Pirate Bay AND its users violate labels' copyright - judge A High Court judge has ruled that notorious file-sharing website The Pirate Bay and its users violated the copyrights of nine record labels based in the UK. None of the founders of the website were represented at the trial in London. "The matters I have considered in relation to authorisation lead to the conclusion that the …
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...here in the UK now. These record labels really take the biscuit when it comes to protecting their criminal lifestyles.
Any Judge can give orders on the tiniest of pretexts of inciting and inducing something as flippant as referrring to the Koran, Bible or Torah !
Whats are we coming to??
And they want ACTA AND SOPA on top of that!
You sir, write words of paranoia and craziness!
You might not like the copyright laws, but whatever the record labels are currently doing is legal. Record labels are out-of-touch, dependent on an old business model, and behave extremely greedily, but they are certainly not "protecting their criminal lifestyles".
I would like to see a world where creators get fairly paid for their work, consumers can get access to creative works for a reasonable price, and the middle-man who currently takes an unjustifiably large slice of the pie is cut out. However "a reasonable price" for consumers cannot be "free" as in "gratis", otherwise piracy will kill the creative industries (bad thing) as opposed to just killing the bloated middlemen (good thing).
I believe this can be done without drastic measures such as ACTA and SOPA, and for that to happen, I as a consumer want to support any effort that allows me to legally BUY at a fair price content that I want as directly as possible from the creators. Large-scale piracy closes down that sensible middle ground and just gives the lobbies and politicians further excuses to impose ACTA-SOPA -like legislation onto law-abiding consumers.
And WTF have the Bible / Torah / Koran got to do with it?
Only because the fuckers bought and paid for the laws that make it so. That doesn't make what they do right. I could theoretically get away with murdering babies with pickaxes if I had enough money to pay off enough politicians to pass a law making it legal to murder babies with pickaxes. Doesn't make it a good thing to do though!
Lots of people here seem to think there is nothing wrong with downloading from torrents, so I'd conjecture that quite a few people go to TPB thinking that it's all fine. Unless that is that those people really know that it's not alright and they're just blustering about trying to justify their actions, but that would never happen, would it?
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The really big problem is that if you rely upon enforcement to protect the so called infinite copyrighted works is that you will have to throw 70 percent of the people in the 18 to 29 year olds who have illegally downloaded music! If that happens, there will be a serious discussion about copyright laws and the legitimacy of the governments involved with enforcement. Perhaps the world needs to take a second look at the infinite copyright laws and patent laws.
Taking at face value statements attributed to The Pirate Bay and its apologists, they seem to sincerely believe that copyright isn't a moral or enforceable exclusive right in the modern world. At all. I think they are mistaken.
You ever read a story called "A Logic Named Joe"? Written before personal computers, a "logic" is a sort of networked home computer, and Joe has a bug, of sorts: it lets anyone on the network access anything. Fortunately, disaster is mostly averted.
Reading the conclusions in this case, it appears very much that the distinction of how TPB are jointly etc etc can be directly applied to YouTube etc since as far as I am aware, whilst they announce that they will respond to takedown requests, there does not seem to be any attempt to make the uploader take responsibility to any copyright breach. This would be an admission that illegal uploads happen and that it is down to the copyright holder to find out and ask for the removal.
I can't believe that they could not have come up with a more precise form of words if they were that determined to find a way to block TBP.
As noted in other comments here though, the main offenders have moved on and there are so many more sites out there this effect of this case is to simply add weight to the rolling stone of big brother style censorship as the more they win the more they will go after until the courts are desensitized and sites are blocked 'on the nod'.
Depends on the specifics surely? Where the ISP servers are based, not the customer receiving the connection to them? What if you live literally yards over the border in Scotland, but your ISP is based south of the border?
IANAL, but as this is all new territory as far as applicable process is concerned, won't any actions hereafter set the benchmark for future actions?
I would hazard a bet at this being a DNS block, meaning the IP address will still work You can just add that to your hosts file and carry on as normal. Failing that, there's VPNs, proxies, I2P, Tor, Freenet...
This is not how to beat copyright infringement. You do it by offering a better service than the pirates. The last game I pirated was Quake IV, and I bought that on Steam anyway. The price was right, and the convenience of not having to trawl through buggy or virus infected cracked executables was the clincher.
Right now I would have to spend many thousands of pounds to buy the music *I already own* to fill up an iPod. That just isn't fair, guys. I don't care if it's the law; I'm just not going to do it, and making circumventing DRM illegal won't stop me. The same applies for trailers at the beginning of DVDs. I want to skip them and watch the feature, but I can't. I know it's collusion between DVD / Blu-Ray player manufacturers and the media companies making me watch that dross when I try and play something on the TV. (Incidentally, this doesn't affect me, as I watch my DVDs from my PC through VLC media player. If I couldn't do that, you can bet I wouldn't be buying anywhere near as many DVDs as I do.)
TL:DR; So what? "The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
Hide My Ass?
HAHAHAHAHA!
Seriously, anyone that thinks that the owners of that site won't roll over and hand over your details to big brother is an idiot and quite frankly deserves to be caught sentenced and fined.
Hide My Ass is fine if you're a schoolboy trying to look at porn in the library, other than that it's so dodgy it's not even funny.
HMA is fine if you're not using it for anything dodgy ... they're a legit company so of course they'll hand your IP address over the the rozzers on request.
It's useful for confusing YouTube as to your location, or bypassing company restrictions on which websites you can visit... I wouldn't trust them enough to actually log onto anything through the proxy mind.
There. I said it.
Again ;o)
OK some stuff is not the same secondhand (games with used-up online redemption codes, etc) but CD's, DVD's .. all the same so long as the packaging is in good nick. Take someone's no-longer-wanted purchase off them for a great price and keep that sale away from Big Media. If you want to make sure the 'artist' benefits then buy a t-shirt, go to a gig, send them an Xmas card with a fiver in it.
Which reminds me... you watch the secondhand games market take a shit-kicking when the next gen of consoles come out. The games won't be any cheaper, either, even though they're largely free to distribute online through XBOX market, etc.
It's going the same way with consoles now... PS3 games are beginning to be tied to your PSN/SEN account for online play now; the death knell for the for the second hand console game market hasn't been rung yet but I think it's coming. I suspect it'll gain traction with the next generation of consoles (PS4, XBoX 720, whatever).
I hope you didn't pay for those extra copies which didn't work properly; just because the games can't be resold that doesn't mean you have to accept faulty goods.
When one torrent site gets blocked another 3 open up...TPB has been under threat for ages and is still up, if it gets blocked there are still plenty of others out there which can be reached in a instant via google.
Nice of the government to waste time and money on the things that really matter.
I trust you lot complaining or gloating about get-arounds are also lobbying your local MP's and what not. Seems to me there is much complaining on internet forums, but absolutely no pestering of MP's. And one really think Ministers lurk on internet forums like this?
People in the UK need to do what people across Europe do, get of your lardy keyboard warrior arses and make damn sure the politicians know how you feel. If you dont, we will all end up royally screwed.
I'm sorry, someone seems to have mistaken the UK for a democracy?!*
You'd be better off lobbying the Daily Mail and watching the reaction slowly cascade up into the ranks of government as it seems our politicos only react to media-backed moral crusades these days.
* a FPTP system with more than 2 political parties cannot be truly democratic; odds are, whoever is in power they'll have had a minority of the population voting for them; with 3 parties it's quite possible for the government to be made up of a party that 65% of the population voted against.
the last thing i 'pirated' from TPB was a copy of Windows XP home edition OEM which i owned a license for anyway but because HP no longer supply XP home CDs and MS stupid licensing meant that officially i had to buy a new Windows license rather than just let me download an iso from their website to be able to reinstall Windows on a laptop i owned the only place i could get a copy of the software was from TPB.
Anyone with a clue knew years ago that TPB and it's users violated copyright laws. That is why TPB principals are fugitives from justice with a bounty on their heads.
It doesn't matter how many torrent sites there all. All that matters is that facilitators or piracy and pirates get punished for their crimes. If that means $10K per copy or prison time, so be it.
If you're dumb enough to pirate, you're dumb enough to be punished.
If you're dumb enough not to own enough slaves to work your land, you deserve to lose your land.
A couple hundred years or so ago, you could legally own slaves in most of the civilized world, and it was pretty much a requirement to do so if you owned (i.e. stole from natives) large tracts of land and needed cotton or other crops planted on them. IIRC, the last country to practice slavery was the United States, and even they eventually abolished slavery (after a few small rebellions and a civil war).
So, just because it happens to be legal or illegal, doesn't mean it is right either way. And if people see a problem with the current copyright laws, then it is their prerogative to do whatever is necessary to change or otherwise break said laws. It's pretty much a given that these laws will be changed one way or the other, be it from mass protests, hacktivism, or simply the passing of time.
Big Brother, because he had lots of slaves.
"Big Brother, because he had lots of slaves."
The "slaves" in this matter are the people who produce the music, films, photographs, games, software, and all other work that gets stolen and for which they don't get paid.
It is the torrent sites, the "cyberlockers" and companies like Google that appropriate the work of other people, reduce its value to a pittance, and then take that pittance for themselves.
And all these people who produce this work, without having any say in the matter, end up working for the profit of a *very* small number of people: the venture capitalists and stockholders of Google and their ilk.
Good work guys, supporting the concentration of wealth in an ever smaller number of hands, and the expropriation of actual working people for the benefit of that very small number of exploiters who profit from the current arrangements.
Not "stolen". This is Copyright Violation, which is entirely different. Stealing something is the act of taking without permission an item or resource and in doing so preventing the legitimate owner from using it. [roughly the equivalent from the legalise]
Copyright Violation is simply making a copy or close enough facsimile of something when you do not have the right to do so. If in doing so you are not paying for a copy of the version then you are depriving the victim of the *potential* money but you are not, and never are, *stealing*. If you would never have paid money for the resource in question then how can you be said to have "stolen" anything. Even the idiot statement that companies such as "BSkyB" are making are propagating this fallacy and it is of course purposely spread through "FACT" and other similar lobby and scare-mongering institutions.
This isn't to say that Copyright Violation isn't bad because it is - if you may have paid for a copy of something but then choose to make a copy anyway but not to pay for it then you are depriving the original creator of the money you would have paid. The original creators put time and effort into creating it and should get some form of reward and typically this is money. The issue of the grossly unfair split of this money is another matter altogether but through its nature tends to be mixed in with this.
In order to be punished, you first need to be found guilty - by a jury, in many cases. We are already approaching a point where you could not get a jury of under-30s to convict in a copyright case, at least not without careful packing - I mean, jury selection. These potential jurors will not become more copyright-friendly as they get older. So whistle in the wind, copyright maximalist - whatever happens in the short term, sooner or later copyright will become unenforceable, having been destroyed by its strongest proponents.
Not forgetting the meedja industries that stuck their fingers in their ears and went 'lalalalala' as the interwebs grew. Seems that you have forgotten the fact that publishers take the lion's share of profits and are thus the injured parties - artists and creative types have always have had to fight for a living.
Hi from Finland! My ISP has blocked access to ThePirateBay and a lot of people are pissed off. This is one of the reasons why one of my musician friends decided to compose and release a 30-minute composition called "The Battle for Free Internet". I think you may like it. You can find it from here: https://sites.google.com/site/mbsjoblom/
On this topic, Apple should be sued because iTunes specifically facilitates the illegal shifting of format from one to another without obtaining the copyright holder's prior permission.
...and we already know that Apple doesn't think of the children appropriately enough given the sweat shop factories they use.
Seriously though, Apple is one of the companies that has put pressure on the UK government to align this law with that of the rest of Europe, let alone elsewhere. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14372698
And who gets punished when the laws are bad?
Recently the US Supreme Court modified copyright which would appear to have retroactively included out-of-copyright works. Yesterday you could host those old b/w movies yourself, and today...you're a criminal...
That's sort of what the argument is about, the law applied to society is being *bought* by big media to support their business model with little thought about the end user, hence DRM (look at how few dedicated *HD* media recorders are around) plus laws against format shifting. Should I buy a CD and pay *again* for a digital copy to put on my phone? In law, yes. But is this because this is fair compensation to the songwriter, or because the record companies thought this would be good for business and lobbied hard for it to become so.
just because "society" has rules doesn't mean those rules are good or fair. There are so many examples in history, one common today is that a teenager of a certain age is old enough to give his life for his country, but is too young to vote out the bastards that would use him for cannon fodder. Slavery has already been mentioned, women voting, etc etc.
tl:dr: Rules and laws are moving goalposts, changing through time. The problem is the current behaviour favours content producers a little more than Average Joe might consider reasonable. Good laws need to be balanced. These aren't.
the laws of society? You are quite naive if you really believe that. Society has nothing to do with the laws of the land. They are installed and maintained by the ruling classes to control the rest. The law only applies to those that can't afford to pay. Look at the raft of footballers and celebrities who can drop a few quid into the court's pocket and make it go away. The law is there for those that can afford it. A district attorney told me that.
Theft is relative, depending on who is the richest person attending the event. If I walk intto a bank, withdraw a trillion pounds, and then not pay it back that's robbery and I go to jail. If a banker withdraws a trillion pounds and then refuses to pay it back, that's banking.
Reconsider the "society" you see around you.
There is that, but on the other hand, everything was nice and worked well before torrents became popular and people 'knew about downloading'.
I hope a few more high profile sites get shut in a show of force (we all know it makes nowt difference), and things carry on back on their merry way. Maureen and Dave don't ask little Johnny to download them Clifford Ricardo's greatest hits, out of fear of prosecution.
Meanwhile, anyone with half a technical brain carries on like the old days.
AC, of course.
And they responded by developing the Low Orbit Ion Cannon, Tor, and, for traditionalists, Sneakernet.
Sure, creators should have the right to profit from their work, but non-commercial sharing has always existed. We used to loan DVDs at work to each other in the days before broadband. Before that people made mix tapes on cassette to play in the car.
Google Newzbin. They are currently holidaying in a Spanish domain. Presumably their users followed and are enjoying some winter sun while it lasts. You would have to shut down most of the Internet to stop such sites simply moving to a different domain, whose name doesn't even have to relate to the old one. If The Pirate Bay moved to hfjkshkhskfh.es, or whatever, Google would still index their pages, which all say 'The Pirate Bay', and they'd be up and running again.
but...
the only thing I have to say on the matter is, you cannot have one rule for one, and one for another.
Hypocrisy is the worst of any moral offence.
The Pirate Bay, as much as I dislike it, INDEXES torrents. So does Google.
It's not a straw man argument. Technically they are doing the same thing, just through a different protocol. In fact, Google probably links directly to some illegal downloads.
QED. Attack all, or no offenders. Not just the most (in)famous.
You've hit the nail on the head there. Without Google, torrent sites would be nothing. Since TPB doesn't have ALL the torrents, when you want to find some content it's just as easy to Google 'moviename torrent' and choose from the list of torrent sites it finds for you. The only way they will stop such sites is to put a lid on Google. The content producers know that, and you can bet they're working on ways to force Google to 'remove all links to site xyz'.
And when the Google links disappear I expect we'll see sites of links to those disappeared links.
So where does the liability stop? If I have a site that links to a torrent tracker for a copyright work then I'm in the same position as TPB. If you now link to my site, are you equally culpable or less? How about if someone links to your site? Then how about if someone has a Google search link on their site? As things stand I'm pretty sure the law at present could be used to prosecute anyone using an Internet connection.
That doesnt make it right Anyway I think the battle has only just begun.
I'm quite sure google lists more copyright infringing files than TPB, probably by 1000-fold, 10,000-fold -- A lot anyway.
TPB has no control over how much infringing material it links to, just like Google. They should not be picked on like this.
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