The Pirate Bay on BBC Click

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[Griffo]

Cool video, thanks for posting!

To be honest, i don't think ThePirateBay will ever get shut down...well, not just yet anyway. I don't use the site much as i prefer private sites, but i love the effect that the site is having. I also like how the guys running it don't give a toss about saying that they do it and will show their beliefs on TV.

And now, not really related to this video, but to the media's view on pirating. I think it's hilarious when they say "you can download bad quality movies...blah blah blah". Now, i don't know about them, but downloading films/tv shows in 720p/1080p is pretty damn good quality to me

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Online copyright showdown as studios take on ‘pirate paradise’
From Tom Sullivan in Stockholm
15th Feb 2009
sundayherald.co.uk

WHEN SWEDISH politicians launched ambitious plans to increase internet access in the 1990s, creating a haven for online piracy was probably the last thing on their minds. Yet today almost every household has high-speed broadband and the country is a world leader in the illegal downloading of music and films. That alone would have been enough to attract the ire of a global entertainment industry fighting tooth and nail to win back lost revenues. The fact Sweden is also home to The Pirate Bay - one of the most successful and brazen file-sharing networks - virtually guaranteed it.

"The Pirate Bay has 25 million users worldwide. Sweden has become a pirate paradise," says Monique Wadsted, the lawyer representing the US film industry in a £10 million criminal damages case which starts tomorrow. "At the moment this country is seen as a copyright haven. Hopefully the pirates will be jailed. It's important to send out a clear signal that it's not acceptable to have a big illegal copying factory on Swedish territory."

The website founders are facing compensation claims from film and music studios including Warner Bros, Fox Movies, Sony Music and EMI. They are accused of conspiring to breach the copyright of films and music such as Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire and The Beatles' album Let It Be. They deny the charges, arguing their site does not contain downloads, but uses "BitTorrent" software which points users towards bits of files on millions of computers. The Pirate Bay's co-founder, Fredrik Neij, calls the site "the world's biggest distributor of culture and media", a claim met with little scepticism in Sweden, which has a long tradition of open access to information.

According to surveys, 85% of 18 to 24-year-olds in Sweden regularly download music and films. The youth section of the Pirate Party, which lobbies for copyright reform, claims it is the third-largest youth movement in the country and recently received a sizeable government grant. "About 1.5 million people download files illegally in Sweden and the media tends to treat the issue as an interesting debate rather than a crime. It is also seen as an intellectual movement defending the free flow of culture over the internet," said Sam Sundberg, author of the recent book, Piraterna (The Pirates).

Just mentioning The Pirate Bay raises the hackles of music executives, said Daniel Johansson, an analyst at Stockholm's Royal Institute of Technology. This is partly due to the way the activists taunt the industry, posting insulting replies to legal threats on their website and holding lectures titled How To Dismantle A Multi-Billion Dollar Industry As A Hobby. And dismantling the industry is what they are doing, added Johansson. "The pirates have created new behaviour on the internet and the music industry is stuck in the old way of doing things. The biggest challenge is to get away from selling copies and to start selling access to online music."

However, some see the showdown as part of a larger struggle for control of the internet. "To find out whether people are downloading copyrighted material you need control and to sift through all communications on the internet," said Rick Falkvinge, leader of the Pirate Party. "This is a fight over who controls knowledge and culture - the public or corporations. You have a few old structures that have traditionally controlled access to culture and their power is being taken away by new technology. This is a fight they cannot win."

The corporations claim the pirates want a lawless internet. Wadsted said: "The pirates' ideology is that the internet is their space and that they can do as they like with it. But that's not the case. The whole of society is online and you can't have a different set of rules there to everywhere else."

The Pirate Bay claims more than a third of all films and music downloaded via its website are physically located in China, and its supporters say other sites can open anywhere if it is shut down. "Whatever happens, it won't have any effect on downloading," said Sundberg. "But if the industry wins it will boost support for the pirates."

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Pirate Bay triumphant as prosecution drops half of charges
Prosecutors drop most serious charges against The Pirate Bay on only the second day of trial in Sweden
Jemima Kiss
guardian.co.uk,
Tuesday 17 February 2009

The prosecution has dropped the most serious charges against the irreverent Swedish filesharing service The Pirate Bay on only the second day of its trial for assisting widespread copyright infringement. After being unable to prove in court that illegally distributed files had used The Pirate Bay site – despite clear markers in the files, which are labelled with the Pirate Bay name – the prosecution, representing a swathe of high-profile music and film companies including Warner Bros, MGM, Universal and EMI – had to abandon almost half the charges.

Co-defendant Fredrik Neij said that prosecutor Håkan Roswall had misunderstood the technology and that his evidence did not implicate The Pirate Bay. The prosecution then had to drop all charges relating to "assisting copyright infringement", leaving the lesser charges of "assisting making available copyrighted content", with Roswall adding that "everything related to reproduction will be removed from the claim".

Per Samuelson, the lawyer representing the defence, claimed the prosecutor's slip-up was a sensation. "It is very rare to win half the target in just one and a half days, and it is clear that the prosecutor took strong note of what we said yesterday," he commented, referring to an earlier comment that supplying a service that can be used illegally is not in itself illegal.

The prosecution immediately down played the setback, claiming that dropping the charges related to copying copyrighted works would simplify the case against The Pirate Bay. "It's a largely technical issue," said Peter Danowsky, legal counsel for the music companies that brought the case. "It changes nothing in terms of our compensation claims and has no bearing whatsoever on the main case against The Pirate Bay. In fact it simplifies the prosecutor's case by allowing him to focus on the main issue, which is the making available of copyrighted works."

The Pirate Bay does not host content itself, but indexes files hosted by uses of the peer-to-peer filesharing tool BitTorrent. Users search the site to find the files they want, and then download them directly from other users' machines. The site, based in Sweden, has been a persistent thorn in the side of the big media companies since it launched in 2003, already dodging one legal threat and repeatedly baiting what it what it sees as an outdated industry.

"It's not defending the technology," said co-defendant Peter Sunde in a press conference. "It's more like defending the idea of the technology and that's probably the most important thing in this case – the political aspect of letting the technology be free and not controlled by an entity which doesn't like technology."

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[Ash]

teeee haaaa...

[nekokate]

Excellent! Viva Pirate Bay!!

[ItzMeRon]

Awesome post.

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Massive International BitTorrent Raid: Where Will We Download Mad Men Now?
BY Dan Nosowitz
Sep 7, 2010

Piracy and the policing thereof is a messy business, often without clear answers. Today marked a huge crackdown on top-level pirates, with several of the largest and most popular BitTorrent sites either down or offering only spotty access. It's hard to say exactly what happened, but here's what we know so far.

TorrentFreak reports that police in 14 countries across Europe launched a coordinated raid that may have been in the works for two years. Sweden, arguably the most pirate-friendly western nation, was hit in seven separate locations, including the PRQ headquarters in Solna. PRQ is perhaps best known for hosting WikiLeaks, leading observers to suspect WikiLeaks (which has angered several governments) was the main target.

In an email, PRQ said that five policemen (and a locksmith!) came to PRQ's headquarters, but were not allowed to enter the premises until PRQ's legal representative arrived: "The raid was about the usual file-sharing crackdown, which they have each year, so not directed directly against PRQ or it’s customers. They (the police) just wanted to know who or whom had used two different IPs during a couple of dates in 2009. Since we did not have this information (no logging) there was no information and/or hardware for them to seize. The police did not enter the datacenter, only the office, so no servers or network have been touched by them. No information given or hardware removed."

PRQ later stated that the company did hand over the emails behind those IP addresses, but that "it's rare that our clients have mail addresses that are traceable." The company denied that the raid had anything to do with WikiLeaks, which was confirmed by Swedish prosecutor Frederick Ingblad in an interview with Swedish news outlet Expressen.se. Ingblad and his Swedish forces spearheaded the effort on request from Belgium. Other targets hit included locations in The Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Germany, the U.K., and Hungary, with one notable target in the Czech Republic--a student dorm at Czech Technical University informally known as "Silicon Hill."

The police effort was far smarter than usual. Typically, raids are directed at individual sites like Oink, the British invite-only music-sharing site that was shut down a few years ago. That's the equivalent of yanking out a plant but leaving the root--new sites will invariably pop up, often with the exact same content as before. This time, the raids were directed at what's known as the Warez Scene, or simply The Scene. The Scene is a loose network of pirates with no clear leader, structure, or headquarters that's responsible for much of the pirated music, TV shows, movies, and software that millions of users download. The Scene is especially renowned for its ability to crack any protected software--which is often much more valuable than music or video. Releases from The Scene are prized among pirates for their quality and rarity--if you find an album online months before its official release, or an expensive bit of software that comes with a pirated serial code, chances are it originated in The Scene. So far, the raid seems to have been aimed mostly at securing information on particular IP addresses relating to The Scene, though Ars Technica reports that at least four people have also been detained.

The raids have had an adverse effect on some of the most popular and extensive BitTorrent sites. The Pirate Bay and BTJunkie have both been down for most of the day, mostly returning nothing but an error message. The Pirate Bay has been shut down before and always seems to spring back to life, but it's been out for an unusually long time today. Mediafire and Waffles.fm, among others, are also down. (A new favorite on The Scene, KickassTorrents, is still up and running.)

One interesting outlier is What.cd, the invite-only music site that took over from Oink. What.cd is down, sporting a cryptic message stating, "Theseus did it or something." Theseus was the founder of Athens, known as the great unifier, but how that might relate to a torrent site remains unclear. I've been told by insiders that What.cd was not a victim of the raid, but is instead down while the site administrators repair a routine (and unrelated) database corruption.

As smart as the raid was, it is unlikely to have any real, lasting effect on BitTorrent piracy. The BitTorrent world is a many-headed hydra. As soon as one head is cut off, another grows in its place. But it will certainly make it trickier for users to download pirated episodes of Mad Men for a while.

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Mediafire's back and working now, after a day offline, so that's good...