Not sure if this is common knowledge, but I was told a few weeks ago from a friend with insight into the bust that TPB servers were located by law enforcement who analyzed clips from a documentary. Not sure if it was TBP AFK or some other video, but it doesn't matter. The point is that you shouldn't let any random ol' folks take footage of sensitive locations. You never know what'll end up happening.
Can someone explain why you can't just use the IP address to track it down? I mean some ISP somewhere must control it, and they must know what physical link it's bound to, etc...
I believe from what I have read, that they have multiple servers that all mirror each other all around the world in run of the mill hosting. They also have load balancers that are in places more secure, all that will be taken down is the load balancers.
It's like they'll never learn from Suprnova, IsoHunt, OiNK, etc. All have replacements which are lots better than the original. The communities even stay somewhat together in some cases where there's a clear migration path from one just-shutdown site to another with the same ideology. The software also improves in an evolutionary response to law enforcement, so the effect they're actually driving is exactly the opposite of what they want.
On the other hand, things like Spotify show that overwhelmingly, people would rather pay for awesome convenience vs even the minimal effort of something like Popcorn Time. It's been the same story for decades now, from ftp dumps and warez channels to Usenet and torrents to rapidshare and magnet links, they'll never succeed in stamping out piracy.
FWIW, it still exists: http://www.demonoid.pw/. I missed it dearly at first, but I'm currently satisfied between The Pirate Bay, gen.lib.rus.ec, aaaaarg, Monoksop, UbuWeb, Internet Archive, are.na, what.cd, and Karagarga.
Same here in the UK. Looks like before my ISP had blocked the specific IPs AND the domain at the DNS level. Obviously now TPB is using a different IP, so if you use Google's DNS servers instead of your ISP's then you should be able to access the site just fine.
Same here! It was banned in Argentina and now I can access to it without problem. My guess is that they are using a new IP (pinging thepiratebay.se gives me the IP 104.28.5.42, which seems to be part of CloudFare network). I'm reading the legal order (http://www.scribd.com/doc/232031432/cnc-tpb-argentina-pdf) and they not only ask to ban IPs from 194.71.107.0 to 194.1.107.255, they also ask ISP DNS resolvers to ban thepiratebay.se (an related domains). Good thing I'm not using my ISP DNS :)
Be careful with torrents. For the first time in my life i just got sued for downloading a torrent. More specifically i was downloading an episode of a TV series that is only available in german in my country, but since i much prefer the original voices,i always resorted to just downloading it. I thought i was save, because it's just a TV show after all, also i was downloading a version not available here anyway, so i wouldn't impact any sales in my country. How wrong i was... You should really be careful with torrenting these days, in some countries at least. Maybe disabling upload altogether helps, but i wouldn't try it.
No need, honestly. Clicking a link on TPB isn't against any laws that I'm aware of. If you want to nail someone for infringement, you watch them on the swarm, not the site.
Having ads means you're acting commercially which is a very bad idea if you already in a semi-legal area. Besides from that it's far away from their initially spread ideology to make a lot of money or show porn ads. I mean TPB users always argue with not wanna seeing ads on DVDs and being enforced to anything and then their website is just unusable without ad blocker.
As of now there's still no article about the "incident" in their blog[1], but I'm sure there will be one soon. At first glance, users, comments, etc. appear to be working, though there aren't many new uploads yet.
They're not the same. se does not have a facebook thing on the front page, it has more links on the bottom of the front page (including a login). Their logos are different. Search results are different (vu seems more up to date). se uses https.
Pirating movies, music, software and so on strikes me as a mostly selfish act, and only loosely related to being anti-government due to there being laws against stealing (in the copyright infringement sense).
Also I don't really see the distinction between watching football, and watching whatever movie one has pirated via sites such as TPB.
Living in a developing country like India , I see the PirateBay more like Robin Hood , not that they're right in what they do but sites like TPB are how most of us ever get to see most classic films , TV series and learn how to use tools like Photoshop. It's not like many people here can actually afford most of the stuff they pirate so noone really loses.
You don't even have to live in a developing country, some of the only ways to access one tv show is to pay a £15+ per month subscription to say Sky or Virgin so that you can access a small majority of tv shows when they air.
Canistream.it is a good example of all of the services you need to watch movies, and that's just movies not music.
Piracy will still be a large problem because it's either to expensive to access or you need lots of services to access all of the content, of course there are people who never pay for anything and will continue to do so even if easier to access and cheaper but I think they will be a small majority.
> Why can't stuff be priced according to the purchasing power parity of that country. A lot of this stuff is simply over priced by our standards.
Disclaimer: I am a proud pirate.
Generalizing, rightholders don't care. They regard intellectual property as pretty much analogous to physical property. They don't have to sell you something if they don't want to, and they don't have to sell something they're selling at a price point amenable to you. They regard the idea that somehow people are "owed" media content at a price reasonable to them to be an example of a sense of supreme, titanic, piratical entitlement. Can't afford it? Don't watch|listen|use it, then.
> Pirating movies, music, software and so on strikes me as a mostly selfish act
Well, it is. Just like any form of protest. When copyright is 14 years again, and when content will be available on a buy-once-for-ever, lend-to-friends, inheritable, anywhere-in-the-world basis, I'll start paying for movies and music again. In the meantime, I'll just buy stuff from the independent artists I like to support them.
> When copyright is 14 years again, and when content will be available on a buy-once-for-ever, lend-to-friends, inheritable, anywhere-in-the-world basis
In the U.S., all but the first thing is true today for the vast majority of media. Some is encumbered in objectionable ways. And you have the option of buying almost any media in a way that makes it not really yours. But nobody is making you do any of these things.
If you want to buy a movie or album, you can go buy it on a disk. Problem solved.
(I see that you also say "anywhere in the world" but I'm not sure what you mean by this. If you were happy with copyright law in your country, why would objectionable copyright laws abroad justify disregarding fair laws at home?)
I'm from Slovenia, and we don't (didn't, maybe) have access to things like iTunes, Google Play, Netflix, ... Now I'm in the UK, but I imagine that if I bought a Netflix/Spotify subscription and went abroad (e.g. to Slovenia), it would stop working. So I prefer to download movies. For music, yes, you can buy mp3s from e.g. iTunes, so it's less of a problem.
Last time I checked, they had some confusing restrictions... Like you can't download stuff, or can only download so much, so when you're abroad without a free 3G connection, it's basically useless. Maybe they've changed it, though.
and what about the injustice of governments (at least in Europe, don't know elsewhere) that make you pay extra-taxes on any digital support with the excuse that people use them to store pirated material.
I'm pretty pissed off that I have to pay this tax despite storing only legitimate material, but not enough to do something directly. I cheer if someone else is fighting against the way the copyright industry works right now.
Living in the Netherlands, I used to be fine with this. It used to be that you'd pay a bit extra for storage media, but that piracy was tolerated. Downloading, that is. But recently the government caved to EU influences and now downloading content is also enforced to be illegal, yet the storage media taxes remain.
>... pay extra-taxes on any digital support with the excuse that people use them to store pirated material.
That's not what the blank media levy is for. It is a compensation for the right copyright law gives you to copy works you bought in one format to a different format. Think buying conversion of an audio CD into mp3 for listening in your car.
Not that the real justification makes sense, but please stop associating it with piracy: it is wrong and serves to perpetuate this levy.
The blank media levy may well be unfair, but I don't see how enabling or engaging in widespread piracy helps fight against that. It probably does the opposite, given the rationale behind such taxes.
having learned to code in a place were a copy of the OS and the most basic compiler was ten times my parents income, i can see how that helps a little.
i do try to pay back my youth of buccaneering shame by always trying to send a patch with any big report to open source projects
I never understood comments like this. Whoever said it's either/or?
Watching a football game is about three hours out of your week, and that's only for 1/3 of the year when it actually is football season. Less than that if your team doesn't make it to the playoffs.
I've spent a considerable amount of time volunteering in my past while being able to enjoy football all the same. The same can be said about any number of hobbies. Comments like this do nothing but create a false dichotomy.
Isn't more "Panem et Circenses" the practical result of something like the pirate bay? The large majority of the content there is entertainment of all forms produced by the high-class members of the powerful states.
I have become so cynical and scared that I usually do not even click on such websites and links. Can the US police arrest you to visit just the web page and search on it?
I wonder how it is back? Aren't Sunde et. al. in jail for this?
It's about as likely as police arresting you because they feel like it. Which I guess happens, but there is little that can be done personally to guard against it.
(I'm trying to draw a distinction between actions that protect an individual and actions that encourage a fair society there, it's the protecting just yourself against corrupt police that isn't particularly possible)
Yeah, there is a strange misconception on HN that the US legal system is totally broken and that everyone is out to get you. I don't think the data support this. Actually, I believe there is legal precedent that you can't be prosecuted for downloading something from a site like TPB, only from uploading to others (the reasoning is that when you upload you're a distributor).
This is mostly true; it is perfectly legal to download copyrighted material. The crime is in distributing copyrighted material that you do not have any rights to. This means that I do not need to worry about if Hulu, Funimation, or whatever streaming service I am using is complying with the law and obtained the rights to stream their content.
However, in the case of torrents you are also uploading the content, which is illegal; and I believe there is precedent that you can be charged (although I do not have a case handy).
This strategy is mentioned in many bittorrent discussion.
What I have yet to see is any sort of justification for why it is ok to push personal risk onto other people, many of which have no idea how bittorrent works.
If you're going to use bittorrent for works that are protected by copyright, sharing in a small amount of risk is how the protocol works. Technical changes that actually reduce risks are fine; moving risk around is merely hoping someone who is ignorant of the technical details can be the patsy.
I'm not familiar with the specifics of the protocol, but your download speeds would be much slower without uploading. I believe that with BitTorrent, you are penalized/rewarded somehow for not uploading vs. uploading.
Not really, trackers will impose restrictions on users based on seeding ratios, but if you just DHT a random torrent whoever gets bandwidth is more down to random luck than priority towards other seeders. There is just no protocol level mechanism that prioritizes seeding to someone with a higher upload - the choice of who to seed to is up mostly to the implementation.
I don't think you need to worry about that. We live in a world where web browsers implement prefetching to improve overall performance, which means your browser "clicks" links for you in the background all the time. This may or may not end up looking like you visited the website yourself. I'm not sure if they're distinguishable, but you get the point. Aside from that, I don't think visiting The Pirate Bay is illegal in the first place, the same way that talking to a drug dealer isn't necessarily illegal either.
Anyway, if you're still worried, I suggest you use the Tor Browser and stop worrying about these things all together.
>I don't think visiting The Pirate Bay is illegal in the first place, the same way that talking to a drug dealer isn't necessarily illegal either.
You'd think that, but stop and remember what the pirate bay actually does, again.
They don't have copyrighted files. They used to but no longer keep track of the people that do have copyrighted files. All they have is descriptions of files and ID numbers. Plus comments and a search engine.
So while I'm pretty sure you won't get arrested for visiting today, I'm less confident the current law won't become stretched enough to cover it.
> They used to [...] keep track of the people that do have copyrighted files
Did they get rid of their tracker? I don't know actually, but that's not important. Running a torrent tracker is considered very legal in most places (similar to running a Tor exit node or something like that).
> Plus comments and a search engine.
That's the tricky bit.
> So while I'm pretty sure you won't get arrested for visiting today, I'm less confident the current law won't become stretched enough to cover it.
I'd rather you wouldn't just say stuff like that. You're basically spreading FUD. There is no sane reason to believe anybody will ever be arrested (in western countries, that is) for visiting a site like TPB. Which law would you like to stretch in order to make that happen? Using their indexer is similar to getting a menu from your drug dealer. You haven't even attempted to do anything illegal yet. What you'd need is a law that allows you to arrest people for something they haven't even attempted to do (some people call that pre-crime).
What happens in reality instead is governments blocking sites like TPB and that's the end of that.
Wait, you think the comments and search engine are the problem? What if they dumped a big list of the most recent 10000 magnet URLs and descriptions at you?
> You're basically spreading FUD.
Well I am pretty scared and uncertain. The Pirate Bay is already so far removed from the actual copyright infringement that I don't see how another layer of indirection guarantees safety for the people that visit the site. Perhaps you wouldn't get in trouble just for searching, but if you used the search results in the process of infringing copyright I would not be surprised to see some kind of conspiracy to commit copyright infringement charge added on for making the search. Is that completely unreasonable?
Can you explain to me how TPB's actions are illegal today? In the dealer analogy, they've never even seen a drug. They ask you what chemical you want and tell you an arbitrary code word that some dealers will recognize.
The problem can't really be that it's a search engine rather than an unorganized list...can it?
Absolutely not! Once you click a magnet link, you're on your own. I was just talking about visiting the site, searching, really not doing anything.
> Can you explain to me how TPB's actions are illegal today?
Depends on the jurisdiction, I guess. I'm not sure TPB is actually illegal, but that question is quite complex. I really wouldn't know.
> The problem can't really be that it's a search engine rather than an unorganized list...can it?
Of course it is! That's how the ended up in court in the first place. On top of all their legal-ish infrastructure (the trackers, etc.) they provide a website that allows people to aggregate, filter, enrich, etc., content. I'm not sure that alone get's you in trouble (it might not!), but it certainly will once you add ads to finance the entire thing.
>they provide a website that allows people to aggregate, filter, enrich, etc., content.
Well let me put it this way. If they had a site with exactly the same interface for viewing torrent info, but no comments, no votes, no filtering, no searching. You think that would win in court?
I think that it is important to emphasize is that the reason why they want to see it dead is because they want the community to build something new and better instead of relying on an over 10 year old service. They want to see some innovation.
>Can the US police arrest you to visit just the web page and search on it?
I'm going to sound like a paranoid nut (and I can assure you I'm not), but the reality is, if you get a target on your back the "US police" will find a way to arrest you[1].
This is the scary thing about mass data collection; they can concoct any story they want from the breadcrumbs of personal data.
I mostly just lurk on HN... but occasionally I wish I had the time to post more regularly. Just so I could build up enough karma points to have downvote privileges for stuff like this.
TL;DR: The article was basically a critique of people like the parent commenter. In the thread that followed, I came down on the side of those who agreed with the article.
So I would downvote parent for two reasons:
(1) Attempting to twist a thread about the Pirate Bay into a thread about the Super Bowl and "'Murica" is pretentious in the extreme even without Latin, and
(2) I disagree with the popular premise that downloading Game of Thrones and porn == "fighting authoritarian governments". I realize that this makes me a minority here, to the point of possibly being considered a troll for admitting it. Which is one reason why I don't bother posting more, which in turn is one reason why HN is so "hivemind-ish" on many subjects.
>the popular premise that downloading Game of Thrones and porn == "fighting authoritarian governments"
You're confusing the users of the pirate bay with the site itself.
I strongly cheer for the site on freedom of speech grounds, even while I think the kind of downloading you describe is bad.
I think the word "authoritarian" is appropriate to describe shutting down a site for "contributing" to a crime just by letting users leave descriptions and contact info.
1. I think the comment was mostly about applauding the very few who do stand up and fight rather have a good time, i.e., watch football, play video games, dance like nobody's watching, or whatever it is they like to do. I don't think it's extreme at all to use watching football as an analogy given it's popularity. Knitting would have been an odd choice, wouldn't you agree?
2. I'm pretty sure the commenter was talking about running a site like TPB, rather than using it.
By the way: I really don't see any reason to be offended by the comment. Some people stand up and fight, others don't. No shame in that at all.
I really don't see any reason to be offended by the comment.
As someone who enjoys football, I am offended by the comment. It presents a cheap, fictional dichotomy -- this notion that on one side are people who watch football (and apparently nothing else -- if you watch the Super Bowl, clearly that is the entirety of your being), and on the other are the freedom fighters and good people of the world.
My Facebook feed is full of similar people who, when they aren't posting pictures of drinking, building model airplanes, or doing other ultimately selfish acts of little consequence for the world, post trite motivational images that decry those who "care more" about a game than whatever pet cause they've decided is important...at least when berating people who might like something they don't. It's boorish and aggressive, and actually terribly offensive.
And the notion that the Pirate Bay is some sort of good cause is uproariously hilarious. Even putting aside the whole complex, nuanced discussion on piracy (no, people don't don't use the Pirate Bay to download Linux distros), The Pirate Bay is one of the most aggressively shitty sites on the internet. It is full of malware ads, diversions, pop-unders. The operators sell your security to make themselves money (and, apparently, a lot of it). Hurrah for their great benevolence.
I guess the implication is that people who watch football don't care or are simply to stupid to realize what's going on. On the other hand, it is well known that politicians pass unpopular legislation during major sport events — hoping that nobody will notice. Saying things like "Panem et Circenses" can't be offensive by itself then, can it?
Aside from all that, you lost all your moral high-ground in the last paragraph anyway. It might be true that a lot of these people are offensive, but so are you.
I guess the implication is that people who watch football don't care or are simply to stupid to realize what's going on.
Which is an asinine, ignorant bit of comical sophistry. It's the sort of thing that people who are covering for some personal inadequacies project onto others (like the armchair critic who decries someone donating time at an animal shelter because...like...Africa or something. Anything to feel better about one's own inaction). It's especially humorous when we're talking about a site primarily used for sharing entertainment material.
On the other hand, it is well known that politicians pass unpopular legislation during major sport events — hoping that nobody will notice
Is this actually true? At all? Do you have any citation whatsoever to back this up? It sounds like manufactured nonsense.
Aside from all that, you lost all your moral high-ground in the last paragraph anyway.
Because I pointed out the reality about TPB? If you are offended by that, you need to land back on planet Earth, and engage in reality-based discussions.
I tried to find an american article for you, but the Buffalo Bills made that impossible. Anyway, I found a german article (I'm german) from our NPR-equivalent, quoting a law maker during last year's world cup. He said that he believes they could pass the most obscene bills as long as it's during a soccer match. The article then goes on and shows some of the bills they did pass during the world cup (selling tanks to Algeria, what have you). You can read it yourself if you like.
> As someone who enjoys football, I am offended by the comment.
I don't think the poster has anything agains watching football personally, he was just using the activity in a figure of speech as an example. Which passive entertainment activity would you suggest? There is always someone who will be "offended" by anything.
I realize that this makes me a minority here, to the point of possibly being considered a troll for admitting it.
You do come off as a troll, not so much because you oppose TPB, but because of the blatant straw man you use to characterize it.
The main advantage that permissive torrent trackers carry is that they serve as vast cultural archives. No, consuming media is not necessary for survival, but should poverty condemn you to cultural illiteracy?
For the record, I downvoted you both for posting insubstantial comments that are basically throwing out an opinion with nothing of substance, while I upvoted this one for talking about relevant issues.
But I do think that there's an argument to be had that spreading pornography and entertainment against artificial governmental restrictions could be construed as "fighting authoritarian governments". I don't know that I'd consider this kind of struggle particularly brave even, but not every kind of authoritarianism is locking up dissidents and not every kind of struggle is militaristic.
However, I currently am in a monarchy that recently had the civilian government taken over by the military, and currently uses government control of the internet to block pornography on a nation wide basis, so spreading pornography to me is literally combating the arbitrary policies of de facto military government parading around as a monarchy.
