back to article Pirate Bay now run from Pirate Party 'mountain bunker'

The Pirate Bay returned to the business of providing its BitTorrent technology to freetards earlier today with a new bandwidth supplier in the unlikely form of the Swedish Pirate Party, after the site was offline for the best part of a day. The Pirate Party’s Rick Falkvinge said in a statement this lunchtime that his anti- …

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  1. lglethal Silver badge
    FAIL

    What an idiot!

    You would think, what with the MPAA's continued dogging of the Pirate Bay website, they would be smart enough to keep quiet and so buy themselves at least a few months of quiet (whilst the MPAA tried to find out exactly where they are hosted) before the next MPAA court attempted takedown. But No, of course not, lets be loud mouths and tell them exactly where they need to launch their next court case.

    Idiot...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Happy

      @Iglethal: Be more perceptive

      They did this on purpose. Hiding would only add to the conviction that they are doing something illegal. But they are doing it in the open because they genuinely believe that current copyright laws are untenable and obsolete.

      1. matt 115

        Not really

        So thats why they hide their servers at the end of a VPN?

        Here they are only admiting the location of the tip p of the iceberg - which we can all see anyway :)

  2. Nathan 13
    Thumb Up

    Whats the score now?

    Is it 2-0 or 3-0 to the pirate bay, I cant keep up :)

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Freetard logic

      Well they now have massive liabilities, and even the people who founded it don't want to be associated with it. If that's victory I'd hate to see what a "defeat" looks like.

      1. The Original Steve
        Grenade

        Idiot Logic

        Years of lawsuits and millions spent on lawyers...

        Yet I can still use TPB as freely as I could have prior to the above.

        A victory? Debatable.

        A defeat? Nothing close to it.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      47-0 i think...

      but we stopped keeping score ages ago...

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    @AC

    "But they are doing it in the open because they genuinely believe that current copyright laws are untenable and obsolete"

    And I genuinely believe beer should be free.

    1. Cameron Colley

      So do I, or at least cheaper.

      Sadly, thanks to the government here in the UK it's never likely to happen. There would be lots of ways for beer to become free, or almost free (most things downloaded cost the user something somewhere along the line) -- but they're incompatible with taxation policies.

      Personally, I'd like to see Marijuana free also -- and the only thing stopping that is the law.

      Sorry, I know you're joking, but there's a serious point behind this about why we pay the price we do for anything -- and it's not always about rewarding the producer.

    2. Simon Redding
      Linux

      Free Beer

      Did you mean free as in beer or free as in speech?

      I don't think you can download beer from PirateBay...

      1. Winkypop Silver badge
        Joke

        Just search for....

        XXXX

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    They never learn

    Sooner or later all of these clowns will end up in prison.

    1. Frederick Karno
      Happy

      cant see it meself

      MPAA wont be sent to prison mate , they grease to many palms for that to happen

  5. Charlie Clark Silver badge
    Pirate

    Good publicity

    Election in the autumn in Sweden and being harassed by the American MPAA? Got to be worth some votes.

    ISP hopping is so easy for TPB and court orders have to be applied for each time so it's conceivable that they go back to cyberbunker again. At some point, some court may choose rule against the MPAA on the grounds of jurisdiction or unworkability or unsuitability - no copyrighted material is ever kept on thepiratebay's servers and the limewire judgement is unlikely to followed outside the US.

    Ahoi shipmates!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Pirate

      Re: Good publicity

      "Election in the autumn in Sweden and being harassed by the American MPAA? Got to be worth some votes."

      After the allegations of not particularly impartial judges/magistrates, the last thing the big names/labels want to be seen doing is getting a political party's infrastructure shut down during a foreign election, at least in a place like Sweden which is not generally seen as some developing nation that can be used as some kind of litter tray for US foreign policy experimentation.

      "Ahoi shipmates!"

      Yoho ahoy!

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Pirate

    Well timed

    With Swedish elections coming up on Sep 19th, assuming the entertainment industry get the current hosting knocked out for a few days before these elections, this will no doubt concentrate the minds of Swedish voters who would quite like filesharing to continue, in the sense enough voters might then think this issue more important than they otherwise would to get a few pirates elected. Also the world only really needs one place with decent enough connectivity to legislate against extreme copyright overriding freedoms of expression and privacy for the effects of this to be influential elsewhere.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    why use PirateBay?

    I just use google with the right search strings. works just as well as PirateBay - after all, they are not hosting the actual content (content which might or might not be illegal). they are just hosting links. I'm sure Bing could be used instead....but I'm not that sick ;-)

    1. Rob Dobs
      FAIL

      Why use Google?

      Sure Google works, but I don't want to receive emails and ads for 5 years on a single search string I entered into their site. For all their privacy concerns I would hope that Pirate Bay either regularly wipes, or simple does not keep user logs. I don't know that they do this, but I know they are more likely than Google, whom I know gathers any bit of data they can like a sick leech, and then hordes it for all eternity. Google claims they "anonymize" your data after 90 days, but I have learned MANY times over (recent wireless snooping anyone) not to trust Google AT ALL.

      When pressed Google seems to retain ALL of your data for ALL time. And anything they do to "anonymize" it can also just as easily be undone by them.

      They are a hypocritical company with bad intentions, and they would sell the logs of all your searches to the MPAA and RIAA if offered the right amount of money, or told to by the courts.

      Google, Intel, Microsoft, Apple, Walmart, McDonalds etc:

      These are all different names for Greed, Corporate Dominance, Hypocrisy, and Elite dominance over the people of the world. All of them have shown a greed and contempt for mankind that makes me sick. We should all do a better job of avoiding these companies products. Companies should not forget that they should be their to serve their customer base, and provide a useful product or service. Though some of the above companies may do this, they do other evil things too. Acting criminally in one area kind of negates your honest actions.

  8. ZenCoder

    Its asymetrical warfare.

    The cost of switching ISP's is probably at least one order of magnitude lower than the cost of forcing them to make such a move, maybe two.

    ---

    I think they need to do is to stop focusing on piracy and instead focus on making their customers happy.

    For example cheap rentals from Red Box and Netflix have drastically reduced the cost of watching a DVD. However because of the increased value, DVD's now form a much bigger slice of my monthly entrainment budget.

    So they are getting less money from me per movie, but getting more money from me each month.

    That's the direction they need to be headed in. Greater value, greater convenience, less money per move but more money per person per year.

    1. Maverick
      Megaphone

      well said sir!

      as a dedicated 100% non-PB user all of this is noise in the system, I'd simply say let's face the REAL basic truth here . . . (these are UK scenarios, OK?)

      CD revenue has tanked because ;

      1) the supermarkets have driven the retail price down from £16 - £18 per unit to £7 - £9 each

      2) the labels went to sleep & let Apple steal their revenue stream

      DVD revenue has tanked because;

      3) retail price point is no longer >£25 each (see #1 above idiots)

      4) rentals are cheap, real cheap (BTW are you awake yet Sky? no?? thought not!)

      simple basic economics, ignore the market trends and your balls get crushed

      but at the end of the day they must be immensely profitable to waste millions on lawyers, so do I worry about the poor darlings? nah

      do buy their 'products'? nup"

      am I interested in their latest 'pop sensation'? PMSL not really

      that having been said - please keep going PB, I do need something to watch with my beer & popcorn and you provide GREAT soap opera :)

  9. Chris Harden

    cell structure

    Didn't the Pirate Bay guy say something like, all that parts that make up the Pirate Bay are compartmentalized, with each host not knowing that they are hosting part of the Pirate Bay, and certainly not knowing who is hosting the other parts of the system, all neatly tied together with a VPN setup.

    Probally why the Pirate Party refused to say who was hosting the rest of the site.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Err...

      This seems to have come up a couple of times:

      A VPN does not stop someone finding out who you are talking to, it just stops them finding out what is being said. TPB using VPNs to communicate with distributed services does not stop ISPs or Law enforcement finding out where the rest of their services are, it only stops them seeing what data is being moved. As we already know what data is being moved, VPNs would seem to be pretty useless, except to try to make the users think that they are in some way protected by them, they are not.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    "extreme copyright overriding freedoms of expression "

    Since you can get what you want online for free, and nobody is going to nick you, how does that work?

    The only freedom being quashed here is the right to be paid fairly for producing creative work that's quite popular. Thanks to spoiled brats.

    1. DavCrav

      Public domain

      "The only freedom being quashed here is the right to be paid fairly for producing creative work that's quite popular. Thanks to spoiled brats."

      Remind me: would that be the Beatles or Roy Orbison? Both of which should be well out of copyright by now if the law (as in original law) was followed. Orbison's been dead for years, and I don't see why his dependants, fifty years later, should be given more money because of what he did in the sixties.

      I agree with copyright. As an author (in a couple of months) myself, I agree that I should be compensated for my work. However (and this is a big however), the essentially perpetual copyright (as it will be extended again next time Elvis comes close to being out of copyright) is not fair on consumers, and does not benefit society either. Elvis wrote his work believing it would be protected for 28 years (or thereabouts -- I can't be bothered to look up the exact number), and not the 90+ years it now is. The time-limited monopoly in exchange for the eventual release into the public domain of the work is the cornerstone of copyrgiht law.

      Because of this I believe absolutely of the ignoring of copyright on anything more than 28 years old, and the application of copyright (except where the author says otherwise) to works less than 28 years old. Keep the Statute of Anne!

    2. copsewood
      Pirate

      privacy and expression

      Your copyright does not give you a right to have my letters steamed open because my privacy right supercedes your copyright here. You should also have no right to have my Internet connection spied upon (same idea), but some governments seem wrongly to think that it should.

      As to freedom of expression being suppressed, Disney's Mickey Mouse plagiarised Steamboat Willy, because SW was out of 30 year copyright in the 1920's, but MM is still in copyright jail 90 years later. As the useful public domain depletes due to extreme copyright duration, many new expressions becomes genuinely more difficult. For example, I saw a TV program describing the impossibility of creating a historical program reviewing a number of civil rights documentaries made during the 1960ies because each documentary would require contacting hundreds of rights holders, who are difficult or impossible to trace and if interested likely to be too expensive to deal with. Consequently copyright interferes with freedom of expression in a world where preservation of history is important, and our ability to represent important parts of it becomes impossible, or in any kind of artistic situation where new work requires representation or inclusion of old work.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Pirate

    The scary part...

    The really scary part is that US law is being applied globally. Your nations laws and sovereignty are being seconded to the USA's.

    Not necessarily a problem, but after 9/11 you now have to constantly prove to the US government that you are not doing anything wrong. Non-US approved encryption is banned, your emails and web traffic are monitored. Your GPS enabled cell phone broadcasts your location 24/7 and when out of your home everything you do is video taped.

    Once the "terrorists are brought to justice" where will the next "enemies" be found?

    "What is the Matrix? Control." - Morpheus

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Sigh...

      I was going to take you seriously, until I saw that you quoted The Matrix...

    2. The BigYin

      Not yet

      But soon. Real soon. The power of ACTA compels you!

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @AC 22:37

    Maybe people are just paying them what it is worth. Most of what comes out of Hollywood is nothing but garbage. They also think that they can set the price and inflate the price. Look at what they are doing to Red Box and Netflix. Those companies pay what everyone else pays and yet Hollywood feels the need to impose stipulations that they don't impose on others.

    1. Sean Timarco Baggaley
      FAIL

      If all Hollywood is producing is "garbage"...

      ... why the hell is anyone bothering to download it in the first place?

      Clearly, it is *not* all "garbage", as plenty of freetards are willing to put in the time and effort to download and view it.

      1. The BigYin

        Freetards...

        ...He's a thing. The "Humble Bundle"* was released and you could get that for free (basically). The "free"tards opted to pat MORE for the bundle that the Wintards or Joboids. US$14.5 from the freetards vs US$8 or so from the Wintards.

        Treat people fairly and they will respond, treat them like criminals or animals and they will react in any way they can.

        The RIAA, MPAA, BPI etc do not get this.

        *I agree that US$1 million is not a lot to the likes of EA; but it does (perhaps) show a way forward for smaller outfits and raises interesting questions as to who the freeloaders actually are. And they are not where you would normally think it seems.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          @Big Yin

          Where are you getting that "stat" from? One of my collegues got the bundle and at no point was asked anything other than which OS he wanted to download it for. This leads me to think that you are equating Linux users with being a "freetard" and Mac/Windows users with being a "paytard". Of the people I know who download copyright stuff from the Internet, 100% of them use Windows, of the people I know who use Linux 100% of them pay for their music/DVDs (based on a sample set of two, one being me.)

          1. Paul_Murphy

            @fraser - from here:

            http://www.wolfire.com/humble

            ------excerpt -----------

            Total contributed $1,273,593

            - Number of contributions 138,812

            - Average contribution $9.17

            <Win> $8.05

            <Mac> $10.18

            <Linux>$14.52

            ------/excerpt -----------

            Big Yin was saying that the average spend per user was higher for the linux users that windows (or come to that apple) users.

            I suspect that they were talking about the 'cost' of the OS, not browsing habits, since the two are not necessarily connected.

            The old argument about having money left over from not paying for the OS is rather tired, but the other sort of free is more relevant -do you want an OS where you are tied into certain codecs, programs, DRM etc. or not?

            ttfn

  13. Pascal Monett Silver badge

    "what we already provide to activists around the world"

    Um, sorry ? I don't mean to be rude, but how can a political party founded just 4 years ago already provide stuff to "activists around the world" ?

    What financial boon do they have that allows them to throw money willy-nilly without a thought or a care ?

    If financing bandwidth is a drop in the bucket for this new organisation, what is their warchest and what do they destine it for ?

    I'm a tad curious.

  14. RISC OS
    FAIL

    Prirate Party Sucks

    I sure if any of the wasters that are members actually had more than a few brain cells and could make/write/create anything that could be sold and copyrighted they would soon quit the party and do so.

  15. call me scruffy
    Boffin

    Yeah Right.

    "With hair of bat, and shell of bunker, with blood of unicorn and horn of political party I call upon Satan to bless The Pirate Bay's elixir of bullshit special sauce."

    That's all these guys are doing, waving all kinds of impressive sounding terms around as if it's going to magically legitimise and protect TPB.

    It wont.

    TPB has lost in court several times now, and there are a lot of jurisdictions that they don't even dream of setting up in because it's skullbuggeringly obvious that they'd lose.

    Political parties, even those who have MPs in an elected chamber, don't have many magic legal rights. Regardless of whether The Pirate Party would throw copyright out if they got into power, they are still at this moment aiding a legally dubious practice. To all intents and purposes they're claiming that the law doesn't apply to them because they'd change it it they ever get in to power, that's hilariously delusional in it's own right, but it also goes down very badly with voters in most places.

    If TPB setup it's servers in the office of... say... The Daily Sports, and said "newspaper" ended up getting cut off from the net, could we really wring our hands and sob about how the big bad MPAA was randomly crushing legitimate news outlets?

    I admit that I think that copyright laws are pretty dumb, I'd even go so far as to say that they should only protect IP for 10 years or so. (Ten years after release most stuff is either out of print or in the bargain bin, or both!) But right now the endless stream of bollocks that is produced in the name TPB to try to claim that the law doesn't apply is offensive.

  16. Digital Freedom

    Bit Torrent aint worth the hassle

    Having never used "Bit Torrent" I was given a demo by some friends the other night.

    What on earth are the MPAA so worried about? I really fail to see why they deem it such a threat.

    Its just like the old days of P2P (2.2Kb/sec etc) Plus im sure ISP's are throttling this also...

    Unless you are downloading "torrent of the day" the speeds are ridiculous, some meaning you'd wait days, possibly a week to complete. Even longer if you're one of those paranoid types who switches the pc off when not around...

    Really, I am genuinely surprised at the need to come down on this like a ton of bricks.

    Its obvious it takes a fair bit of effort to download a Torrent and needs people at the other end to stay online once they have reached 100% too...

    Aren't the MPAA (and the like) being a "little" bit overprotective here?

    1. vandenbudenmayer
      Go

      Huh?

      Maybe you are being throttled? I find that torrent speeds have grown to unbelievable levels. When I download a movie it arrives within 15 minutes, almost always. Based on a size of around 700 meg. And that goes even for the more obscure files with less than 50 seeds. There really is no effort involved at all.

    2. Steve Brammer
      Thumb Down

      Re: Bit Torrent aint worth the hassle

      You're wrong. Bittorrent is hyper efficient. I'm an ex-pat living in Sweden and I have a 100Mbit connection at home. I don't download music or films but I download lots of UK TV programmes using Bittorrent. Most programmes run to about 200-250MB for a half hour programme or 400-500MB for an hour long programme. I can usually download at sustained downloads speeds of 5-10Mb/sec which means bittorrent works almost as an on-demand service for me with even hour long programs taking under 10 minutes to download. The uploaders are very dedicated as well, I can for instance download an episode of Top Gear only an hour after transmission in the UK.

      Bittorrent is more efficient than you give it credit for and you should not judge the rest of the world against the crappy broadband speeds you see in the UK.

  17. Steve Brammer
    Thumb Up

    Clever move by Swedish PP ahead of national elections

    I'm an ex-pat living in Sweden and what most people here don't seem to realise is that this is quite a clever move on the part of the Pirate Party in order to raise their profile ahead of national elections here in September. They would just love for the music or film industry to try to take them to court over this as they know there would be a big enough backlash to almost certainly gain them a place in parliament at the next elections. The impressive number of votes they got in the last European elections was connected directly to the public's discontent at the Pirate Bay trial. The Pirate Party would have a field day if the music and film industry were to try taking them to court as it would be possible for them to move the whole debate from just a copyright issue to one of political censorship and an attempt by the industry to suppress a legitimate political party.

    My guess though, is that you will see the music and film industry taking a rather low profile and not rising to the bait. They know it would be a disaster for them if the Pirate Party actually got seats in parliament. It will be interesting to see how this pans out in the coming months.

  18. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    @Digital Freedom

    Were you using a BT connection between about 5pm and midnight..? then you want the forum about net neutrality and traffic management.... that's on Thursday at 4.40pm.

  19. The Fuzzy Wotnot
    WTF?

    Worth it?

    TPB the BT equivalent of Napster, or at least they would like to think they are. Shaun wotnot at least had the sense to sell out when it got too much to bear!

    Does anyone with any nous actually use TPB anymore? Most dodgy torrents have moved over to use the decentralised open trackers no fixed trackers like TPB, it's merely the torrent files get hosted on places like TPB and Demonoid.

  20. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    The only solution to this perceived problem is...

    composed of two steps, and both must happen

    1. Ease access - make it available readily and everywhere, currently there are a plethora of services viying to provide material but there is no one clear winner - no one has the distribution model nailed - exactly how difficult is it to have an "online" digital library - which manages each user's products - i.e. you purchase content, it's added to your online library, and you can then proceed to watch/listen online - to make it extremely attractive, allow "transfers" or "second hand sales" between users, you buy movie A, and once done want to swap for my movie B, swapping isn't free, but incurs a "smaller" charge than buying outright - I mean these are simple ideas..

    2. Change the pricing model (reduce the cost) - there is one VERY important point here, pricing should take into account locality - i.e. someone in Sri Lanka can't afford to pay ~180 (~79p) rupees for a song, and the local pricing should reflect that - and it's because it doesn't, in places like that, resorting to pirated material is rife (I know, I'm originally from there!) The demand for content is by far and large ignored, and as a result people resort to the only way they can get the material (without having to impart large chunks of monthly salaries!)

    People will pay for something that's cheap and easily accessible, saves the effort of looking up torrents, waiting for seeds and all that palava...

    The major problem is that 1 must happen, there are ridiculous restrictions in place (see Hulu, Amazon video on demand etc.) which means that these providers cannot increase their customer base - which would then allow them to drive down prices.

    I don't think this is a question of IP, it's a question of changing distribution regulations - if that's done, prices will ultimately go down as services like Amazon (or even a paid for Hulu) would ease access to this content!

  21. DrXym

    Don't see the need for pirate bay

    Bittorrent does everything else in a distributed fashion, so why not searches too?

    1. Paul_Murphy

      Because

      The bittorrent search engine only handles legitimate traffic (as far as I can tell anyway).

      Now this is a good thing since it goes to show that the BT system isn't all about the pirates - it's about sharing files, and files like games patches, free ebooks, reference documents, certain device drivers, peoples home-made movies etc. can all be swapped back and forth with no worries.

      If someone wanted to make their files available to anyone at any time, quickly and easily then one of the very best ways to achieve this is to make a torrent of it and let it loose.

      It does depend on not minding who can get hold of it of course.

      ttfn

      1. DrXym

        I don't see what legit or illegit has to do with anything

        The ratio of illicit to illicit material available via bittorrent is a concern but I don't see it being especially relevant to implementing a distributed search.

        A distributed search system where there are search providers and there are search consumers. A provider would be a glorified tracking url with a digital signature. When you do the search you first connect to the tracker, and from there you establish connections to seeds and so forth and searches would be sent off across your peers.

        Thus Bittorrent (the company) could be a provider, and PirateBay or anybody else could be a provider too. As long as the client allows the user to set 1 or more search provider urls, then its quite possible for many providers to co-exist. In purely economic terms, a distributed search would actually be a disincentive for people like the Pirate bay because they couldn't load up the pages with their own adverts.

  22. obsolete
    WTF?

    Server Locations Secret?

    "The Pirate Bay’s servers are untouched and getting the site up and running only requires the routing (IP-tunnel) to go through another provider....Where the servers are actually located remains a mystery."

    My take:

    CyberBunker would obviously know where the so called “Secret Servers” of The Pirate Bay is located.

    How can they provide bandwidth if they cannot relay the information back and forth to the servers?

    If I am wrong:

    Can someone here please explain to me how they can keep the locations of the servers a secret from their ISP (bandwidth provider)?

    The Servers will need to be connected to the ISP!

    1. call me scruffy
      Boffin

      It's at best half true.

      With bittorrent you have trackers, clients and indexes.

      Clients are of course the software running on users domestic machines, and the overwhelming bulk of traffic involved in bittorrent is between clients, there is no point in concealing this traffic, and each client has an easy time finding out who the other clients are.

      Next come the Trackers, these keep track of the clients in the swarm and give new clients an initial list of peers to communicate with. The amount of traffic isn't as high as peer-to-peer, so a tracker could be put at the end of a VPN or TOR-like system, but all the traffic would go through the bunker. Alternatively these machines could be simply hooked up in data centres, with IP addresses dished out from TPB, either way puts them out of the bunker, but either with a sizeable bandwidth problem, or with no geographical concealment.

      Then comes the index, this is either in the bunker or on the end of VPN/TOR, and all the bandwidth goes through the bunker.

      From the technobabble it sounds like the trackers and indexes are hooked up through a simple f***ing IP tunnel, and when TPB's current ISP gets upset, they'll change ISPs, change DNS, and then wait for everything else to catch up.

      It's crappily engineered, overhyped, and far from invincible. And it smacks heavily of people who've watched to much Star Trek blurting out words in the hope that it'll sound impressive.

      What's truly pathetic is that given the extreme intellect we're led to believe is required to understand freetard thinking, nobody has made any real refinements to bittorrent software or architecture to help TPB, people have however worked out how to spoof trackers to get higher performance ratios.

  23. ReformCopyright

    The Law is an ass at present

    The Pirate Bay is clearly a reaction to the onerous copyright regime currently being imposed on the planet by the United States. Any argument that copyright protects artists went out the window many years ago when they extended copyright to first 75 years and then later to 95 years.

    This is about monopolising culture for corporate profits.

    I will support the Pirate Bay on that basis and also support anyone else who will stand up for the ordinary person in the face of corporate monopolists and their bought politicians.

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