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back to article P2P badboys The Pirate Bay kicked out of Greenland: Took under 48 hours

The Pirate Bay has been torpedoed after telecoms companies from two countries blocked the website’s dual domains. The world’s largest file-sharing site moved a Swedish .se domain to a Greenland-based .gl address between late Monday night and early Tuesday morning after apparently being tipped off that the Swedes were planning …

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      1. batfastad
        Reply Icon

        Re: why is it illegal?

        So does google when you punch in the hash of a torrent. So does ebay, encouraging people to buy/sell second hand media (technically piracy). So do manufacturers of MP3 players with software that allows you to copy CDs etc.

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        1. Anonymous Coward
          Reply Icon
          Facepalm

          Re: why is it illegal?

          Yes, but they all have lots of money, and are therefore not behaving illegally. Do try and keep up!

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      2. Captain Underpants
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        Re: why is it illegal?

        @Chad

        I'm not sure that applies across the board - besides, if it were true, it would equally apply to every search engine ever made publicly accessible and probably every computer-based comms technology ever made.

        Newsgroups are still going strong and, barring Newzbin, haven't been persecuted for being an easy way to get warez. I've never heard of an IRC server being chased over warez/piracy issues even though that's another fine long-standing avenue for naughtiness.

        Meanwhile, BitTorrent is a fantastically useful protocol for anyone who wants/needs to distribute large files without bleeding money for hosting, which means that it gets used for both lawful and unlawful uses. (I saw "lawful" because the "illegal" aspect of torrenting is based on the "oooooh, that's redistribution, therefore we'll treat people running torrent clients in the exact same way as we would someone mass-producing knock-off DVDs that they sell for a fiver down the pub".)

        I have a whole bunch of torrents that I regularly seed at home - many of them are legitimately free films ferom the likes of vodo.net; others are legitimately free software packages or game mods; others are non-free but private-tracker torrents for things like Humble Bundle game packs (as in, the torrents are made available by the Humble Bundle founders and I seed them to try and help HB keep their bandwidth costs down).

        The fact that naughty material is available as a torrent doesn't mean that all torrents are naughty or that the existence of torrents predisposes people to be naughty. If anything was going to predispose people to be naughty, it would be the access they have to a networked machine that's very good at making copies of information structures....

        It's also worth noting that in certain countries, taxes are levied on storage media that are directly paid to performing artists collection bodies as "compensation" for piracy (Canada & Spain, for example). How easy is it to argue that an action is illegal if the state has already imposed a tax on you which asserts that you will commit the action and charges you accordingly?

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        1. Alan Brown Silver badge
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          Re: why is it illegal?

          "It's also worth noting that in certain countries, taxes are levied on storage media that are directly paid to performing artists collection bodies as "compensation" for piracy "

          Supposedly. The general opinion of canadian artists is that the prime recipient is the canadian General Fund.

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          1. Captain Underpants
            Reply Icon

            Re: why is it illegal?

            @Alan

            That's not the point. The point is that the levy is applied to storage media, and the legislature describing it states that compensating artists is the rationale.

            The fact that the levy is incompetently administered does not reduce the potential problem of treating as criminal an activity for whose repercussions you are imposing a tax.

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            1. Darryl
              Reply Icon
              Pirate

              Re: why is it illegal?

              Most of the people I've talked to here in Canada about this (of course I am a completely law-abiding citizen and would NEVER pirate anything) are of the opinion that, hey, the government charged me for pirating music when I bought these blank CDs, so I'm damn well going to get my money's worth.

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          2. Rukario
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            Re: why is it illegal?

            From http://www.cpcc.ca/en/frequently-asked-questions:

            The private copying levy is not a tax. It is a royalty paid to music rights holders. Unlike a tax, which is collected by the government, the private copying levy is collected by the CPCC to provide remuneration to rights holders for private copying. The private copying levy is earned income for rights holders and helps them to continue to create music.

            Also, note the change in how the money is distributed:

            Music authors and publishers: 75% in 2000; 58.2% in 2010-11

            Performers: 13.7% in 2000; 23.8% in 2010-11

            Record companies: 11.3% in 2000; 18% in 2010-11

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            1. Captain Underpants
              Reply Icon

              Re: why is it illegal?

              I have to say I don't love the idea that buying a CD and having the temerity to transcode it to a format that can be used by the only audio-playing equipment that I own should involve me paying an additional levy. Especially not since buying the storage media involves paying the levy even if you only ever buy digital downloads:ie where the payment you've made for the song already accounts for it being a digital file.

              So no, they can screw off, it's a tax. If it's applied across all storage media sales (ie there's no way for me to say "I won't be storing any transcoded media on this device, therefore I am exempt from the levy) then I don't see how they can argue otherwise.

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              1. Rukario
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                Re: why is it illegal?

                @Captain Underpants

                The reason it's called a "levy" and not a "tax" is because it isn't collected by The Government.

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                1. Captain Underpants
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                  Re: why is it illegal?

                  @Rukario

                  Yeah, I noticed that the first time. I'm not personally convinced, though, because it's applied across the board and provides no exemption mechanism for those whose usage does not match the criteria. Hence, if it's a legislatively-mandated cost to be included in the price of all such items, it's no different in my mind to sales tax/VAT. (The more cynically minded might argue that the fact that the money gets funneled to a body who then pisses it away in a manner that most of its intended beneficiaries don't much like is yet another similarity to an actual tax...)

                  The difference between a tax and a levy in semantic terms is irrelevant, in any case - the key fact here is that if you buy storage media, you are paying a per-amount-of-storage-space charge to a body which compensates musicians for the transcoding of their music that you are assumed to do, whether or not you do it. At which point, screw 'em. If they're allowed to pre-emptively charge you for something you may do just by virtue of buying hardware, then the same sort of logic legitimises users pre-emptively snaffling naughty free copies of $BAND's new album before deciding to pay for it or not, because apparently we're reversing the usual order of the payment | product handover process in retail transactions...

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        2. Chad H.
          Reply Icon

          Re: why is it illegal?

          It's a matter of degree.

          Google doesn't celebrate the fact that unlawful behaviour can be committed through it - the pirate bay on the other hand openly promotes this as a feature, the clue is in the name.

          In the other cases, lack of prosecution doesn't mean the behaviour can be considered okay.

          I'm not trying to attack torrent technology - the question was asked what the Pirate Bay is doing that's illegal - that would be encouraging illegal behaviour, and I challenge anyone to say with a straight face that they do not.

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          1. Captain Underpants
            Reply Icon

            Re: why is it illegal?

            @Chad

            Well, I guess it can be argued that with TPB in particular there's a specific focus.

            But generally, with torrent trackers, unless they're focusing on specific media and stopping people submitting legitimately free material as torrents, that's not necessarily the case.

            It's going to be interesting to see how Google treat trackers in future, given that the emergence of Google Play (or should I say re-emergence of Google Video?) means that they now find themselves with conflicting interests, since taking the AdWords money from torrent trackers may well mean depriving themselves of film rental/sale revenue through Google Play...

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      3. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        Re: why is it illegal?

        >Because they entice/encourage illegal behaviour.

        So do BMWs

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      4. Dan White
        Reply Icon
        Happy

        Re: why is it illegal?

        Ant and Dec encourage me to commit violence against my TV. Should that make them illegal?

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        1. Crisp
          Reply Icon

          Re: why is it illegal?

          ThePirateBay is sometimes the only way to recover media for something that you've legitimately bought.

          My old copy of Starcraft and Brood Wars still entitles me to play the game, even though the CD's that the game came on died a death a long time ago.

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  2. Melzeebub92
    FAIL

    Cache

    I've found that you can bypass these restrictions by simply googling the page on PB that you want and viewing a cached page from google.

    Personally, I find the ease in bypassing these blockages moronic and shocking. Surely there is a much more effective way of blocking the page that isn't this easily maneuvered...

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    1. Sir Runcible Spoon
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      Re: Cache

      "Surely there is a much more effective way of blocking the page that isn't this easily maneuvered."

      Yes, there is, but it involves DPI and filters on your BB link. Think Phorm.

      This isn't something we want at any price.

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  3. b166er
    Pirate

    'Twitter user David Neal was devastated when he was unable to break copyright before breakfast'

    Welcome aboard noob-troll

    Yaarrrrr

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  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    They should base themselves in China, that would really piss Hollywood, er, i mean America off.

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  5. Stevie

    Bah!

    Suggestion: Change name to Absolutely Legal Stuff Bay.

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Thumb Up

      Re: Bah!

      ...or change name to YouTube. That would take care of all the problems relating to copyrighted audio and video.

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  6. Neoc
    Trollface

    Have they tried...

    ...the Cayman Islands? It works for Banks and other Corporations...

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    1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: Have they tried...

      TPB do have standards - they don't want to be associated with criminals

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  7. RaveDance Radio Station

    The pirate bay is such a good site would be sad to see it go

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  8. Grease Monkey Silver badge

    Don't forget, of course, that some countries object to your registering a domain their unless you operate there. Or, let's be fair, unless you pay taxes there.

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  9. Stevie

    Bah!

    Does anyone have hard figures on the legal/illegal content flow that are trustworthy?

    'cause if not, my anecdotal first-hand experience (from others: I've never visited The Pirate Bay) is that 100% of the torrent usage is copyright infringing, and that will inform my views on the matter.

    I venture to guess that downloads of <insert free operating system> are far outweighed by downloads of, say, Avatar.

    Hell, I'll bet more people download copyrighted Wizards of the Coast Dungeons and Dragons material than legitimate stuff if it comes to that.

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    1. Captain Underpants
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      Re: Bah!

      You're right to ask for numbers, but I'd also like to point out that there is a non-trivial amount of legitimately freely redistributed content out there in torrent form. I'm not going to argue that it's more popular than $USBILLBOARD#1ALBUM or $TENTPOLEHOLLYWOODBLOCKBUSTER, but it's certainly there.

      There are also commercial operations using closed trackers to distribute their software.

      There is also the ever-present warez issue of files being deliberately misnamed (as has happened not only by malware or dodgy smut merchants, but also with "poisoned" files released by record labels).

      So without a clear and quite labour-intensive methodology (which will need to include some sort of anonymised data access to a large number of ISPs, as well as permission to retrieve and inventory every torrent identified from the anonymised ISP data, as well as some sort of magic to identify when non-free material is being legitimately torrented) there's no useful way of reaching any conclusion.

      (I should clarify - this applies to the overall superset of torrent trackers; I suspect that the number of legitimate torrents on TPB is rather low as a proportion of the total number of torrents...)

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  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    So sad

    The pirate bay is running out of options as no civilized country wants to support piracy.

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  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Hmm...

    ... ProxyBay?

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  12. SleepyJohn
    FAIL

    Hey Grandad, my pal Jimmy says ...

    ... that in the old days the internet was controlled by American gangsters and corrupt governments. That can't be right, surely? Is that why my teacher calls it the Second Dark Age? A second era of "cultural and economic deterioration" that accompanied "a period of low activity in copying"?

    She said that in those backward days people were so stupid they could not understand the difference between digital patterns flashing across the internet and plastic discs carted around in trucks. She was laughing so much she could hardly get the words out.

    Was it really as horribly stupid as that, Grandad?

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Hey Grandad, my pal Jimmy says ...

      You teacher was referring to current day digital criminals not the old days.

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      1. SleepyJohn
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        Re: Hey Grandad, my pal Jimmy says ...

        I was referring to my grandchildren referring to these days as 'the old days', in the fond hope that their generation will rid themselves of the parasites currently trying to wrest control of the internet from the people.

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        1. FrankAlphaXII
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          Re: Hey Grandad, my pal Jimmy says ...

          That would be great and all, but the internet was never under their control. First it was the US DoD, then the NSF, then IANA/ICANN. Funny way of looking at things you have there, or you need a history lesson. Now go fetch grandpa another beer.

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