A decade ago this week, Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, and Carl Lundström were all found guilty of 'assisting in making copyright content available' via their site, The Pirate Bay. Each was sentenced to a year in jail and their fines totaled over $3 million. Now ten years on, the site has a life of its own without those four. It has been the target of a many takedown notices and has even been blocked multiple times.
Ten years ago this week, four men were found guilty and sentenced to prison for running The Pirate Bay. At the time, Peter Sunde said that the site would continue, no matter what. A decade on he has been proven absolutely right and that in itself is utterly remarkable.
Earlier on SN:
The Pirate Bay Turns 15 Years Old (2018)
How The Pirate Bay Helped Spotify Become a Success (2018)
The Man from Earth Sequel "Pirated" on The Pirate Bay - By Its Creators (2018)
How The US Pushed Sweden to Take Down The Pirate Bay (2017)
What's a Digital Copy Worth? Not Much, Says Peter Sunde's New Machine (2015)
Related Stories
Peter Sunde, co-founder of The Pirate Bay, has taken steps to refute the notion of many in the music publishing industry that each digital copy has a certain value--upon which should be based damages if someone is found to have committed copyright infringement.
Sunde has built a machine from a Raspberry PI, called Kopismashin, designed to make copies of single tracks at the rate of 100 copies per second [and drops them to /dev/null].
"I want to show the absurdity on the process of putting a value to a copy.... [F]ollowing their rhetoric and mindset it will bankrupt them," says Sunde.
A series of documents released by the US Department of State have revealed how Sweden was pressed to take action against The Pirate Bay. According to US officials, this directly led to law enforcement's decision to shut down the torrent site more than ten years ago. Sweden, meanwhile, avoided a spot on the feared US Trade Representative's 301 Watch List.
[...] The trail starts with a cable sent from the US Embassy in Sweden to Washington in November 2005. This is roughly six months before the Pirate Bay raid, which eventually resulted in criminal convictions for four men connected to the site.
The Embassy writes that Hollywood's MPAA and the local Anti-Piracy Bureau (APB) met with US Ambassador Bivins and, separately, with Swedish State Secretary of Justice at the time, Dan Eliasson. The Pirate Bay issue was at the top of the agenda during these meetings.
"The MPA is particularly concerned about PirateBay, the world's largest Torrent file-sharing tracker. According to the MPA and based on Embassy's follow-up discussions, the Justice Ministry is very interested in a constructive dialogue with the US. on these concerns," the cable reads.
"Embassy understands that State and Commerce officials have also met with Swedish officials in Washington on the same concern," it adds, with the Embassy requesting further "guidance" from Washington.
Source : How The US Pushed Sweden to Take Down The Pirate Bay
Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
With the file-sharing wars in full swing, 2007 saw the movie The Man From Earth being pirated all over the Internet, but its creators didn't fight the movement. Instead, they embraced pirates and thanked them for their attention. More than a decade on its sequel, The Man From Earth: Holocene, is again being shared on The Pirate Bay. But this time its creators put it there themselves.
Source: https://torrentfreak.com/the-man-from-earth-sequel-pirated-on-the-pirate-bay-by-its-creators-180116/
One of the latest beneficiaries of sharing music online, according to TorrentFreak, turns out to be the streaming music service Spotify:
Without The Pirate Bay, Spotify may have never turned into the success it is today. Ten years ago record labels were so desperate to find an answer to the ever-growing piracy problem that they agreed to take a gamble. Now, more than a decade later, Spotify has turned into a billion-dollar company, with pirate roots.
Last autumn the EU suppressed a 300-page copyright study showing yet again that copyright infringement does not harm sales. It often helps sales. Both factors have been known for a long time, with other studies going back to the 1990s.
Earlier on SN:
- Spotify Files for IPO After Losing $1.5 Billion in 2017
- Spotify Raises Cash to Fight Apple for Streaming Music Market
- Band Earns $20K for Silent Album on Spotify
Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984
The Pirate Bay Turns 15 Years Old
Founded in 2003 by a group of hackers and activists, The Pirate Bay aimed to bring file-sharing to the masses. In the fifteen years that followed, the site transformed from a small community to Hollywood's resilient arch-rival, serving millions of users. And that's not the only thing that changed. Todayish, The Pirate Bay turns 15 years old, which is quite an achievement considering the immense legal pressure it has faced over the years.
While the exact launch date is a bit of a mystery, even to the site's founders, August 10 was previously chosen as its anniversary. What we do know is that the site was brought online in 2003 by now-disbanded pro-culture organization Piratbyrån, which is Swedish for Bureau of Piracy. The group was formed by political activists and hackers in the same year, many of whom had already launched other web projects challenging political, moral, and power structures.
One of the group's unwritten goals was to offer a counterweight to the propaganda being spread by local anti-piracy outfit Antpiratbyrån. With BitTorrent as the up-and-coming file-sharing technology, they saw fit to start their own file-sharing site to promote sharing of information.
The Pirate Bay first came online in Mexico where Gottfrid Svartholm, aka Anakata, hosted the site on a server owned by the company he was working for at the time. After a few months, the site moved to Sweden where it was hosted on a Pentium III 1GHz laptop with 256MB RAM. This one machine, which belonged to Fredrik Neij, aka TiAMO, kept the site online and included a fully operational tracker.
Related: Anti-Piracy Firm: P2P Piracy Still Relevant
(Score: 5, Interesting) by RamiK on Monday April 22 2019, @10:19AM (4 children)
Back in the golden age of Chinese knockoffs you could get a brand name ware of any kind if you looked hard enough. And if you know some Chinese and your way around taobao I understand this hasn't really changed.
So, here's a thought: If you're a state actor that hates seeing money getting sent to the US, wouldn't you run/fund a film, music and literature piracy operation? The risks are non-existent. The American lawyers aren't looking too deep as long as they can keep issuing take-down requests that keep them under retainers. Your own population enjoys a lot of free entertainment and ends up spending their money on local goods instead...
Good business all around. No?
compiling...
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday April 22 2019, @12:46PM (2 children)
Run a clandestine pirate site, so the state has plausible deniability that they're in any way involved? I dunno, might be tricky. What is the state to do when the copyright cartels bring to bear all their power to force the state to crack down on piracy? Unfortunately, they still have teeth, and can get the lax state sanctioned in various ways if they don't do something real. If they have a lot of Pirate Party politicians in power, that makes it all the harder to play that game convincingly.
It might ultimately be better to run the piracy operation openly, and call the MAFIAA out on their copyright extremism. I keep hoping a few nations will try it. Like, maybe Egypt will pump some serious resources and effort into their dream of recreating the idea of the Library of Alexandria, online, with modern material.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday April 22 2019, @04:59PM
You assume, that they are in any way interested in providing free access to information. As opposed to just wanting a sizable cut of the pie.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday April 22 2019, @10:57PM
First entry [youtube.com] to go into the library.
(point: TPB/entertainment may be a bad starting point for the idea of a library. Maybe scihub, tho?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 22 2019, @02:38PM
Entertainment is different from watches or phones, as they present the culture and values of the producing nation.
Far too many criminals outside of USA ask for their "miranda rights" thanks to one to many cop shows and such being imported from the states.
(Score: 5, Informative) by terrab0t on Monday April 22 2019, @12:21PM (3 children)
If your local government has compromised the DNS system you can always find The Pirate Bay on TOR [uj3wazyk5u4hnvtk.onion] via its .onion address.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 22 2019, @12:57PM (1 child)
Or make the DNS lookups for thepiratebay go to the cloudflare nameservers or use OpenNIC.
I use the onion myself for TPB and my DNS upstream is OpenNIC, but I have pdnsd set up to do lookups at the dns authority for several pirate domains.
https://www.skytorrents.lol [skytorrents.lol] is an excellent DHT search engine.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 22 2019, @02:57PM
here's another one:
http://enotegggr635n4lw.onion?5f3e392c7d3ffa225ce1cc51ff7c605ff9bde134 [enotegggr635n4lw.onion]
try not to kill it, pls.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 23 2019, @06:21PM
everyone already uses dnscrypt-proxy, right?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by takyon on Monday April 22 2019, @03:35PM (1 child)
In the age of deplatforming, nationwide social media bans, LiveLeak becoming crap, etc., torrents still have their place.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Monday April 22 2019, @11:04PM
So will the dark web.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 23 2019, @12:41AM
P2P represents freedom to exchange and distribute information which any state would rather not allow. They have too many skeletons in the closet. Any website can be closed down, threatened, blocked. But P2P will still be around and it must.
The hoax that torrents allow download of crap, useless holy-wood films is only a hoax. The real purpose of hating on P2P is because it brings freedom. Therefore we must have more of it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 23 2019, @08:31AM (3 children)
As someone not downloading movies, music, etc I feel I lack a bit of knowledge about "piracy". Is there any trend to move away from torrents to some other more anonymous platforms? Are there even any viable alternatives at all?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday April 23 2019, @09:04AM
The trend is toward illicit streaming services that are effectively "anonymous" because you are not uploading to anybody and there are no legal consequences for using it (at least in the U.S., for the moment).
One "privacy" measure is the VPN. A lot of people are being paid to promote VPNs in the last couple of years, this is apparent when watching some YouTubers or reading up on Kodi addons, etc. If your ISP is your worst enemy, a VPN could be what you want.
If you want hardcore anonymity, you will probably have to accept a significant slowdown, which could impair your streaming/downloading of movies.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by urza9814 on Tuesday April 23 2019, @01:00PM (1 child)
Eh, torrents are still a good choice.
We used to have dedicated P2P apps like Limewire and such, but as far as I can tell those are mostly dead. And good riddance...all data passing through centralized servers was a terrible model.
There's the online streaming stuff -- where people just Google "watch [movie] online" or something like that and a few results will turn up. The benefit is you aren't sharing, so you aren't as liable legally...but the downside is the majority of the results are already shut down, outright fake, or just distributing viruses disguised as "codecs".
There's probably still some darkweb stuff...I used to download through Freenet, although the network I used back then has only the name in common with today's version. So I dunno how prevalent that is anymore, but it's definitely possible. It tended to be rather slow though -- days, not hours. I think some people might still use IRC as well, although I don't know much about that.
But torrents seem to be the main option. Torrents can be as secure as you want them to be though, which is both a benefit and a liability (since that security isn't by default). You can use private trackers (typically invite only), you can block known enforcement agencies from connecting to your node (ie, Transmission privacy settings using a list like Bluetack level 1), you can use a VPN or proxy your traffic through Tor. It's an open protocol that takes care of the P2P part, and you can build whatever other systems you need on top of that. I'm having trouble thinking of anything you could do with a new P2P client that couldn't already be accomplished through configuration of your BitTorrent client settings. It's just a matter of knowing what you want to configure.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 23 2019, @07:57PM
Bluetack looks like it's offline?