Pirate Bay Founder Devises DDo$ Attack | Hacker News Reader

Pirate Bay Founder Devises DDo$ Attack

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89 pointsmcantelon34 comments

Some say this is infantile like the previous poster said, some think it's awesome. I'm not sure it's either, I can't decide if this is civil disobedience or a weird form of vandalism. I'm by no means on the fence on the issue of piracy and I think the ruling in the case was absurd but I can't bring myself to take part in this action.

Maybe if this action was targeted at the plaintiffs rather than the law firm I'd think differently but it's destructive to punish those who choose to represent those we don't agree with.

I just can't shake the feeling it's wrong, I don't like it.

I think what makes it wrong is that most of us think that they didn't do anything against the law, and even though the law had to be bent for that conviction to go through, what they're advocating now is basically lawlessness. As funny and clever as I think it is, I think it's crossing the line.

The lawfirm is hardly at fault. What exactly will be achieved by harassing them?

The law firm could have chosen not to take this stupid case. Before thinking that I'm exaggerating or infantile or whatever, I would ask you to think about Richard Stallman and his "obsession" for free software and freedom in general.

The law firm could have chosen not to take this stupid case.

Everyone deserves good lawyers. Even people you disagree with.

What if it was the other way around and the MPAA was hassling law firms who defend file sharers?

What's "stupid" about the case? I've been following the case when topics came up on HN, but I still can't understand why everyone is siding with TPB, an organization that advocates piracy. Yeah, they weren't hosting the material themselves, but they encouraged their services to be used to illegally distribute content that did not belong to them, did they not?

I side with TPB because I consider them a great example of civil disobedience.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonny_Bono_Copyright_Term_Exten...

"The Act extended these terms to life of the author plus 70 years and for works of corporate authorship to 120 years after creation or 95 years after publication, whichever endpoint is earlier."

The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension is a U.S. law. Sweden was actually life+70 before the Sonny Bono act.

I'm not a big fan of life+70 myself, but I don't see what the Pirate Bay case has to do with copyright terms. The infringements claimed are on works like Walk the Line and Harry Potter, which are far from the end of their copyright terms, Bono act or not.

Rosa Parks was a great example of civil disobedience. To me this just looks like people who don't want to have to pay to watch Prison Break.

No, it's civil disobedience. The Pirate Bay wasn't started to facilitate watching Prison Break to couch potatoes, or to make money, or even to fix such "deficiencies" of copyright as life+70. It was founded by an activist group explicitly against the whole institution of copyright. That's why they go to court where couch potatoes would have surrendered already.

Well whatever you think about if TPB is illegal or not the ruling was also against the the fourth person a 45 year old business man Carl Lundström. He had no involvement with the tracker after consulting a lawyer who warned that it might not be legal before getting into buissness with them.

Also the €2.7 million in fines is unheardof as we don't do punative damages in Sweden (now you might think that's absurd but that's an issue on it's own). The verdict is also about accessory to spreading a handful of copyrighted material and not about the site in general.

Then there's the whole issue with the judge possibly being biased, the police investigating the case getting a job at the movie industry, an entity in the European Union announcing its support for a verdict against TPB, the plaintiffs lawyers knowing the verdict long before anyone else including the accused did, the original raid on TPB took all the servers the webhost had (which was a lot) not just TPB servers and I don't think they ever got to the bottom of if our old minister of justice Thomas Bodström had told the police to perform the raid to begin with (it's highly illegal for a minister to directly order or otherwise use his influence).

I happened to think what TPB is doing isn't illegal however I'm not a lawyer and I do place my trust in the Swedish legal system, so if the case is found to be illegal in the last instance it can appeal to then obviously it is. It would be nice however if this whole thing didn't ooze of corruption so much it's disgusting.

This is infantile. I hope it gets him new charges if he goes through with it.

No, it's brilliant! I gladly payed $0.057.

Eh, it's easily the oldest trick in the book when comes to giving someone money you don't want to give them. I might call it trite, juvenile or predictable, but 'brilliant' is not a word that enters into it.

Getting other people to pay is the brilliant part.

I agree with dfranke here. This whole issue with the RIAA is about powerful entities abusing their resources toward unethical ends. If the letter of the law is on the side of the Pirate Bay (which it is, by all accounts), then they have no reason to do something like this; and if it isn't, then they have no right.

Why should you be nice to a corporation that wants to take away everything you own, and prevent you from ever owning anything again in the future?

(As an aside, I wonder why more terminally-ill people don't go on last-minute killing sprees.)

Evolution.

I've often wondered the same, about suicide perpetrators. Opportunity squandered!

> Why should you be nice to a corporation that wants to take away everything you own, and prevent you from ever owning anything again in the future?

Yeah, I wonder that too. Why exactly are we nice to The Pirate Bay?

Agreed. Sometimes in life, things don't go the way we want them to.

The responsible way of addressing this issue would be to dedicate more time to convincing the public that your views are in fact the legitimate ones, that copyright has some serious flaws that need to be addressed, and that the law was bent out of intention to aide a corporation's interests.

Instead, the Pirate Bay pretty much proves the opposite point: They're a bunch of petty crooks that are only interested in stealing and harming others.

A shame, because they do have valid points and we do need to reform our copyright laws globally.

Yup. These underhanded tactics makes them seem less like the 'victims' of the music companies.

This can diminish their cause quite a bit in the eyes of the public, not just for themselves but for anyone else that might face a similar lawsuit in future.

My karma appears to be undergoing a vigorous random walk.

It's interesting to watch it go up and down when you say something controversial. I agree with you. It's childish and reflects poorly on the BitTorrent community which is already treading water.

Anyone who has produced anything of value wants to protect that thing of value. If the value of products can't be protected, then people will stop taking the big risks they need to take to produce the products.

People who steal movies and music and other digital content need to give up the delusion. BitTorrent is a great system, unfortunately, leeches on society have destroyed its reputation and value to the world by using it to steal people's hard work.

Just stop doing it. Do you really need 1,000 movies? Do you really need 10,000 songs? Just stop stealing stuff. There's plenty of great free content on the web.

Just stop doing it. Do you really need 1,000 movies? Do you really need 10,000 songs? Just stop stealing stuff. There's plenty of great free content on the web.

I hear this all the time. I couldn't agree more. But if I don't need 1000 movies and 10,000 songs, and I do enjoy the great free stuff on the web, isn't the result exactly the same for the producers of said "things of value"?

Would it not be better for them if I did believe that I needed their movies, "stole" 990 of them and bought 10, than if I decided (as I do more each year) that I just don't need that stuff in my life?

It is. But if they're competing with the free stuff, the solution is to make stuff that's worth more than the free stuff. So much more that people are willing to pay the price. They may go out of business if they fail, but if they succeeed, we're all better of because of it.

If, on the other hand, they're competing with their own pirated stuff, making it better will only make the problem worse. The way to solve that is to make piracy harder, more dangerous, or useless. If they succeed we may be better off (if they change their business model and the new model gives us better quality), but it seems unlikely. It's more likely that everybody will be worse off whether or not they fail or succeed.

I don't see how that can even work. The site is in Swedish and they only provide a 'Plusgiro' number, which I think is insufficient for international money transfer.

Plus the bank can close or suspend the account whenever they want.

oh, and did anyone actually check that it's not a scam?

When we register a plusgiro-account to make a payment to it you see the name of the account holder. Since this has been making the rounds around the Swedish blogosphere for one or two days now I'm sure someone would have noticed especially considering how paranoid my fellow pirates are.

Even if it was a scam the scammer would essentially make himself loose money by the nature of the action.

The core banking system is fairly fragel, under some system a transfer of money to an account let's the other party keep transfering money to that same account.

There's a fee attached to receiving money over a postgiro-account as the article explained, the hack is that the fee is larger than the money they receive and not that they could keep it. Your ability to (maybe) get the money back is just an extra step you could take if you wanted to cause more harm.

In Sweden there are laws that if you transfer money to someone by accident they are required to return it and this is a Swedish bank account and a Swedish law firm. I have no idea if those laws would actually apply in this case though, seeing how I'm not a lawyer or anything.

On a related note it's nice to know those laws exist when you accidently pay the rent to your webbhost.

Except that the bank can also refuse to consider these transfers to be made "in error", given the vast publicity this has been given on the web. Indeed, given the fraudulent intent behind these transactions, the bank can simply keep the money (without forcing the intended recipient to swallow the costs of the transfer) to pay for its own costs in handling the transfer.

On top of that, above a certain dollar limit (don't know what it is in this case), this gives the Swedish court jurisdiction for criminal charges for the mastermind, for bank fraud.

That's... clever... but I can't see it working very well. They'll probably just lock out payments at values smaller than the transaction fee.

How long until Peter Sunde returns T when invoked on this law firm? (</lisp joke>)

for those who didn't get it, Sunde's handle is "brokep".

http://www.ccil.org/jargon/jargon_5.html#SEC8

[edit: ignore the examples of possible uses]

Some naive comments. Might makes right, especially when it comes to the law. If PB has found a way to kick the motherfrackers in the shins, more power to them.

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