn't seem to be enough, considering the enormous amount of influence and power on cultures and thought all over the world, the US has control over. Restricting supply is just a trick and controlling distribution is not enough, there must be a force that pushes, too. But what is it? (I'm probably overlooking something extremely obvious because the alternative would be a world-wide psyops-campaign).

I mean, unless US pop-culture is just that much superior, that good, that everybody wants it, everywhere. But that also seems unlikely (and I don't mean that by hating on pop-music or anything, because non-US pop-music is really just as "shit", the "main stream" is still art IMHO, even when I don't like it myself, and that's a whole other discussion again).

>encourage individual inventors to make technology that the whole society will benefit from at a price of some limitation on use by society for a short period of time

I always imagined it was more along the lines of encouraging inventors to open-source their technologies, by giving them greater legal defenses for doing so.

To avoid the "apple does research, and archives it secretly, lost forever if it doesn't reach market" scenario; instead we now see Apple publishing anything and everything it thinks it can lay claim on, to tune of absurd claims today, but in (80) years, the research is still available to all

I think the content industry is the one really driving this whole net neutrality thing, even more than the ISP business. If you follow the money, content is around a $2 trillion annual business, and ISPs are only a few hundred billion.

Do you have a source to a link between the content industry and anti-NN? I assume there is more to it than just "they have a lot more money".

Well, the OP for one. Their anti piracy efforts are legendary, and pressing ISPs to filter VPN's and BT would be in their interest.

I have personally argued this point: the copyright industry's business model is based on making deals with centralized distribution services. They have no concept of peer-to-peer in their world, only of producer-consumer relationships. That is why when faced with something like BitTorrent they panic and start suing individuals, hoping to scare people away from new technologies. Copyright companies often try to divide people by geographic region, something that the Internet has made fundamentally difficult for them (see e.g. VPNs as a way to evade region-locked streaming services; or people downloading pirated copies before the official release in their country).

So Hollywood would love a non-neutrality network. It would give them greater power to block BitTorrent, VPN services, etc. They might complain about the fees being charged for priority access, but they would rather deal with that problem than with the impact a neutral network has on their business.

Content is the new oil, isn't it?

For me it sunk in upon seeing the the Department of Homeland Security now puts their seal anti-piracy warnings. So the copyright industry now has a direct line to "the terrorists hate our freedom."

There's a reason I coined the term 'MAFIAA' for them: http://mafiaa.org/

That's the real disaster. It's a completely irrelevant industry, small by any measure and with a completely dispensable value lobbying against essential things like the freedom of press and affordable education material. And winning.

It gets better: I overheard a cop once saying that he has an Amazon Fire Stick and he streams movies and shows to other cops. He then said its not illegal if you stream it. The cops get involved cause they don't understand it anymore than others do in some cases. You just gotta get to some ones boss and you are forced to follow orders even if they're wrong. I live in the USA btw so might be different from elsewhere. Cops are not lawyers I guess...

I know cops who do this and I think it's just wilful ignorance.

Not here to play devil advocates but the distribution of pirated content is actually extremely lucrative.

They get at least a few dollars per thousand views. It adds up really quickly when any video will quickly get hundreds of thousands of views, multiplied by the number of episodes, multiplied by the number of shows.

Pirating content is serious business. It can also be free and makes no money to the site owner but that's usually not how it's done.

Stallman's view on use of the word content: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.en.html#Conten...

. . .it treats them as a commodity whose purpose is to fill a box and make money. In effect, it disparages the works themselves. If you don't agree with that attitude, you can call them “works” or “publications.”

>At the time there were some rumors that Sweden would be placed on the US Trade Representative’s 301 Watch List. This could possibly result in negative trade implications. However, in a cable written April 2006, the US Embassy in Sweden was informed that, while there were concerns, it would not be listed. Not yet at least. “We understand that a specialized organization for enforcement against Internet piracy currently is under consideration,” the cable reads, while mentioning The Pirate Bay once again.

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..)

Overall the whole series of events was pretty offensive, and it paints the picture of the US being a schoolyard bully.

Business as usual, but better the bully than the psychopath.

From Wikipedia's "1954_Guatemalan_coup_d'état":

"[..] The United Fruit Company (UFC), whose highly profitable business had been affected by the end to exploitative labor practices in Guatemala, engaged in an influential lobbying campaign to persuade the U.S. to overthrow the Guatemalan government. U.S. President Harry Truman authorized Operation PBFORTUNE to topple Árbenz in 1952; although the operation was quickly aborted, it was a precursor to PBSUCCESS."

Reading about those things, one get the impression that the Department of State works for the Camber of Commerce, instead of the USA citizens.

(1). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27%C3%A...

> Reading about those things, one get the impression that the Department of State works for the Camber of Commerce, instead of the USA citizens.

If I'm not mistaken the first permanent "embassies" were set up by the Venetians (mostly) and the Genoese, and their role was essentially just that, i.e. protecting the economic interests of their "home" entities. It so happened that most of the time protecting the citizens who happened to reside in foreign countries also meant protecting their home-city economic interests, but that mainly happened because the citizens involved were traders themselves. So, in a way, you could say that what the Department of State is now doing is just the continuation of the initial idea of a "foreign embassy".

Surely, the role of the embassy of a power, ruled by a oligarchy of merchants and aristocrats, it's very different from the expected role of the embassy of a democratic federal republic.

Just joking. As you say, business as usual.

>Reading about those things, one get the impression that the Department of State works for the Camber of Commerce, instead of the USA citizens.

Well, of course.

The best part: The vast majority of all Scandinavians honestly believe that we have almost no corruption and that out justice system is so close to perfect that it is hardly necessary to discuss improvements.

It never ceases to amaze me how much influence the MPAA has.

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...

It's because so few care about copyright. It is seen as something dry and stodgy that only affect artists and their publishers/labels.

This perhaps because once the cassette recorder, never mind the VCR, came to be, most nations on the western side of the wall decided to not go full police state and thus added a "friends and family" clause to their copyright laws.

This meant that a person could create a copy, if it was meant for a direct friend or a relative. This avoided having to park a copyright cop in every home in the nation.

Never mind that producing analog copies from tape to tape cause of a noticeable loss of content with each generation removed from the original.

But the computer, never mind the internet, changed all that. It made mass copying not something that required massive machinery in a warehouse, but something every kid could do in their own home. Especially as bandwidth and storage capacity kept improving at a massive rate.

And digital copies do not degrade like an analog one does.

The organizations also play a game of the Boy Who Cried Wolf. Remember Home Taping Is Killing Music? By their propaganda, the music industry should have died multiple times in the past few decades.

>> It's because so few care about copyright. It is seen as something dry and stodgy that only affect artists and their publishers/labels.

This is because copyright relates to stuff that's usually intangible. People easily grasp the idea of theft when it comes to tangible, physical stuff.

>> And digital copies do not degrade like an analog one does.

True, but digital copies are for the most part still stored on media that can degrade, break or malfunction. In the context of places like TPB, digital copies are indeed degraded as they are often uploaded with lossy compression to reduce file size.

What about licences for when the movies come out on dvd and are shown on the numerous tv channels in 100+ countries. I can imagine then this figure amounts to a multiple, maybe $40B?

That's a large industry definitely and a powerful one.

And streaming rights for Netflix/Hulu/Whatever other platform there is (lots of them). TV royalties are also paid every time the movie is aired.

Indeed and this per year. So, you're looking at $700B over ten years?

> 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.

It's underestimated since it's a global business, plus they there's a very long tail for every movie to turn a profit, DVD/BR releases, TV, and online reselling, renting, etc... and the fact movies remain their property for 75 years+, and for some companies like Disney they retain the copyright forever, and keep sellings goods like cupcakes as well.

American box office results are far from the only source of revenue for movies. Their is foreign box office, DVD/Blueray sales, digital sales, digital rentals, streaming fees, and broadcast fees.

In Blockbuster's heyday their revenue alone surpassed American box office sales.

Don't forget product placement, in film advertising, endorsements (both in film and around its marketing)...

Oh and merchandising... that's a big one!

Note that the value of product placement, in film advertising, endorsements, and merchandising all /benefit/ from the increased distribution of piracy.

This suggests possible changes in business model, but it is really hard to give up an existing revenue stream in order to build future revenue streams that may fit the current world better, especially when the future revenue stream is currently small (e.g., music industry's fight against streaming, which is projected to become a larger revenue stream than physical sales had been - https://www.ft.com/content/94c5cdb0-4a26-11e7-a3f4-c742b9791...)

You can't make easy analytics with 'piracy reach', but I bet you could probably make some estimates by monitoring bit torrent.

It's been noted that the most surprising thing about corrupt officials is not how many there are but how cheap they are.

> Movies, while extremely popular, don't generate that much money

But movies are part of Intellectual Property, which is the US's biggest export (in real dollars).

And despite all these efforts, I'm still a happy user of the pirate bay whenever I want to watch something that I can't find on iTunes or Amazon. For me, the Pirate Bay has been the most reliable way to find stuff over the last years, for so many things it's still better than all the paid alternatives that I use.

So much money wasted on futile attempts to suppress a website...

I hope TPB will teach copyright owners a lesson that there's no point and no way to fight piracy.

For the one TPB that has survived, there are several file sharing websites (decent ones that are actually usable) and torrent sites that have been pulled down and the copyright owners have prevailed. I think this more points to the technical acumen of the ppl behind TPB.

I am not taking strong sides against or for fighting piracy. I do hope the greater share of the profits do end up with the original authors and not the content distributors.

These days TPB is little more than a indexer of magnet links.

I think there was a claim floating around that one could offer all the TPB magnet links in a simple text file that would be a maybe a MB in size.

It's more but not even 100MB: https://archive.org/details/pirate-bay-torrent-dumps-2004-20...

This does not include the descriptions though.

Also check out https://github.com/sergiotapia/magnetissimo

I downloaded it once. The entire catalog of TPB in magnet link form worked out to 63mb zipped IIRC.

There is, just make it easier (and in some cases, even possible) for people to pay for content (see the comment above https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15920913)

There are always people who are ready to pay and people who will go to every length to not to. Instead of focusing on giving a good experience to the first crowd, companies end up screwing it up and then waste time on trying to force the second crowd to pay.

That reminds me of the fanfare up in the cold north when Netflix expanded their offerings those shores. Only that once one checked the catalog on offer, it was downright anemic. Several TV series lagged by multiple seasons for example.

Never mind that since then Netflix have lost the right to distribute quite a few movie catalogs that may hold hidden classics, as they shift their focus onto producing their own content and the copyright holders wants to keep the percentages that Netflix got for themselves.

This however leads to market balkanization and drive people to once more consider alternative sources.

I read a great article years ago where a Disney executive argued that they had to view pirating as a competing business model, and provide a better experience instead of just trying to shut it down.

Disney and pirates compete on price, quality, availability, ease of use, and so on. Price is going to be hard to compete with since pirated stuff is free, and I guess they are attacking the availability of pirated material to increase their own by comparison, but what I wish they would focus on is to make it easier for the user to find the stuff they want. If I knew I could go somewhere for all of Disney's catalog of shorts and feature films, I'd be happy to pay a small amount per movie or subscribe for continuous access. Instead it's spread across multiple services, or you have to buy individual DVD boxes and try to assemble your own collection which is a lot of work. They could make it a lot easier for me to watch that specific short (now I go to YouTube and hope it's there) or movie (I check if it's on Netflix or another streaming service, and if not, I skip it).

My (limited) experience of NFL.com is that they've done great when it comes to making it easy to watch current and older games, with options to subscribe to all games or just one team. The English Premier League doesn't have the same centralized streaming service I know of and instead depends on selling the rights to TV channels to show games, which leads to consuming a lot of pirated material if you want to follow a specific team all season or want to watch all concurrent games.

If the content providers just compete in the areas they can affect, most people will pay to use it it's more convenient than the alternative.

Disney is building their own streaming service, so you may get your wish. Not sure about the "small amount", tough.

> I read a great article years ago where a Disney executive argued that they had to view pirating as a competing business model, and provide a better experience instead of just trying to shut it down.

This is exactly how Spotify get my money. It's so much easier than trying to manage a pirated collection.

There's the extremely annoying tendency at least at German streaming providers (iTunes, Amazon/Google Video) to remove rental access to movies about nine months after DVD release or when a second movie of a series is about to arrive at the theatres. Only buy access remains accessible. Now that physical video rental stores are on terminal decline, online stores have an effective oligopoly without real competition and push customers towards paying a maximum. The only alternative in this case remains thepiratebay.

There is also the issue that movies in Germany and such only have the German Audio track in 5.1, but the English one is in 2.0. How ridiculous.

But most Germans don't care for the english track in the first place, being used to subbed dialogue.

It's changing. I'm seeing movies in English a lot more often in cinemas than I did 10 years ago.

But there is no technical reason not to include other languages in 5.1? I would get the argument for DVDs and maybe live TV, but not for streaming...

There are a lot of immigrants, like me, who can speak and understand German but miss a lot when watching movies.

Subtitles would help a lot but even that is missing with a lot of providers (I wonder what people with hearing disabilities do).

At least Netflix has always German subtitles. For series, English subtitles too most of the time, but practically none of the movies have those in English which I find quite weird.

Are you saying it isn't ridiculous? It's always ridiculous to not have the original language track in the best quality/format. It would be ridiculous for Japanese films distributed in the US to have the Japanese track in 2.0 and the dubbed English in 5.1

> It would be ridiculous for Japanese films distributed in the US to have the Japanese track in 2.0 and the dubbed English in 5.1

A far worse offender, for me at least, are Blu-Rays in that regard. During their introduction, they were hailed as allowing distributors to pack dozens of high-quality different language tracks and different subtitle options on the disc.

While the reality these days looks like this: Most Blu-Ray releases are still regionalized, very often with limited audio language options (in 2.0 quality) and sometimes not even subtitle support for one language.

I think a lot of that has to do with distributors pretty much forming cartels by region, thus having only rights to distribute only specific versions in specific regions.

To be fair this has gotten somewhat better, at least with TV series and newer releases on Amazon. Newer shows releasing with proper audio quality, language choice and often even CC subtitles in both languages.

I was pleasantly surprised that my Prime subscription might actually still be useful for something.

For Germans: Create a US iTunes account, buy USD iTunes gift cards on eBay Germany, put in the account. Rent from the US store.

This proves the exact point that customers who wish to legally pay for content have to jump through a ridiculous number of hoops.

Register an account in a different country, pay for a gift card in another currency, suffer international transaction fees + currency conversion rates, then manage multiple accounts with different balances depending on when iTunes has juggled around it's regional stores.

Or just visit pirate bay.

Isn't that as bad as downloading via torrent? In many countries the sole consumption is not considered illegal (only sharing is), so violating iTunes terms could be even worse theoretically.

And as a side note it could open you up to getting your main account blocked by Apple if they start cracking down on that.

Aren't you afraid of receiving a 'Abmahnung' for torrenting?

I'm still dumbfounded that the practise of setting up torrent honeypots by agencies like waldorf&frommer is actually legal

That's why you use a VPN when downloading Torrents.

Abstinence is not an alternative?

I've never understood why so many people feel that they have to see every superhero movie or every Blockbuster.

Becomes more difficult the more social your life becomes. Ordinarily I wouldn't care about the new Star Wars movie, but because everyone else cares, I pretty much have to go see it, if only so I can talk about it.

I don't mind going to see movies in the theater, but TV shows are a different animal. Hollywood refuses to allow me to buy the kind of access I want, digital, unencrypted copies that I can store on a disk drive, or failing that a streaming service that allows access to everything, so pirating is the only way to go.

You pretty much have to see it? I think Hollywood sucks and all, but geez, if you think you have to pirate a TV show at a certain level of sociality, you're probably not really socializing in a healthy way. You may not be giving them a lot of money, but you're definitely giving them a lot of power over your self.

That's an... interesting... way of looking at it.

I'm not sure what having a social life has to do with anything. I haven't sat down to watch a TV show for over a decade, but by some great miracle, I have a robust social life with friends and plenty of activities to do. When a friend asks, "hey, did you see the latest Star Wars movie" or "how 'bout that great Sportsball game last night??" I just say no, didn't see it, and we talk about something else. I know, it sounds crazy.

Or they just start talking with your other friends about it and leave you out.

You have an unusual definition of "friend" then... But I'm not gonna tell you who to hang out with.

You really want me to tell my friends what they should be watching and talking about?

It's really cool that many torrents that are over 10 years old are still seeded.

Does anyone have any insight on how TPB has managed to stay online this long?

IIRC it was sold / transferred to an unknown party and hosted outside of any jurisdictions. The mistake the original owners made was that their names could be traced back from the website.

> hosted outside of any jurisdictions

I'm curious about this - does it mean hosting in a country that "doesn't care", or is there some other option that I'm unaware of?

There are shady hosting companies who don't ask a lot of questions. Some of them even accept BTC. At the end of the day TPB is just ones and zeros in a basement somewhere.

You could host on 2 servers and combine at the client (one server has even bits, the other odd) - that technically wouldn't be hosted anywhere only existing transiently at the client location?

"We towed it outside of the environment!"

There's some info on their 2014 set up -

>At the time of writing the site uses 21 “virtual machines” (VMs) hosted at different providers.

>All virtual machines are hosted with commercial cloud hosting providers, who have no clue that The Pirate Bay is among their customers.

https://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-runs-on-21-raid-proo...

I subscribed to Amazon Prime, thinking that I can stream series and movies that I was interested in, only to find, that only things that I could watch were shows produced by Amazon itself(Man in the High Castle etc), channels and movies were restricted content because of my location. I don't understand why it's still an issue.

You can blame that on the studios, they make licensing content extremely complex.

Streaming services (Amazon, Netflix, etc) would love for you to be able to access their catalog from anywhere (as you can see since Amazon allows you to watch their own content from anywhere) but are limited by contractual clauses and/or exorbitant fees, which make this sort of deal not worth it.

Studios are used to a territory-based model instead of a globalised market, since that's pretty much how cable works, so when you negotiate content with a studio the contract will tell exactly which territories you're allowed to stream the content from.

It is still an issue because of the way the market is structured. Movies exclusive distribution rights are sold separately to distributors in each country to maximize revenues, in advance if possible. (Or once the movie has toured festivals for independent movies, making it impossible sometimes for years or forever to buy a digital download in one’s country)

So I see that you run https://eggerapps.at/ , where you sell various pieces of software that I'm sure you've spent a lot of time creating and perfecting.

How would you like it if I set up a mirror with cracked versions of all of your apps, and then successfully diverted all of your sales to it?

And then when you sue me, how would you like it if I openly mocked you? I'll post your takedown letters on a section of my site where I call you a fool, do the digital equivalent of spitting in your face, and continue to flagrantly violate your rights.

That's exactly what the Pirate Bay does and I don’t understand how someone who sells their painstakingly created intellectual property could support that, let alone admit to participating in it.

Edit: na85, and what if I only divert 10% of the sales? Why should I now be totally innocent?

>and then successfully diverted all of your sales to it?

No doubt you can back up this assertion that the pirate Bay diverted all or at least the majority of movie sales.

Given that he himself is a creator and someone directly affected by piracy (in this case software cracking) I assume he knows what he's talking about.

As a creator as well, I am aware that my software is out in the wild and people are using it for free and so far I've yet to notice any harm coming from it, quite the contrary. Even if we live in a connected world, we still don't live in a fair world, having a credit card or a PayPal account is still a hard thing to obtain in quite a bit of countries and so it happens that from time to time I receive emails of users that are using cracked version of my software offering to snail mail me checks or asking me for alternative payment methods, in these cases me knowing that they get enough joy of my apps is payment enough.

In my case I do believe this is free marketing, in the end a good chunk of users come back and buy the apps if it's truly useful for them and counting the others that wont buy it as lost sales is stupid as they would not spend the money anyway.

It'd be awesome if you did this: expected net result, he gets more sales and at the low cost of 10% of revenue, much less than other distribution channels!

Yup, and now we're getting into an even worse situation. We're going from bundled cable packages to numerous walled garden streaming platforms that, were one to subscribe to them all to get most of the content they'd get from cable, it would surpass whatever the monthly cable bill was by a large amount.

May I ask what measures you take to stay safe?

I am new to the US, got Netflix and Amazon Video but soon realized they hardly have what I am interested in. So I got myself a Vpn (BlackVPN, if that matters) and started using Popcorn Time. I am still a bit wary to download torrents, something I used to do a lot back home.

So, any suggestions on what more I can do before starting torrenting?

https://app.put.io/ Put.io is absolutely the best way to download torrents. I am not affiliated with them in anyway except that I am a massively happy user, and assume you will use this service only to download legal torrents, like me :)

If you're interested in learning more about The Pirate Bay, the founders and the trial, watch the documentary called TPB AFK (The Pirate Bay : Away From Keyboard) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTOKXCEwo_8

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...

Does it talk much about the financier Carl Lundström's role in TPB?

He never gets mentioned much for some reason*

* Because of his far right connections

IIRC it does, but only briefly. He bought advertising space on TPB and it became a controversy. The TPB guys were falsely accused of being right wing extremists for doing business with Carl Lundström.

Woah, woah. He was a co-defendant at the trial. He was more that just a dude who bought some ad space.

The allegations by the prosecution are of a bit more than that: https://gigaom.com/2008/02/02/who-is-the-fourth-man-in-the-p...

Or get it from the pirate bay itself:

https://thepiratebay.org/torrent/8118457/TPB.AFK.2013.1080p....

While I do recommend adblock, there is no reason to be afraid of the site, or of torrenting this copyleft material.

I'm sure there are many reading this who have absolutely no sympathy for pirates. They're stealing and that's that.

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.

If I sell some object and my logistics is that I sell 3 per months, then I manufacture 3 objects per months and wait for customers to buy them. If someone steals one, then I've only 2 remaining objects. I've the choice between telling the 3rd expected customer that I'm out, or to manufacture one extra, which in any case result in a direct loss of money. I'm a victim of theft.

If I'm a film producer and my logistics is that I sell N viewings per month, and someone pirates the movie, then this doesn't interfere with my ability to sell the N viewings to my expected customers. So this isn't theft. Of course, I would like the pirate to be my customer so that I can step up to N+1 viewing per month, but if I want to enforce that I need to turn to who made the copy available to the pirate, which is counterfeit.

"don't steal, the government hates competition" - some bumper sticker

After decades of extreme propaganda on the subject, most Americans equate piracy to theft, which is obviously untrue.

Beyond that, there is a hatred toward piracy that is arguably worse than that of theft.

Fighting this propaganda-fueled nonsense is difficult, because piracy, on the surface, is a choice to not pay rightsholders, which is, on the surface, bad.

As soon as one digs beneath the surface, however, it is easy to find many neutral, or even good reasons to "pirate" content.

The abuse by rightsholders, organizations, and even government in the name of protecting copyright is bad, and not simply on the surface. It is a deep-rooted, malicious system, and people ought to understand that whatever hatred they have toward piracy, they should have ten fold toward anti-piracy.

I remember the piratebay trial being a gigantic farce where some of the judges had ties to copyright organisations. It's crazy how much power have these mafia-like organisations.

(edit: spelling)

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.

That this passed without causing a conflict of interest is astonishing. https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2009/0423/pirate...

Also worth mentioning is that the lead investigating police got a job from Warner Brothers very soon after the trial was successful. Thank you, job well done. https://techcrunch.com/2008/04/18/officer-who-investigated-p...

In recent news, the chair of Swedens Supreme court judge Stefan Lindskog has been implied in shady financial transactions, and is under investigation by the police. The belief we once had that Sweden had a low level of corruption can be put to history. And of course even having a low level still means there is some corruption. https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/polisen-utreder-hogsta-doms...

YMMV.

It is my impression that corruption measures usually indicate corruption available or actively done by normal people without power (eg. bribing officers to get licenses or similar things).

Corruption by big corporations and similar things is usually another thing (although if things are corrupt in the low level, they will for sure be in the higher levels).

Nitpick: "without causing a conflict of interest" is incorrect, as there most definitely was a CoI. You probably meant to say "conflict of interest scandal" or words to that effect.

> Also worth mentioning is that the lead investigating police got a job from Warner Brothers very soon after the trial was successful.

Can you blame them? Thanks to that case the guy got a lot of experience in the area of copyright violations and online piracy, that's valuable knowledge to have and they could use someone to advise them.

You're implying that he did it for the cushy job he got for it, but I have my doubts. Maybe if you can prove he got the offer before the investigations started?

It's hard to prove but there is still a dirty smell around it all.

So much for Sweden being held up as this magical corruption free democracy. It's almost like the people "measuring" this sort of thing might not be doing it honestly...

> mafia-like organisations

Why not write "governments"? It's much shorter.

Let's get one thing straight: Torrent sites do not host content. They host community.

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.

Got to love the 'privacy' instead of 'piracy' typo in the first cable screenshot:

"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 ..."

was it a typo or a huge backdoor of piracy into privacy talks?

Canada has been on the 301 watch list for a long time now. There have been some attempts to get off it (theatre camcording law) but it turned out that that the real reason a country is put on the list is a lack of fawning obedience to the US copyright cartel. A country that is perceived to not be toeing the line is put on the list. If there no actual policy reason to be there the copyright cartel just makes stuff up.

So these days the list is meaningless and is roundly ignored by Canada. Sweden probably should of did the same thing.

"The new confessions of an economic hitman" by John Perkins is a very good exposition of the close ties of state and corporate powers in the US and how they co-operate to increase the capital wealth of the elite.

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.

Wow, 10 years ago already? This was quite big here in Sweden back when it happened. It's scary how quickly these things slip out of our conscience (at least mine). It's chilling what you can get away with by just staying cool for while... Or is the short term damage in PR not worth waiting it out for the long?

People aren't stupid they know it's wrong to download a movie or music they didn't buy. But everyone agrees the response by the US law enforcement is overreaching and out of proportion.

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.

To remove pirated movies from the interwebs there are two options really: either attack content providers / trackers etc, or, find the users directly.

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.)

"In Germany, as soon as you start a torrent client, your traffic is being monitored by bots and agents"

How is traffic monitored when I start a client? Don't I need to download/upload something to get monitored? Is the monitoring connected to trackers I download from or ISP monitored?

"[...] with a heavy fine."

Was it a fine or some kind of fee? ("Abmahngebühr")

I'm not familiar with the German legal system but the sum did depend on what they've uploaded. (It was detailed in the letter, if I remember correctly, $600 for half an episode-of-whatever and $3000 for multiple movies.)

As for the traffic monitoring, indeed, I'd imagine it to be honeypot tracker where all content/traffic is visible rather than something installed on the ISP side.

No it's not the tracker, it also works for magnet links and people get letters for downloading.

There are companies who join the download swarm and register all other downloading parties. That's very easy with bittorrent, since the protocol is (originally) designed for fast download sharing without any regard to anonymity or pseudonymity.[1] The process is not reliable for providing evidence of copyright infringement, though, and the German system mostly works by scare tactics of lawyers - many people don't want to risk a lawsuit even if they could win it.

[1] https://torrentfreak.com/thousands-of-spies-are-watching-tra...

These companies are the scum of the scum, tbh, I recall I once got a letter claiming I must pay about 6000€ for illegally downloading "Debian 5 Linux Netboot ISO" and "Ubuntu 12.04 x86 Full ISO" or something along those lines.

They sent some awfully scary letters for what amounts to legally obtaining an ISO file.

I used to run an abandoned warez site when I was young. I received a lot of cease and desist letters from "lawyers". They usually failed to identify the infringing material, failed to show they had the right to act on the copywriters behalf and a staggering amount of them confused trademark infringement with copyright infringement. Also, every last one I received via email. Yeah, right, like that's going to hold up. I ignored all of them and never got even so much as a follow up.

In other words, such things are considered low-hanging fruit by these companies. Just throw it out there and see what sticks.

Luckily the german system is less strict than the DMCA, you can fact-check any letters you get, you only need to act if you know (for certain) it's illegal

How do these companies know who to contact for a given IP address? Do ISPs just cooperate with them?

WHOIS records.

Though that only tells you the RIPE member for it.

They might have still leased the IP elsewhere (which is totally informal, if you operate a IP range all you need is a letter saying you can do it with the owner's signature)

> $600 for half an episode-of-whatever and $3000

Insane, you can get a good VPN from TorGuard, PIA or NordVPN for 10x less than half of an episode!

I think he is saying that there are companies monitoring the trackers.

Copyright holders have been sending those kinds of settlement demands in Finland as well. They seem to be monitoring the torrent swarm for relevant IP addresses so that they can demand that ISPs hand over account holder's names. ISP are by law required to hand over this information if the users has shared something illegally to "a significant degree".

They settlement demands have been between 500€ and 3000€ and they have usually been lowered in the cases that have gone to court. A few have however ended up footing legal costs in the tens of thousands.

> ISP are by law required to hand over this information if the users has shared something illegally to "a significant degree".

ISP's only hand over data by court order but in the past few years, court orders have granted this right to pretty much every request from the copyright holders. ISP's are now contesting this and there were two recent judgements in the courts to allow ISPs not to hand over the data. See this [0] (in Finnish).

So the situation is now better in Finland, partially because the predatory abuse from copyright holders' law firms sending out tons of "fines".

[0] https://www.turre.com/operaattori-voitti-oikeudenhaltijat-tu...

So no Tor exit nodes in Germany, I suppose ...

IIRC there are Tor exit nodes in germany, they also filter some traffic but only on the lowest amount of effort they have to do legally. Ie the usual suspects: illegal porn, illegal torrents (usually also porn) and websites not conforming to strict german industry standards.

How does the node operator know what traffic should be blocked (i.e. that something is illegal porn or illegal torrent) ? Is there an official source that says for example which website should be blocked and that is enough ?

Unlikely that there is a public list, but a node operator could certainly compile such a list based on angry letters they receive.

That would be my approach too, but I was wondering if this would be enough to stay out of trouble.

Under german law, yes, notice-and-takedown is basically all you need to adhere to; if you are aware of illegal activities, you must take measures to stop them. (But unlike the DMCA for example, you are allowed to verify any notices thoroughly before taking action, you only have to listen to verified claims)

I was sort of joking a bit but I do know that german node operators block some traffic.

However, it's on a purely notice-and-takedown basis, which is the DMCA of germany but more broadly applicable; if you are made aware of illegal activity on your network you must stop the activity and take reasonable measures to prevent future abuse. They can also fall under the network operator laws in which case they are not responsible for the traffic at all but I'm not sure if that is applicable to tor nodes or not.

I have a Tor relay (not an exit node) running in Germany.

Once I started reading other people's experience of running an exit node through that ISP (Hetzner), it turned out that the hosting company was the one receiving these reports and forwarding them to you. After it, the consequences can range all the way from warnings to physically shutting down your server until you do something ridiculous (IIRC send them a physical mail).

Since I didn't want to risk my server being shut down for whatever reason (there are some other uses of it non-Tor related, and the rest of the monthly bandwidth goes towards Tor relay), I've decided to just not run the exit node.

I'd say it's still very useful to the Tor network, since it handles something like 400 GB of Tor traffic per day.

In Switzerland piracy for private reasons (non-commercial) is legal!

In Belgium, you're allowed to download, but not to upload.

Hmm... maybe it is like that,too. I'd have to do some research.

In Germany downloading is no problem, too. Uploading is what they try to get you for.

Not really. You're allowed to download for personal use from authorized sources.

See https://ictrecht.be/featured-2/torrents-wat-mag-en-wat-mag-n....

Oh, thanks for this update! I had only known about the situation before the Court ruling.

At least a few years ago in Sweden, all cases where someone had payed a fine for downloading pirated material due to such letters was because the person admitted guilt. The anti-piracy organizations had no way of forcing someone to pay, because none of the evidence would hold up in court. They tried to submit screenshots of IP addresses, but since it's easy to spoof it wasn't enough to convict someone.

I don't know if this has changed in recent years, as I haven't heard anything about it recently.

The copyright industry is a direct arm of American soft power projection into the rest of the world. For the content industry it's about money, but for policy makers and the geopolitical strategists who have the ear of those policy makers, it's about furthering the nation's position in the world.

The content industry punches above its weight in getting the government to protect it overseas for this reason.

Interesting aside: is the redacting technique vulnerable to an analogue of the "timing attack" on certain crypto?

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.

The 2008 Underhanded C Contest [1] had an exercise in "leaky" redaction. The winner, [2], used a very fun approach.

[1] http://www.underhanded-c.org/_page_id_17.html

[2] http://notanumber.net/archives/54/underhanded-c-the-leaky-re...

It's interesting that even after all the scummy things the movie industry has done, people still desperately want to pirate their content. People who base their opinion on a principled opposition to copyright, should be leading the charge in promoting other means of compensating content creators. Stop signalling how much you desire the copyrighted product, and start signalling how much you desire the non-copyrighted one! IMHO The only people who should be pirating are the people who don't have a principled stance on copyright.

I wonder why isn't there torrent-search-over-DHT yet?

I mean, this is known point of vulnerability.

Maybe it's because owners of popular bittorrent software don't want that feature?

btdb.io and btdig

btdig seems better as it doesn't have annoying pop ups, which are constantly brought up on btdb, even with ublock origin and noscript. I would not be surprised that btdb is buying ads from an ad provider that sell js injections to a MPAA operated third party.

btdb is nice because you can sort by seeds, you cannot with btdig.

To be honest I stopped using classic torrent indexers entirely since I started using DHT indexes. They have much larger choice. The issue is that you cannot "post" magnets links on the DHT automatically (I think you cannot), so the DHT works as long as people are finding magnets or torrents elsewhere. It's bringing more decentralization, which mean more chaos but much less traceability.

It did not work terribly well for other networks like Gnutella; it just gets flooded with spam and malware attacks. Good engineers and researchers never had the chance to develop solutions to that problem because the copyright industry delegitimized peer-to-peer and pushed everyone to more centralized systems (by abusing the court system).

Many interesting points which contradict the behavior of the lawyers of said MPA during the court hearings.

“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.

I wouldn’t be as miserably ashamed for this as I am, if it weren’t for the fact that the popular artists my country has produced since, oh... 1996? Aren’t worth defending from piracy.

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.

The framers of the U.S. Constitution knew the risks of the government creating and granting monopolies, however limited. The incentives are to remove the limitations and expand them.

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.

Still up though. I use it every once in a while because its on TOR. My ISP has to block some pirate sites now.

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.

Why is the name of the official who spearheaded this initiative REDACTED?

Is this undercover, spy-type work as opposed to public, legal actions carried out by a legitimate government agency?

I've discovered some days ago that the thepiratebay.org domain was available again. Is it linked to the original one or is it just a proxy?

I use it often so somebody keeps it running, actually there are dozens of mirrors running on various ccTLD-s. The source must be available somewhere online so you can spin up your own instance.

It is. As The Pirate Bay don't host any .torrent files, only magnet links, on memory the entire site came to under 200mb.

It was only down for a few months. I have read that other people are running the website these days.

It has degraded a bit but essentially it works fine most of the time.

What do you mean by again? Was it blocked by your ISP previously, or do you mean that it used to redirect to others like .se? Because I'm pretty sure the .org domain has continuously worked for me since 2004 when it was registered.

Funny, the "brand equity" of The Pirate Bay is really something. After over 10 years of use, there's almost a nostalgic bond to the site for me now which makes the downloading of material a familiar ritual with only positive associations.

Not necessarily proud of this, just something I've noticed.

I don't care indeed, but someone has to think about the potentials and ecosystem that it could lead. Don't block the possibilities and help them to be in right way.

> U.S. authorities provide concrete suggestions for improvement

I don't think improvement is quite the right word.

"In your face, Hollywood."

With Net neutrality repealed say hello the blocking sites like this one .. well without a vpn.

You mean the one I used last night to watch Dunkirk? Great detective work there Lou.

Amazing how Yankees are annoying g the whole world...

do people still use piratebay ? there are better alternatives now

For example?

DHT indexes, btdig and btdb.io

Kodi with Exodus

Honest question: why is this surprising / newsworthy?

It's important to not forget what the web used to be, in order to have some context for what it's becoming (see Net Neutrality).

At least to me a Swede, this [datacenter] "... was raided by 65 Swedish police officers" is so incredibly out of touch with normal reality in this country, on so many levels.

* Copyright infringement case assigned to that many officers? Unheard of. High profile murder investigations don't get that many.

* We have this peculiar law, that ministers are NOT TO meddle in the running of government agencies. Yet, this is what we got.

* From cautious "see what happens" attitude among prosecutors with regards to copyright infringement and copying for personal use - to a big leap: not only an attempted (though only partially successful) witch hunt of Pirate Bay founders, but also inventing a whole new crime, called "accessory to copyright infringement".

Not that I don't agree that what Pirate Bay did was at times shady, but the whole thing made me believe without a doubt a few things:

- US as a case of "wag the dog". The trade associations (RIAA etc) in the US can easily make the state do their bidding. And the US state as an institution is quite weak, when it does these things so quickly. What that implies, is that there is no thinking things through. No serious cost/benefit analysis can possibly have been made. "How much ill will from foreign countries is this move worth? Fuck that, do it now."

- That Sweden would be pushed around so quickly. I must have been naive, but it was surprising how not even a symbolic attempt at saving face was made here. Our domestic response was decisive and swift. Can't help but make you wonder what we could be made to do to ourselves over something more serious than fucking copyright infringement. Dance, monkey, dance.

Yes especially when pretty much all other crimes except murder and stuff like that are disregarded nowadays. Swedens judicial system is completely broken.

...And police officers and whistleblowers like Peter Springare that dares to speak out about it are ostracized and made persona non grata.

Though I agree with much of that, I didn't want to conflate what happened 10 years ago with the current situation. The current situation needs it's own whole topic/thread.

Edit: though now we are talking about current situation anyway, I feel there is a chance to turn things around for the better. But it would probably involve many very big adjustments, one being massively higher salary for police officers. (Like 30% more.)

Norway is the same for the record. There was a local case recently where the police knocked down an innocent man on the street, handcuffed him, and charged him with assaulting a police officer. There were something like 30 eye witnesses, still he lost in court, police clearly giving false testimony. Luckily he did win the appeal.

"Luckily he did win the appeal." ... so system is not broken?

Edit: I misunderstood. I thought the officers were punished. Sorry.

They knocked him down on the street, arrested him, charged him, dragged him through two years of trials. After winning the appeal, the chief of police mocked him openly and called him a liar. There was ZERO repercussions for any of the involved officers.

That's not broken?

edit: and you could look up the historical cases like Tonny Askevold. Charges of first-degree murder was dropped. The police can and will do whatever the fuck they want.

The difference is that in Sweden the police doesn't do anything. Even if you give them a lot of evidence they drop the cases all the time.

I have personal experience of this.

"Henlagt grunnet bevisets stilling" (effectively claiming that the case will not be investigated due to lack of evidence) have become a running joke in Norway.

As a comparison to the 65 police officers that raider the Piratebay datacenter,gang murder investigations in Malmö, Sweden nowadays involve 3 police officers.

Source: https://www.sydsvenskan.se/2016-12-10/tre-poliser-istallet-f...

The "disproportional resource allocation" of the police and authorities begs for further investigation.

My wife had her credit card info stolen, and used it for about $3000, which was all that was on it. I recognized the site they used for purchases (also in Sweden), and called them up. They were very forthcoming and froze the account/purchases upon number verification (the card was already locked to be disposed at that point). They obviously couldn't give out any personal information to me, but they had information available on who it was for any police inquiry.

I relayed this information to the case handler, and yet immediately after I get a form response of "We've shut this case down since it's obvious there's no way to solve it".

We only needed the report to get our money back through insurance, but it really pisses me off that the police doesn't have resources to solve a case that I have solved for them, yet can spend _65_ officers on a political sham.

I've had the same thing happen with a flight that was booked with my credit card on the same day that I cancelled it (probably some guy at Mastercard making some extra money).

Booking a flight seems like it's something that's very easy to track down who benefits, doesn't it?

Police are pretty worthless in my experience as well. Once, some poor bastard had the misfortune to purchase a device stolen from my employer that I could easily track. I had GPS coordinates, identifying personal information, pictures from their phone, pretty much anything you could ask for, but nothing was done even after it became clear that this person was a meth dealer.

Then why do you keep voting a government like this?

All governments are fucked.

I have seen up and coming politicians in Norway basically become big media's mouthpieces over this topic, because otherwise their political carer is toast.

Damn it, when the law was up for review. The panel had strict rules about what parts of the law they could recommend changes for. Effectively they were only able to consider of the copyright duration should be extended or not.

It need not be "surprising" to be worthy of discussion.

The fact that the US has so much control over international copyright law enforcement is a big deal.

The fact that a site that does not host copyrighted material was taken down in the name of copyright law is a big deal.

What he says is not that he doesn't know it. What he says is that everybody knows it since years and the article doesn't contain anything that hasn't been known already.

I wouldn't fully agree with that, but his question is quite clear, imo.

Well, since it was about things that long ago, new people grew up for whom that might be newsworthy.

Because exposition of abuse of power requires proven concrete examples.

It confirms that american businesses can apply pressure on a geopolitical and diplomatic level, which is scary.

Laws should apply to their own countries. If a foreign business can influence how the law is applied, it should be perceived as the US doing things that should be out of its reach. That's something empires do, and if they keep doing it, it will taint a bad image on the US.

I don't understand why there is so much controversy over this. I've been reading about the reasons TPB is a bastion of freedom for years and they read like a list of reasons its ok to cheat on taxes, or put recyclable materials in the compost bin. We all know its illegal in the US, we know TPB knows it, and instead of changing copyright laws, it is continually justified. It feels disingenuous.

I'm tired of the same conversation for the last 20 years.

20 years seems like a huge exaggeration unless you're talking about something more than just TPB.

On the Internet, the conversation about mainstream piracy goes all the way back to Napster (1999).

> We all know its illegal in the US

We are talking about Sweden.

Illegal is even a stretch here: thepiratebay.org did not, and does not, host copyrighted content. It hosted torrent files, and now hosts magnet links.

(rant, sorry in advance)

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.)

Piracy is not stealing. If I make an exact copy of your car and drive off in the copy, did I just steal your car?

Yes, the distinction is so obvious and yet it needs to be raised repeatedly.

Your analogy is terrible, but let's go with it:

If I spend a million dollars inventing a nice car that can be freely replicated I don't have to sell it for a million dollars to break even. I could sell a copy of it to 1100 people for $1000 each and everyone wins: Nice cars are inexpensive for everyone and I make a living, so I can keep inventing nice things.

But if there are 200 pirates among the 1100 who take a copy of the car but don't pay the $1000 things are different.

Now I'm selling 900 cars and losing money so I have to do something. Such as:

* charge $1200 per car. Pirates win but car buyers lose, to the tune of $200 per car. Don't call it stealing if you don't want to, but your pirates are getting something and someone else has less money as a result. And of course you can't simply raise the price without losing some customers, so this can only go so far.

* invest less to make up the difference (making a crappier car). Pirates win and car buyers lose. The pirates don't win as much, though, since they have to drive the crappy cars too.

* enact stringent anti-copying mechanisms to try to precent unauthorized copying by pirates. This costs money, raising the price of the cars and is inevitably user hostile. So, again pirates win and customers lose. But again, the pirates don't win as much because they have to deal with the user-hostile anti-copying features as well.

Note this is a vicious circle. As piracy makes the product more expensive and crappier, more people will be motivated to pirate rather than pay, causing the product to get even crappier or more expensive. And anything that makes buyers lose also makes my car company lose, with fewer sales at lower prices to less satisfied customers.

* Ultimately, I might find I can't make money doing this at all: that there isn't a price high enough to make up for the piracy and low enough that anyone will pay for my crappy cars and I just stop making things altogether. Here pirates lose, buyers lose, and, of course, I lose.

Don't call it stealing if you don't want, but you are getting something without paying for it and it is costing other people more money as a result. Not only is your piracy making stuff more expensive for everyone else, it's also making it crappier for everyone and ultimately lead to less nice stuff being available at all.

> If I spend a million dollars inventing a nice car that can be freely replicated I don't have to sell it for a million dollars to break even.

So do filmmakers make movies or an implementation of the bittorrent protocol?

That analogy is terrible.

And why shouldn't the US have pressured Sweden to take down the Pirate Bay? The people running that site are openly and proudly flouting copyright laws and allowing American-owned (among other) content to be downloaded without payment to the owners.

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.

Not only that, but the people running TPB has earned millions from advertising revenue, literally earning money off other peoples' work.

Yes it might be very much fine from the US perspective to do this. Things change however once you look from the other side. It can easily be in the economic interest of other countries to not pay the US copyright holders, especially 100 years after something was created.

So this is not so much about claiming the US is doing something against the interest of US citizens. This is about other country politicans/judges/police being corrupt, taking benefits from USA and acting against the best interests of the people they promised to defend.

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