Pirate Bay data now tugged by IP-address-tracking current The new version of The Pirate Bay appears to be using the CloudFlare content delivery network, which logs IP addresses to filter out attacks. The use of CloudFlare worries some who feel it increases the likelihood of Pirate Bay users being surveilled. Which obviously won't be a problem for the overwhelming majority of users …
EZTV has moved domains (from eztv.it to eztv.ch) and still runs on CloudFlare. It was a preemptive move. Although the eztv.it domain is now defunct, services such as PopcornTime rely on the eztvapi.re domain which has had superb uptime recently.
KAT got hit hard with DMCA takedown requests this week.
TPB has no quality control right now. There are currently numerous fake uploads for the unreleased, unleaked Jupiter Ascending for example.
There is no illegal content on TPB, or the majority of torrent sites.
Torrent sites should not host any of the data their users/members are sharing regardless of legality as it should be based on a P2P network where users share data themselves.
Uploaders are responsible for the legality/copyright of the material they upload in the jurisdiction they upload from.
Downloaders are only legally responsible when the whole file(s) is(are) downloaded and if they feel the material is potentially illegal OR copyright protected they should remove it forthwith from their machines and possibly inform the relevant authorities in the jurisdiction they download to.
Or you can assume that everyone on TPB knows the legal status of every file before they have downloaded it and treat them all as criminals.
Anybody using TPB is operating in the open anyway and any logging by CloudFlare is just an extra layer on top. A lot of people using torrents do not understand their IP address is clearly visible to anybody else in the swarm and tracing them is trivial. I rather shocked a friend when I showed them the "peers" tab on his torrent client and did a whois on several of the addresses as they thought the whole thing was totally secure and untraceable.
If you are going to torrent TPB is the very last place you should use as it is nothing but a pool for police to fish. I don't even see why they insisted on getting it blocked in the UK as having it available is nothing but a boon for the authorities.
Copyright infringement is a civil offence, when it's not done on an industrial scale, so the police should not be involved.
http://www.findlaw.co.uk/law/small_business/intellectual_property/copyrights/500585.html
However, civil cases are much easier to prosecute, being based on balance of probabilities rather than beyond reasonable doubt, so many defences are less likely to be acceptable. But, assuming you're not uploading then the damages should be fairly small too.
Makes no difference for the general public if the pirate bay is behind cloudfare or not. It's not illegal to browse the site or download a .torrent file or magnet link from there. If anything illegal is done it's done at the users end and away from the site. Nothing logged by cloudfare is of any relevance. I would expect staff login in a different way, bypassing the cloudfare part and going directly, so that their details are not logged.
Connecting to a swarm of a torrent gives away your IP address anyway so that is where someone would have to worry, not over cloudfare logging their ip as visited a site.
Lets also not forget that downloading/uploading copyright content is not actually illegal in every country, so some tpb visitors will not be breaking the law of their land anyway.
Totally agree with the point made above that TPB should not be illegal as it hosts no copyright content at all, just links to places that do (or meta-data), in the same way as search engines and youtube search do.
Never use TPB back but glad to see it back and sticking its fingers up at the copyright cartels.
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