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Copyright Holders Have to 'Resend' Millions of Pirate Bay Takedown Notices:
After several weeks of absence, The Pirate Bay became accessible again through its main .org domain last weekend.
At first sight the site looked more or less the same but there are some significant changes, both under the hood and in appearance.
Many users immediately noticed that the site doesn't work well with several ad blockers. Whether this is a bug or a feature is the question, but it was both frustrating and annoying for some.
[...] With the new Pirate Bay design also comes a new URL structure. Instead of the old torrent pages that were accessible through thepiratebay.org/torrent/12345, the format has now changed to thepiratebay.org/description.php?id=12345.
Other URLs, including categories, the top lists, and user pages, all updated as well. To give another example, the 100 most-active torrents on the site can now be accessed from thepiratebay.org/search.php?q=top100:all, instead of the old thepiratebay.org/top/all.
For users, this isn't a problem. All old links simply redirect to new ones. However, for copyright holders, it's an outright disaster as it means that they will have to resend all their takedown notices.
[...] Looking at Google's transparency report we see that copyright holders have asked the search engine to remove more than five million URLs. Pretty much all of these notices have been rendered useless.
For example, this 2012 takedown notice from Paramount Pictures removed the link to The Pirate Bay's top 100 video torrents. However, after the update, the same page reappeared under a new URL. Another consideration is that Google is just one search engine, so the same applies to other search engines too.
Previously:
(2020-04-11) Pirate Bay No Longer Uses Cloudflare, Visitors Sent to 'Black Hole'
(2020-04-09) Anti-Piracy Copyright Lawyer Decides to Abuse Trademarks to Shut Down Pirates
(2020-04-07) Movie Company Boss Urges U.S. Senators to Make "Streaming Piracy" a Felony
(2020-03-26) Supreme Court Rules States are Not Liable for Copyright Violations
(2020-03-23) The Invisible Man, Emma, and The Hunt Hit Pirate Sites after Rushed Video on Demand Releases
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Monday April 20 2020, @05:30PM (4 children)
Whew, lots of philosophy in this one. First, the Broken Window Fallacy. At a stroke, the Pirate Bay broke in the legal world every virtual window with their name on it. Many admirers and workers of justice are angered and feel trolled. They are wrong to feel so.
As you point out, replacing all those windows could provide a lot of employment for a lot of legal clerks. Yes, if the justice system and the plaintiffs have plenty and to spare, they can certainly afford to waste a big pile on such ridiculous labor. If they do so, the rest of us will laugh at them for being such backward idiots. The Pirate Bay need only reformulate the links again, something that should be even easier the 2nd time, to break all those new windows all over again.
And that of course is part of the larger point that the Pirate Bay and pirates have been trying to make for decades now. Which is that for information, the scarcity was always contrived and artificial. Control freaks, hoarders and misers have worked themselves into an epic, decades long, furious fit over this matter. The universe just won't cooperate and provide them some means, any means, by which the artificialness of the scarcity can be turned real. It's so unfair to hoarders to be ruined at a stroke by the breaking of a regime of artificial scarcity!
As for the justice system, they too are subject to natural law. They, and the legislated law, are not as powerful as the control freaks could wish. They often do block injustice with procedural barriers. If it was too easy to bully, sue and win, control freaks would use them as a hammer to crush all opposition to their control.
Finally, what has this to do with art? This is only one small, peripheral battle. The problem is that artists have been mesmerized and seduced by the shine of great wealth. Sadly for them, almost all of it is illusory. I find it especially strange that there are authors who are celebrated for their perception and insight into the human condition, who can write stories about the immorality of greed, and the clever cons of fraudsters, and yet fail to connect all that to the situation with copyright. I would have thought that specialists in the science fiction genre could do better, as it is technological advance that has laid bare the artifice, but it seems not. "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!" They do see the problem, yes. They tend to throw up their hands, give up, when it comes to solutions. Even when solutions are staring them in the face, all they see is that these real solutions appear to have a much, much smaller pot of gold than the current illusion. They could take a heroic approach, do The Right Thing, though it appears to lead to professional and personal ruin. But they're as human as anyone else, and most aren't made of the same stuff as their fantastic ink embodied heroes.
On this one, artists are, I feel, a lost cause. Musicians are particularly ill equipped. Often been suckered and cheated, by publishers. Many do sort of get it after an experience of that sort. Authors, however, should do better. Perhaps that's a problem with fiction-- authors take too far the freedom it gives them, veer too easily into propagandizing. If you look for it, you can find in much fantasy exaggerated property rights, and extremely exaggerated valuations of physical embodiments of knowledge, with much melodrama over it all. No, to resolve this matter permanently, the rest of us will have to drag them, kicking and screaming, back to reality.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Monday April 20 2020, @06:00PM (3 children)
You mention science-fiction and fantasy.
One of the major publishers of science-fiction and fantasy, Tor, sells all their ebooks without copy protection.
One science fiction author reports that he has kept one of his books on the New York Times best-seller list by posting a blog entry giving the ebook away for free every time it threatened to drop off the list. Every time he did this, sales picked up again.
They seem to have gotten the message.
Yet they are still profitable.
-- hendrik
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday April 21 2020, @12:09AM (2 children)
Some of them have gotten it, yes. Cory Doctorow is notable for that. Is he the SF author you mean?
Good for Tor. Baen also. They launched their Baen Free Library some years ago, stocked it with older material that had fallen out of print. I understand it worked, and their sales rose.
Yet these are small steps. Ultimately, fee for copy is unworkable. We all know this, but I think it worthwhile to spell it out anyway. Audio CDs were big in the late 1980s, and the system worked okay because the means to copy them were out of reach of ordinary folk. Best we could do was cassette tape. The 1990s saw the arrival of the CD-ROM drive, then the CD burner, the incredible leap in hard drive capacity, the mp3 audio codec and computers fast enough to decode it in real time, and home Internet. All the pieces were there, and Napster put them together. Big Media treated them to a vicious and hysterical legal lynching that of course utterly failed to turn back the clock. They've been trying that one again, on the Pirate Bay, and it too has failed miserably. When they managed to pervert and corrupt the legal process to hand them an unjustified victory against the Pirate Bay, with the far too harsh punishment of prison time for the operators, they seemed to expect that the public's belief in the justice system would result in general acceptance. They found out how wrong they were. People were not fooled. In the backlash, the Pirate Party won its first seats in the next election.
Now we have flash drives that hold over 100 times as much data as a CD, likewise with hard drives, and home Internet is inexorably getting faster. You hardly bother downloading just one song now, no, you download a collection, perhaps just one album, or perhaps the entire published output of one artist, and throw away or ignore the stuff you don't want. What used to take dozens of boxes of vinyl records now fits in a pocket. It's only going to get more powerful. They should be building new ways of making a living from art, not fighting these hopeless rearguard actions. They really aren't, and still haven't accepted that securing control of copying is a lost cause.
I love e-books. Dumped most of my paperbacks for them. Can do lots of cool data mining on e-books that is totally impractical with paper. For instance, I was curious how often Lord of the Rings mentions "money". A quick search of the text turned up every reference. Until the final chapter in the final book, chapter 10 of the 1st book is the last serious mention, with it used one more time in an expression in the next chapter. Might have thought it would be mentioned at least a few times in connection with the famously money-grubbing dwarfs, but no. Gold, yes, money, no. Just can't do that with paperbacks.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday April 22 2020, @10:19PM
No, it wasn't Cory Doctorow I was thinking of. But he does give away electronic versions of his writing for free from his web site. He started doing it when he started publishing his writing because he needed to stand out in some way in order to get noticed.
The author I mentioned was already an established top-ten author when he started doing it. But I forget his name.
-- hendrik
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 23 2020, @07:14PM
Sorry to nit, but cassettes were hardly the best we could do. The old Reel-to-Reel was a great duplicator and Hi-Fi enabled VCRs would both easily surpass cassettes for sound quality. Some of us were using these to make "better" copies of the CD since many of the earlier CDs were poorly mastered for the CD media (excessive highs typically).