Leaked: Police Plan to Raid The Pirate Bay
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
It doesn't matter whether copyright infringement is ethically good or bad. It doesn't matter whether these sites are legally liable for copyright infringement that goes on using them.
You look like complete morons trying to take down site after site. You are pissing people off and what do you have to show for it except a few hollow victories?
If copyright infringement through file sharing has decreased, it's due to itunes, amazon, google, and all the smaller companies offering digital versions of content. Guess who is missing from that list? MPAA and RIAA members.
Trying to fight copyright infringement through punitive fines or throwing people in prison is sick. It's like the drug war, only worse. At least you can point to a few crazy meth heads as a danger to the public. "Pirates" hurt... the meatspace content distributors that are rapidly becoming obsolete?
I have a question. Is copyright infringement (in the UK at least) a criminal offence or a matter for the civil courts?
Sure they do.
In some countries (e.g. UK) the prosecution service (e.g. Crown Prosecution Service) only bring a crime to court if it's "in the public interest" (cf. http://www.cps.gov.uk/publications/code_for_crown_prosecutor... ). Ireland has similar laws ( http://www.dppireland.ie/brief-guide-to-the-criminal-justice... )
Although this applied to the actuall criminal prosecution, not the police enforcement.
Which is several layers above the poor bobby actually carrying out the raid. It's more of an illustration to dagw's post than a counterargument.
People who are skilled at making arrests and beating down doors are not necessarily also skilled in analyzing data and crime statistics in order to decide which cases to persue.
I have always thought about The Pirate Bay like a gun shop in the US. Gun shops sell guns and ammo...they help facilitate killing human beings...but we never hold the gun shop responsibile (so long as they comply with licensing laws etc). Why dont we look at The Pirate Bay in the same way? They supply a tool that can be used for wrong doing. It can also be used legitimately (as in the case of guns).
How is this arguement so different?
Law enforcement doesn't have enough free hands to go after every crime, therefore which crimes are pursued is always a choice. Resources are finite, therefore the decision to commit law enforcement agents to copyright infringement is also, at the same time, a decision to NOT commit law enforcement agents to pursuing trading violations on Wall Street, or income tax evasion among the rich.
In other words, with resources being finite, every decision about what to pursue is at least partially a political calculation. Ideally, that calculation may be based on social utility (in Jeremy Bentham's formulation "the greatest good for the greatest number") or, that calculation may be based on some corrupt influence of various political factions.
People like myself, who question the usefulness of these raids, are trying to raise the question "Is this the best use of our taxpayer dollars?" Given that trading on Wall Street recently contributed to the onset of the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, I would say the case for stronger enforcement of trading regulations would prove more useful than further attempts to surpress copyright infringement.
Misses the point. It's somebody's choice, but it's not always the law enforcement agency's choice. If the FBI director's boss tells him to raid TPB, his choices are "do the raid" or "get fired."
I would guess it's more satisfying to go after real criminals, but they have to follow their orders.
Fucking hell, talk about America world police :(
The option that gets the most traction is DC statehood, but understandably, the overwhelming force behind DC statehood is Democrats who want to automatically get another 2 Senators out of the deal. And the whole point of the District of Columbia was to keep the federal government neutral by not putting it in any state.
A more sensible alternative, which has less traction, is to reducing the District to merely encompass the core government buildings and ceding the rest to the state of Maryland, just as the parts of DC south of the Potomac were ceded to Virginia to form Arlington County. If this were done, Maryland would have to agree to it and the 23rd Amendment, which gives DC three electors in the Electoral College, would probably need to be repealed, or else the land surrounding the Capitol, White House, and Supreme Court buildings would have three electors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_retrocessi...
It's an important issue for sure, but it's a tough nut to crack and the notion of statehood means any resolution to the problem will have a direct partisan effect.
Retrocession is a neat idea aside from the fact that none of the people it would affect actually want it.
Statehood is the only option that makes sense. It is unfortunate that DC happens to have demographics that favor one party over the other only because it makes it hard to get things done. But it doesn't change the basic unfairness of the situation. It's not a partisan issue any more than women's suffrage is a partisan issue.
There was a decent plan a few years ago to give a voting member of the House and also granting an additional member to the next state in line based on census data (conveniently a heavily Republican district in Utah, I believe). Unfortunately it fell apart when Republicans added poison pill amendements to alter gun ownership and abortion laws in the District. It was also probably unconstitutional.
The White House, Capitol, and Supreme Court should not be placed in any state. Either statehood or retrocession would be best suited by carving those buildings, and the area immediately surrounding them, out of the ceded area and retaining them in a federal district.
> The founders certainly did not intend for 700,000 Americans to live without representation.
The founders created the District of Columbia in the first place; did they not intend anyone to live there?
> There was a decent plan a few years ago to give a voting member of the House and also granting an additional member to the next state in line based on census data (conveniently a heavily Republican district in Utah, I believe).
Statehood would still create 2 new Democratic senators out of 102, so giving the Republicans 1 extra Representative out of over 400 is hardly a "decent plan". You'd have to make up the 2 senators somehow. For instance, if you split the state of Washington in half at the Cascades, Eastern Washington would make a state much, much larger than DC in both area and population with 2 Republican senators.
If representation were the issue then retrocession would be an acceptable solution. The fact that people don't accept retrocession just shows that people really want more Democrats in the Senate.
Yes, that's what I was saying. You don't need to change anything; they are already carved out. The White House, Capitol, Supreme Court, along with most of the museums, monuments and parks are already in federal jurisdiction.
> The founders created the District of Columbia in the first place; did they not intend anyone to live there?
Eh, it's complicated. Congress was in a reactionary mood, having recently been chased out of Pennsylvania by an angry armed militia.
> Statehood would still create 2 new Democratic senators out of 102, so giving the Republicans 1 extra Representative out of over 400 is hardly a "decent plan".
Well, it wasn't a plan for statehood. It did not award the district any Senators. It was just for a single voting member of the House.
> You'd have to make up the 2 senators somehow.
This is the part that drives me nuts. No. You really don't. For the same reason that you don't need to offset the end of Jim Crow laws by giving white people extra votes.
First, not everyone in DC is a Democrat. But even if they were, giving them a voice in Congress is not a gift to the DNC -- these are seats that should have been there all along.
> The fact that people don't accept retrocession just shows that people really want more Democrats in the Senate.
That's totally false. We're talking about local politics here and there are local political reasons why DC would not want to be in MD or VA and why VA and MD would not want DC. Here's a fun fact: the DC Republican Party supports statehood. And of course the DC Green/Statehood Party does. (Also consider that adding another chunk of DC residents to VA would likely turn that state from purple to blue.) This is not a partisan issue; it's about basic fairness.
That's only true if you compare statehood to the status quo, not if you compare statehood to retrocession. DC would be one of the smallest states in the union; it would go from zero representation to massively disproportionate representation on a similar scale to Wyoming or Alaska.
But, while I'm probably also right from the perspective of justice, I was just talking about the practical politics of getting it done.
> But even if they were, giving them a voice in Congress is not a gift to the DNC -- these are seats that should have been there all along.
"All along"? The land DC is now built on was originally part of Maryland. So "all along", DC residents should have been Maryland residents. If you want to carve out an entirely new blue state where there's never been one before, it's only fair to carve out an entirely new red state where there's never been one before. Eastern Washington has greater area and population than DC and it's as reliably Republican as DC is Democratic; it's a fair swap.
And usually not in local ones, either, according to the US Customs & Immigration Service: "There are very few jurisdictions where a non-U.S. citizen may vote in a local election."
-- Wife of a green card holder
Whether that abuse comes in the form of violating copyright or protecting copyright is irrelevant. Copyright isn't the ethical issue here. The abuse is.
The GPL is basically an inversion of standard copyright: where copyright is normally used to restrict access, the GPL ensures access. So it's pretty easy to see how not complying with the GPL is similar to aggressively pursuing piracy or using horrible DRM.
> When you use open source in a proprietary app,
> the original is still in tact
GPL violations and media piracy only share copyright as a common thread, but copyright isn't the entire picture.
Budget increments. This is basically the beginning and the end of the story.
And I, as a Swede, is both angry and embarrassed that we're taking it. In the next election, the Pirate Party gets my vote, but sadly the larger public remains oblivious.
- Government for the people. This is often forgotten, but it's the most important point - enforcing strict copyright does not help the citizen. Period.
- Censorship - raiding one site means raiding any site, eventually
- Copyright should be relaxed for non-commercial purposes - not because RIAA it's obsolete, but because in the world of the Internet, this is the way that will insure maximum creativity.
- Hitting the incumbents and setting an example that it's possible
The German one is pretty good also, btw.
(On initial glance, the google translate version is an acceptable translation to get an idea of what is being said).
As you will see, their platform is not a single issue and the likely reason why the Piraten Partei was successful in the last Berlin local election. They were so successful they won every seat they could possibly have held. If they were any more successful, the additional seat(s) would have had to been left empty, since the Partei only had so many candidates running.
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:938802790a385c49307f34cca4c30f80b03df59c&dn=The+whole+Pirate+Bay+magnet+archive&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A80&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.publicbt.com%3A80&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.ccc.de%3A80Then, build a package that lets you seek out one of the repos, pull it, and integrate it with your Torrent client.
Alternatively, you could hide the hashes in TXT records of domains no one knows about. Cached, resilient magnet hash records.
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:
Also, there's a certain irony in the Tribler download not being available on BitTorrent - to the extend they had to take the site offline a few weeks ago due to excessive download traffic.
I haven't used it much since I want a native client for my platform, but from what I've seen it's almost like an "App Store" with search-functionality and a one-click procedure to download. What makes you think it's harder to use than normal bittorrent-clients and sites?
What issues are not solved and what new issues are created?
"Our technology increases your tracability. Every Tribler software installation has a unique identifier based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography."
"We are constantly monitoring the Tribler P2P network using spider software. This will allow us to detect inefficiencies in our P2P software. However, it will also show us the occurence of illegal activities."
Add to that the statement that the entire Tribler network is 'constantly monitored' (cf. some organizations doubtlessly monitoring some torrent trackers, but it being improbable that every single torrent tracker is monitored), and one once again has a gross escalation of privacy erosion that surpasses the extent of mere IP-based tracking.
What is interesting about PirateBay are the comments, the description and (why not) their name and status.
Interesting. So if these servers are seized and turned off you don't know where they were talking to. Though if the police are careful they ought to be able to tap the outgoing connections and get the IPs for the others servers they were communicating with and go from there.
I'm surprised to see that a backup might be considered an heroic move. If you don't have any backup you may as well consider your data entirely lost !
I cant think of a single movie, album or piece of software that cant be pirated as easily as it can be bought - yet people still buy them.
If you like the software, you pay for it or donate to the developers to support further development. If it turns out it wasn't what you were looking for, you delete it off your hard drive.
Nice strawman though, if a bit lazy. You could have gone with piracy supports terrorism or something along those lines as well.
That is a metaphor that only obscures the real issue, because the money was never in your pocket to begin with.
If you're selling software for a living and you don't have a reasonable strategy for coexisting with the inevitable pirates, then you're doing it wrong. If piracy will make or break your business model, you are doomed.
I'm not taking any position on whether that's right or wrong. It's simply a fact.