Pirate Bay: a guilty verdict is an attack on the Internet | Hacker News Reader

Pirate Bay: a guilty verdict is an attack on the Internet

arstechnica.com

20 pointsbep29 comments

I don't really know what to think about this trial, but I don't like it when stories insult my intelligence by implying that there is some doubt as to whether The Pirate Bay is mostly used for copyright violation. There would be no Pirate Bay without "pirated" movies and TV shows.

I'm not sure how you can assert that there is _zero_ doubt as to the pirate bay being used mostly to violate copyright. It would be a breach of journalistic integrity to state that "everyone knows that the pirate bay is only for getting copyrighted content illegally," or any statement similar to that.

As such, the story states: "As for The Pirate Bay, the argument might be made that nearly all of its popular downloads are in fact illegal." The story continues by commenting that there is "somewhat shockingly...[no] sort of survey of site content." I fail to see how this is an insult to your intelligence, rather than simply unbiased reporting.

The article spends two grafs on the "question" (the prosecution asserts [em. original] that...) of whether The Pirate Bay mostly traffics in unlawful content, at one point pulling out a statistic that claims the opposite is true and pointedly noting that the statistic hadn't been refuted.

If you want to make the argument that it's a shoddy prosecution, fine. That wasn't my read of the story. My read was, "maybe The Pirate Bay is used legitimately as often as it is abused for copyright violation". If I'm expected to believe that's even "maybe" true, I'm a bit offended.

In fact, the only person to present such evidence was defendant Peter Sunde, who claimed that a survey of his own showed that 80 percent of the 1,000 .torrent files he examined appeared to point toward material that was legal to distribute. </quote>

Do you know a source that provides different data?

If a pawn shop in my neighborhood carried 80% legally sold items, and 20% stolen items, there'd be zero doubt that the owner was intentionally acting as a fence, and was helping create the demand that was causing local burglaries.

20% stolen content is HUGE.

The Pirate Bay is not literally holding 'stolen items'. They are merely providing a roadway to them. The analogy would be a person who gives directions to pawn shops. Giving directions isn't illegal, right? However, I don't know about the rules for crime by association in Sweden.

> 20% stolen content is HUGE.

What are you comparing it to?

I do not know the Swedish law either, but let's take it to an extreme:

If someone were to run a site called Assassin Bay, where clients could post .target files specifying jobs and hit men could accept those jobs, I'm sure that the site would be taken down within hours and the site owner would go to prison. Even in Sweden.

EDIT: To allow for the possibility that the Assassin Bay also has legal traffic, replace .target with .ad files. Then assume generously that advertisements for legal jobs make for 80% of the traffic and 20% are hits. The argument I made would still hold.

I think a much better analogy would be if someone were to run a site called "Craig's List," and had a section devoted to 'personals.' Would the webmaster be _legally_ responsible for those using that service for prostitution?

(again, not the site's moral responsibility to itself [craigslist cracks down on this sort of thing], but to the point of being able to arrest and imprison craigslist webmasters.)

If a site has been running for several years and a substantial portion of the ads are illegal and during all that time the site admins have repeatedly refused to remove illegal ads, then yes, the site admins have some responsibility.

I see your point.

However, I reworded the comparison a bit and some things don't look right even though they are.

  Pirate Bay       : Assasin Bay
  Legal .torrent   : .ad
  Illegal .torrent : .target
  Illegal Download : Loss of Life
  
  Property         : Life

The last analogy seems a bit inhumane. Then again,

> let's take it to an extreme

Thanks for seeing the point, which was that beyond a certain stage a website should not be able to maintain an "impartial" stance.

Your list will not look shocking any more if you add a line for the respective sentences:

Pirate bay : Assassin Bay

slap on the wrist : 15 years (1)

(1) if the admins provably and repeatedly have refused to remove .target files.

No, that's wrong. It <i>feels</i> the same if I click on a .torrent or if I download from iTunes. Either way I started a download and have a new album within the half hour.

The analogy would be if the pawn shop had transporters that weren't accurate enough to build a new copy from one location in a warehouse somewhere, so it had to make many copies from warehouses around the US, combining them all into a single coherent and accurate copy.

err, something like that. I'm not saying the Pirate Bay should be illegal, just that the pirate bay <i>is</i> called The Pirate Bay. I expect it is more than 20%, by data or .torrents. That is to say, I don't like incorrect analogies.

http://thepiratebay.org/top/all

Assuming all of that material is in fact illegal to distribute in that jurisdiction (I have no idea about their copyright laws) that still says nothing about what percentage of the overall torrents are illegal material, just that the illegal torrents are far more popular.

This doesn't matter though. If the majority/all of the most popular torrents on that site are illegal then the most popular use of the site is for illegal torrents. If most of their users go there to download illegal torrents, then that is the actual function of the site -- to share illegal downloads. It doesn't matter if that was originally intended to be so or not.

And if most of the bandwidth consumed "on the Internet" is used to transfer these illegal files, what is the actual function of ISPs/the Internet?

Ah, but you're not countering my argument. I'm not counting bandwidth -- I'm counting people. If most people on the Internet spent their time downloading files illegally then sure, that would be the main usage of the Internet.

On the recent page at this moment (http://thepiratebay.org/recent) , 90% of the torrents are of copyrighted content not being distributed by the rights holders. Two of the legal ones, I believe, are the porn picture sets. They are used to promote pay porn content and I will give the uploader the benefit of the doubt here. The other one is someone's collection of recipe for Indian food. I'm similarly assuming that his collection of recipes is not copyrighted, but 15.9MB of recipes is a lot of personal recipes.

Look: I am not in favor of the current system of IP. I think it is ridiculous to artificially add some constraint of scarcity when the marginal cost of duplication has fallen to zero. But we're reasonable here, we're not in court. We don't need to defend TPB using legalistic arguments. We can just be happy that a group of high powered lawyers turned out to be completely incompetent.

What is the percentage of torrents that point to materials illegal to distribute? (it is not a rhetorical question, a justified guess would suffice)

Otherwise, my answer is:

  - http://google.com 
  - http://news.ycombinator.com (enable showdead in the profile)

...as to whether The Pirate Bay is mostly used for copyright violation.

That's irrelevant. The question is whether TPB is breaking any laws. One can provide a technology or service which users use as a means for illegal activity without being held responsible. In the US, as far as I know, one has to "distribute a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright" [1] in order to be held liable.

As I understand it, Swedish laws are a lot more lenient.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MGM_Studios,_Inc._v._Grokster,_....

Ok, in fact, what you're saying is irrelevant. I'm explicitly not talking about whether the prosecution is justified. I'm questioning whether this journalist is justified in portraying the makeup of Pirate Bay torrents as controversial. The Pirate Bay exists almost entirely to further copyright violation.

Maybe that shouldn't be illegal, or even unlawful. I don't care. But don't tell me The Pirate Bay is mostly there to move Ubuntu.

There would be no Pirate Bay without "pirated" movies and TV shows.

You are probably right, but the prosecution didn't have any admissible evidence to this effect.

Similarly, gun manufacturers are not liable for murders committed with their guns; even though they train people how to use them to kill others. Providing the public with tools that can be used to commit crimes is not a crime. That is what this trial is about.

Finally, it has not been proven in court that redistributing TV shows on BitTorrent is illegal, and it certainly hasn't been shown that telling people where to get said shows is illegal.

If we can just start from a place that is honest about what The Pirate Bay is doing, I don't care what conclusion we reach.

The problem is that intent is considered in court cases. So while the intent seems obvious, the founders of The Pirate Bay are not stupid enough to say anything that has a good chance of showing in court that one of their major goals was to enable users to pirate copyrighted material.

Yes, but I understood that tptacek's point was that we shouldn't try to keep up appearances here. (Which is not what you are doing, but other people are.)

I really don't think that the story was implying that TPB is mostly used for legal downloading. It was just saying that the prosecution has not shown a lot of evidence that TPB is mostly used for piracy.

I believe that the founders of TPB have a philosophical problem with copyright, and created TPB to actively support piracy. But that belief is not legal proof that the TPB's main purpose is to support privacy. And that's all the prosecution presented, a belief. They didn't do any kind of site survey of the legality of the torrents.

Peter Sunde is the only one to provide any kind of stats. Now I would be interested in knowing how he got his stats (he definitely didn't use the Top 100 in the survey selection), but the prosecution didn't rebut it with any kind of statistics of their own.

It's kind of like if a DA decided to prosecute Mick Jagger for drug use, but didn't look for any drugs or do any drug tests. Mick Jagger has been convicted for drug use and has admitted to using drugs, and I would believe that he still does. But that belief should not be the basis for a conviction sentence.

And I am convinced that TPB can be used legally, for example downloading linux distros. So one of the major questions is whether TPB has the legal responsibility to police itself and respond to requests to remove user submitted files. And any verdict would have big implications for website owners.

So to sum it up, I believe that most people use the TPB to break the law. But the site was created with a good understanding of local copyright law. And so the most anyone could say is that it is in a legal grey zone.

Verb tense fail.

A guilty verdict WOULD BE an attack on the Internet...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8fbrUjjivw :)

Or, as the Germans say, "wäre".

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