O2, Be Broadband axe Pirate Bay access
Telefonica, which owns the O2 brand and fixed-line provider Be Broadband, is implementing a High Court order to block conventional web access to file-sharing search engine The Pirate Bay. O2 confirmed to The Register that it will join BSkyB, Virgin Media and Everything Everywhere by cutting off www.thepiratebay.se from its …
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Re: Not a torrent user...
Copyright infringement is not theft.
Copyright infringement is not theft.
Copyright infringement is not theft.
Copyright infringement is not theft.
Copyright infringement is not theft.
Copyright infringement is not theft.
Copyright infringement is not theft.
Copyright infringement is not theft.
Copyright infringement is not theft.
Copyright infringement is not theft.
Copyright infringement is not theft.
Copyright infringement is not theft.
What? The movie industry seem to have brainwashed people into believing falsehoods by repeating things over and over again, thought I'd give it a try, but with the truth. Who knows, might catch on.
@tom 38
From your post it sounds you're trying to brainwash yourself.
The economic damage from free downloads is clear. It is less than copyright lobbyists like to claim but it is substantial. Nobody invests in music because of the free downloading.
Re: @tom 38
Who said anything about downloading music? Copyright infringement is not theft. This is not a personal opinion or argument, it is a legal definition.
The various trade bodies would like copyright infringement to be treated as theft - a criminal offence - rather than copyright infringement, which is a civil offence. To try and achieve this, they have repeatedly lied to consumers, to try and insert this 'fact' into the communal conscience. This behaviour is abhorrent.
FYI - although not that it is relevant - I pay for all my media, one way or another, and do not upload or share media with anyone.
Lets look at the damage to the music industry, in terms of global revenue over the last 6 years.
2006 ($60.7 billion),
2007 ($61.5 billion),
2008 ($62.6 billion),
2009 ($65.0 billion),
2010 ($66.4 billion),
2011 ($67.6 billion)
Really looks like they are struggling there. So why are they moaning so much? Lets look at a breakdown. This is global revenue from physical sales:
$33.1 billion (2006),
$30.6 billion (2007),
$27.5 billion (2008),
$24.6 billion (2009),
$22.2 billion (2010),
$19.9 billion (2011)
Aha. Now it makes more sense. Even as revenue has increased, their old stalwart of physical sales - where they bilk the highest margins from the consumer - has been decimated.
This is the same argument being peddled by the porn barons. The internet has changed how we consume media. We as consumers are no longer prepared to fork out obscene amounts of money for shiny discs, and they need to adapt rather than slavishly holding on to their old ways and trying to legislate/sue people so that nothing changes.
Re: @tom 38
"Nobody invests in music because of the free downloading."
Tell that to Simon Cowell. He is invested in The X-Factor and The X-facor USA. He also runs Syco a music publishing company. Last time I looked he was being driven around in a Limo.
Re: Not a torrent user...
Of course, you are right. But calling this copyright infringement is disingenuous. Downloading TV shows, film and music that you have not licensed, and in the vast majority of cases have no intention of ever paying for, is intellectual property theft, not copyright infringement. Your version of the "truth" is one that is perpetuated by freetards like yourself. As ever, the fact lies somewhere between the "truth" as professed by the entertainment industry and your over entitled freetard version of the "truth".
The Censorship Virus....
seems to be spreading rapidly
so glad i'm not with any of the "Main Big isp's" then, and it all works fine, been seeding for a week :)
on a side note its always the bpi that gets mentioned, never the fact that tpb is not only for music but a damn good source for alot of other rare hard to find stuff e.g. old ebooks and tv ep's that would otherwise be unobtainable
im in no way defending music backups, i am simply stating everyone should not be forcefully blocked from a website simply because they "Might be downloading music"
and remember folks, "home taping is killing music".......
Take their business elsewhere?
To Where?! Every ISP will soon block TPB....Personally I'm not all that bothered, there are other torrent search sites. I agree that it's a potentially slippery slope as this could pave the way for blanket bans of other websites, but TPB doesn't really have a use other than piracy, and it IS the right of an IP owner to protect their work and their cashflow. That's just business.
Re: Take their business elsewhere?
No, only the ISPs named in the suit have to block it. Is the BPI going to spend the money to roll out the verdict to every small boutique ISP out there?
Re: Take their business elsewhere?
I doubt all ISPs will be blocking. We no longer provide broadband to our customers, but used to. If we were still doing so I very much doubt anyone would have noticed whether we did or did not block it - I haven't seen any court order saying we have to block it.
Can anyone who's on one of these ISPs try it and tell us how it's implemented?
For example, the classic minimum-compliance-with-bone-headed-court-order level of compliance is to spoof the DNS to return a specific IP address for the blocked domain. This, of course, is trivially workaroundable by just using a different DNS server (such as Google's 8.8.8.8).
Blocking IP addresses is rather more work --- as you have to keep up-to-date with TPB's IP address changes, plus of course the risk of collatoral damage by other uses on a shared address --- and if I were an ISP being legally required to do something I didn't want to, I'd probably consider doing this to be too much effort if the easy approach satisfied the requirements.
tell you tomorrow
I am on Be - they will be implementing the block overnight tonight.
Blocking the IP would also block any other sites hosted on the same server and spoofing the DNS is trivial to circumvent & against the RFC.
Apparently VM used Cleanfeed to filter the url, not sure how this works maybe DPI to filter the URL?
Re: tell you tomorrow
> "sites hosted on the same server"
Do you think that TPB use £5.99 pcm shared hosting?
Easy
Cleanfeed. I'm pretty sure the court order even references it (or did in the Newzbin one anyway). Speaking of which, anyone figure out quite why BT need more time to organise it? didn't they comply with the Newzbin block pretty sharp-ish? It's a line in the Cleanfeed blacklist FFS.
It works at the IP level, by routing to a proxy which then does a bit of DPI to inspect which site its heading for.
Re: tell you tomorrow
they could do if they wanted, they don't host any content. The entire contents of the TPB would fit at least 4 times over on my shared hosting.
The point is the possibility exists for companies to get sued for blocking access to non-censored site.
workaround
Well I found out an alternative ip for the main site and it worked for a day,but then it timed out after.
Changed dns settings to opendns and still doesn't work (on BSkyB)
However no problems using a proxy or using a Tor browser,starting the download,then closing tor to speed up the connection.
Just wondering why using opendns isn't making any difference.
Re: workaround
"Just wondering why using opendns isn't making any difference."
OpenDNS = just DNS with bells on, all it does is return an IP for a site.
If your ISP ONLY "blocks" at the DNS level (by handing you the IP for a webserver with "Stop being naughty" on the homepage) then "any other DNS provider" should work.
However, if your ISP block at the IP level, then you won't get out. Or, if they engage DPI, and look for a known hostname (which may change IP address) then that'll be blocked too.
It's trivial for your ISP to force route your web and/or DNS traffic via a proxy for inspection. Hell, I run DNS interception at home to ensure all machines (regardless of local config) use OpenDNS via my router, and DHCP option 252 to shunt all non-HTTPS web traffic via my home proxy (with adblock).
Sort their own content delivery out
I decided I wanted to play Mass Effect. I looked it up online to see if it could be streamed to me, and found that for some reason it was cheaper if I bought a physical copy. So I bought it, downloaded it off of TPB and played it happily. It arrived in the post a few days later, so I put it on a shelf...
I then decided I wanted to play Mass Effect 2. I looked it up online to see if it could be streamed to me, and found that for some reason it was cheaper if I bought a physical copy. So I bought it, downloaded it off of TPB and played it happily. It arrived in the post a few days later, so I put it on a shelf.
I then decided I wanted to play Mass Effect 3....
Couldn't they spend their time and money sorting all this out rather than taking everyone to court and talking bollocks about lost sales...?
DNS
Be had an issue with their DNS cache servers a while back, which meant a lot of people switched away from Be's internal service to OpenDNS or Google as has already been mentioned.
Sod them...
Up until recently, despite being a regular Torrent user, my preferred tracker site was never The Pirate Bay. However, since these ridiculous bans came into place, I am now making a point of using TPB (via the ToR network) instead of my previous preferred tracker indexing site.
Congratulations to the people who brought this issue to court, you have now added a user to TPB who was never one before.
The point here..
... is not that TPB effectively died a few years back anyway, but rather one of censorship - it really doesn't matter what site it is.
Don't blame the ISP's, blame our legal system for allowing record company dinosaurs to win this legal battle. Dinosaurs who really just don't get exactly what to do with this damn internet thingy - even though it's been over a decade since napster.
The genie was out the bottle already, the horse hadn't only bolted, it had sired 3 generations of wild horses.
In the meantime, the new digital model, with Apple at the helm, is doing rather nicely thank you.
No doubt the industry will view this censorship as a victory, which only goes to show just how incredibly clueless they are.
It's whack-a-mole with 100,000 moles to their single hammer - completely pointless.
But now a new genie has been unleashed - UK censorship of websites.
Right now, it's just a gesture more than anything else - it's not illegal (as far as I know), to circumvent this censorship using proxies - but how long before it is?
Will ISP's update their Ts&Cs to protect their own arses - will the buck be passed to the consumer?
Well done with all the smart "I know how to get around this" posts. This is the thin end of the wedge and the next wave of censorship comes around and more port based controls are imposed and proxies are blocked then what? Keep pouring on the fuel guys. . .
Hows that work blocking all the pedophilia in the world going?
Oh, you mean you just use it to source the IP's so you can arrest people instead, but now your IP feed is turning up all sorts of random people including grannies and 4 year olds? And it never actually stopped it anyway, just made it more annoying to find?
You can't full block things on the itnernet without going entirely the other way (Great firewall of china) and even then that doesn't work, you need extra things like factories so you can lock your workforce up.... sorry, I mean provide them with accommodation.
Well done with all the smart "I know how to get around this" post. This is the thin end of the wedge and the next wave of censorship comes around and more port based controls are imposed and proxies are blocked then what? Keep pouring on the fuel guys. . .
I can still see it...
Be punter here and I just checked and I can reach The Pirate Bay
The reason I can see it....
Just remembered I use Google as my DNS provider.
I guess this is why I can still see "The Bay" without any issues.
Re: The reason I can see it....
You've got the "fail" icon ironically correct. The block isn't applied until tonight (score 1) and the block will be implemented via the Cleanfeed system which has nothing to do with who provides your DNS (score 2).
Re: The reason I can see it....
They are implementing it tonight not last night.
opendns won't work for you tomorrow I am pretty sure.
Good old corruption
Until the death penalty comes out for corruption, we will always have rich people writing their own laws. Even if they are busted, they don't get more than a slap on the wrist. There is no reason for them not to fill their pockets. look at Rupert and our PM for a good example right now.
Pity we cant get to see the bank accounts of the various Politicos and Judges who took backhanders along the way, I would love to know just how much getting a law passed for specific private company's actually costs. 5-20 million? More?
Anyway, thanks for the BPI for taking us one step closer to zero democracy and totally non-free-market economy.
Anarchy!
"...Guys, we will close comments for this article if you keep trying to post workarounds..."
Now, that's what I call "biting the hand..."!
???
"Bootnote
Guys, we will close comments for this article if you keep trying to post workarounds."
Wow, now The Register is threatening to start censoring, wtf!
Re: ???
How silly. We are legally obliged to ensure that such links are not published.
You can find links elsewhere, if you want. How is this censorship?
Re: ???
Are you sure you're legally obliged? El Reg isn't named in the court order, and neither are the customers...
Legal status
You post, we publish - our responsibility.
We are liable to action under UK* law if we publish ways of accessing copyright infringing material.
*The Scottish angle appears to be a red herring - no substantive differences between the two codes on copyright here, that I can see.
Re: ???
Are you?
Since when was El Reg an ISP that was hit with the courts ban hammer?
Re: Legal status
Except you're not.. You're linking to a site that links to a site that might link to a page that has infringing content.... How many degrees of separation does it take to be safe?
Also, the Scottish response was relevant to the question it was posted to. A purely Scottish ISP would need to see a case through the Scottish courts... not just an extension of the current one.
Re: Re: Legal status
Allowing guys to post workarounds on the grounds that we'll most likely get away with it ... hmm. That makes sense.
On Scotland, the courts would rule the same as in England and Wales. One might gain a little breathing space by moving to a Scottish-only ISP. But if enough people did this, that's all one would gain: a little breathing space.
Re: Legal status
if el-reg did not moderate any of its posts at all, then they cannot be held responsible for the comments of posters.
The second they even correct a spelling mistake, or correct punctuation, or remove the private telephone number of Prince Charles then they have moderated the forum and are legally responsible for every post contained on the site. ..
There is lot to be said for having a unmoderated forum and the resulting open discussions you can have, but it only takes 30 seconds until it reduces to personal abuse & flame wars mixed in with spam posts for boner pills...
Re: Re: Legal status
Unmoderated forums are legally much safer in the UK than moderated forums. Your last par explains why we choose to moderate.
Re: Legal status
You could always try growing a backbone, or standing up for what you profess to believe in. You've filled enough column inches over the years, lambasting everyone from Google to the Chinese government for either imposing, or failing to resist censorship of the internet. Now you're cravenly self-censoring, just because of a court order which has absolutely nothing to do with El Reg, whatsoever.
Talk about arm-chair generals!
Re: Legal status
"Unmoderated forums are legally much safer in the UK than moderated forums. Your last par explains why we choose to moderate.' Really? Your moderators are shit then.
IT babe magnets speak
its not actually that clever to come on here boasting about how you can get round it . keep it to yourself.
The ISP's are just complying with a court order so no need to lash out at them like an imbecile either.
URL please
I don't use torrents much and don't recall ever visiting TPB.
What is a URL that is supposed to be blocked so I can't check how censored the net is for me.
First wave of censorship
I see this as the first wave of censorship because everyone who knows how to torrent knows how to circumvent these measures (or can find out in a few seconds with a search engine), making them ineffective.
I'd put money on the 'powers that be' who forced this on the ISPs knowing that this situation will happen and it's a strategy of theirs to then turn round and say "we need stronger blocks because this isn't working", which will end up making things just a little bit worse for everyone.
Hmm, yet again the English Court system overrides the legal rights of other parts of the UK.
TPB
T'would have been nice if, for once, the British courts didn't bend over and 'adopt the position', when their masters in Hollywood snapped their fingers. Perhaps TPB's own response to a threatening email from Dreamworks' lawyers might serve as a template:
DREAMWORKS: In accordance with the DMCA, we request your assistance in the removal of infringements of the Shrek 2 motion picture from this web site and any other sites for which you act as an Internet Service Provider.
TPB: As you may or may not be aware, Sweden is not a state in the United States of America. Sweden is a country in northern Europe. Unless you figured it out by now, US law does not apply here.
Scource: http://static.thepiratebay.se/dreamworks_response.txt
Re: TPB
Doesn't look like a "threatening" email at all.
Unless you have a different dictionary to me....
Re: Bootnote
Why are we forbidden from posting work-arounds? None of them are illegal or expressly forbidden by the court order.
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