The Pirate Bay gets raided.

[schild]

Frontpaged

Text:

Took them long enough, eh? So, another torrent site gets hit with the law and people get shocked... AGAIN. I don't get it. The stupidity of the public (anywhere) continues to astound me. Did they think it was OK? Every single person who used that site knows that what they're doing is wrong. And one way or another, these people will probably get screwed under some international law. But I know nothing about that sort of shit, all I know is what I read. Anyway, this story will probably be everywhere, but I want to highlight two very important details:

"This defiant immunity from legal action has long baffled observers, but the site has become the flagship of intense debate both inside and outside of their native Sweden. It has even spawned a credible pro piracy movement, the Piratbyrån, and a political party, Piratpartiet (The Pirate Bureau)."

And from a press release by this "Pirate Party," as translated by its <strike>leader</strike> Captain: "Pirate party criticizes police for unlawful and immoral raid.

Am I living on the fucking moon? Who the fuck? What? How? Are these people retarded?

[Original Article]

RULES OF ENGAGEMENT:

1. No biting.
2. No punching below the belt.
3. No pretending you understand Swedish law. If you do, I want you writing a frontpage article.

FIGHT.

[Dren]

Your link to the original article doesn't work like you think it should.

Anyway, stealing is bad mmkay?  However, stealing to prove that somebody is stealing is bad too.  I can't pretend to know everything about this, but it doesn't seem like it would be all that difficult to prove a site is distributing stolen movies right?  Why resort to hacking?

[Roac]

Pirate Bay did not distribute stolen movies, or stolen anything else for that matter; they only distributed links (or rather, torrent files) to sites which do.  It is (was) an index, nothing more.  Far as that goes, the sense is that the laws regarding this are far more flexible in Sweden than in most other countries.  The owners of the site thought so at least, since they had hosted cease and desist letters along with their mocking replies.  Plenty of other sites have flaunted copyright laws citing Swedish protection as well.  The original article indicates that the police are looking to test the waters with this case, so it would suggest even they are not certain of the legality of pushing this through.

We'll see, I guess.  It's legal so long as you can get away with it in public.

[angry.bob]

They all deserve jail time just for using bittorrent to pirate anything bigger than a 6mb MP3. People who think BT is a good way of sharing movies,TV shows, game ISOs, and anime episodes are fucking retards. USENET, USENET, USENET. It's a bajillion times faster than any BT, plus with a small amount of preparation it's pretty much untraceable.

That aside, as much as people loath piracy, it's the direct cause of the DVD box sets of TV shows that are everywhere in the States now instead of just Europe, as well as reducing the lag between domestic and foreign release dates. It's also the biggest determining factor in what Anime series are picked up for release by companies like ADV.

In general I agree that Piracy is bad, but frankly, so are the 70 year old business models that it's forcing changes in as well as the odious changes to copyright law and the DMCA that the MPAA and RIAA have pushed through.  

Content on demand, in you house, on it's release date is the future. The movie theater is dying, and it needs to. The "theater experience" has been shit for decades, and for $12 a ticket I can wait a couple of months and own it on DVD to watch on my HD widescreen. The industry needs to realize that they can make way more by offering the movies as pay-to-download on the same day it's released in theaters. Obviously that would mean a slow death for the theater industry, but frankly I don't give a shit. Nobody cried when the bulk of my industry got offshored to third world shitholes so they could save .001 cent per transaction, so they can suck it too.

[Tebonas]

I get all my US TV shows from Bittorrent. Its just convenient to let it run overnight. I don't care about the speed. It has 6 hours to do its work while I sleep.

Know why I can't buy things like Battlestar Galactica? Because iTunes only allows sales of those in the USA. So fuck them if they don't want my money.

[Broughden]

They all deserve jail time just for using bittorrent to pirate anything bigger than a 6mb MP3. People who think BT is a good way of sharing movies,TV shows, game ISOs, and anime episodes are fucking retards. USENET, USENET, USENET. It's a bajillion times faster than any BT, plus with a small amount of preparation it's pretty much untraceable.

That aside, as much as people loath piracy, it's the direct cause of the DVD box sets of TV shows that are everywhere in the States now instead of just Europe, as well as reducing the lag between domestic and foreign release dates. It's also the biggest determining factor in what Anime series are picked up for release by companies like ADV.

In general I agree that Piracy is bad, but frankly, so are the 70 year old business models that it's forcing changes in as well as the odious changes to copyright law and the DMCA that the MPAA and RIAA have pushed through.  

Content on demand, in you house, on it's release date is the future. The movie theater is dying, and it needs to. The "theater experience" has been shit for decades, and for $12 a ticket I can wait a couple of months and own it on DVD to watch on my HD widescreen. The industry needs to realize that they can make way more by offering the movies as pay-to-download on the same day it's released in theaters. Obviously that would mean a slow death for the theater industry, but frankly I don't give a shit. Nobody cried when the bulk of my industry got offshored to third world shitholes so they could save .001 cent per transaction, so they can suck it too.

Good angry post. I give this a thumb's up.

Question though. Do you really think increased TV series boxed sales (at a far faster rate of release following airing), and decrease in time between EU and US release dates can be attributable to the effect of pirating on the industry?

[angry.bob]

Question though. Do you really think increased TV series boxed sales (at a far faster rate of release following airing), and decrease in time between EU and US release dates can be attributable to the effect of pirating on the industry?

I do. "Back in the day" I was a member of several boards that were all about people in the UK making SVCD rips of TV box sets and trading them for camcordered US movies, and in some cases SCVD rips of domestic release DVD's. The community grew exponentially and eventually DVD burners became common enough that people started offering ISO's. It was right after that the TV and movie industries started bitching specifically about people circumventing Regions, that domestic box sets would not happen because it interfered with the value of show syndication, and that sharing recordings of TV programming was piracy too. About 6 months after that the first TV box sets started showing up and selling way better than they expected and the delay in release dates dwindled. In about a year it was a bigger pain in the ass to pirate the stuff and more expensive than to just wait. When you factor in locating which group the stuff is posted in, downloading it, joining the rar files and fixing any that are bad, dicking around with the image format, burning it, etc, and then doing it for 23 more episodes it was just less hassle, time, and money to pay $60 for the commercial release. It's not that hard to do now, but this was back in the day before recovery programs like PAR existed. If you had a bad rar file it meant repost requests and all sorts of hassle.

Do I have any proof? No, not really. But I know we had at least one industry mole (on the TV side) on the board seeing what we were up too and what we were trading. It wouldn't suprise me if they simply listened to what was being said and lobbied to have the waters tested with the Buffy season 1 box set. The timing of what was happening in the community and what was happening in the industry was too in synch to have been coincidence.

[Sairon]

I live in Sweden and have learned some of the legal parts involved in this from friends. Under the current laws there's nothing considered illegal in this. I've heard that if they walk free on this one then raids won't be allowed in any form based on piracy. The police didn't handle the matter very professional as well imo, they seized all servers in a very popular server farm, where piratebay also had theirs. A lot of servers offering commercial content was taken offline, there could of course be legal consequences for the police because of this.

While I do agree that piracy is wrong it's pretty much become accepted in Sweden, studies shows that there's 1 300 000 pirates in Sweden, in a country with a total population of roughly 9 000 000 that's huge. They say that after piratebay was taken down internet traffic in Sweden went down with 20%. I don't think that the corporations will win this battle, piracy is so accepted that it has political meaning to support it.

[bhodi]

It's not piracy, it's copyright infringement. I hope they walk.

[HaemishM]

Bah, callig it piracy is just a cute way for the wannabe rebels to think that copying a movie is somehow a romantic adventure in "Sticking it to the man!"

We all know copyright laws are fucked and getting fucked-er by the day. It's all about the money. Whose money are you picking up? I think we've long since passed the point where an amicable solution for both parties involved could be reached. The copyright holding corporations (not most of the original creators mind you) want total control (and thus monetary value) of every single viewing of the copyright material, and the users want to be able to view the shit they buy without hassle when they want to and in whatever format they want to.

But the whole situation has degenerated into a holy war, and the eventual losers will be the pirates and the people taht want content their way.

I've yet to see a study of "the effects of piracy" that didn't count every single downloaded song as a lost purchase.

[Strazos]

It really is all about the money. A lot of times, companies just price the things out of range for a lot of people. Simply put, if more media was reasonably priced, there would be more people getting things "legally."

Case in point - the ST: Voyager the Complete Series on DVD has a completely unrealistic price.

The The Complete Evangelion series on the other hand, completely realistic price for the whole thing.

Also, music CDs seem to have, at least to me, come down in price in recent years. $12-14 is reasonable. $.99 per song on iTunes seems reasonable, though I have never used the service.

Then again, how many times have we done this thread now in just the past year?

[bhodi]

I've yet to see a study of "the effects of piracy" that didn't count every single downloaded song as a lost purchase.

This is really my favorite, because we love charts:

[koboshi]

the whole situation has degenerated into a holy war, and the eventual losers will be the pirates and the people taht want content their way.

{buzz} Oh I'm sorry, it was a good guess but thats not the correct answer. Thanks for playing our game!

[HaemishM]

Why not? The corporate copyright holders have the money to get the laws changed the way they want, and the wherewithal to actually arrest these motherfuckers. Pirates will always find ways to pirate shit, but the guy in the middle, the normal consumer, is going to get fucked either way.

[Chenghiz]

I'm curious as to how creators and innovators would ever see the profit from their works if there was no such thing as a copyright.

[koboshi]

  The problem isn’t IP rights it's the unwillingness to change. What piracy is doing is demonstrating that there is a faster cheaper way of getting the games, movies, and TV shows, we all know and love. The price of most products has been inflated by the cost of production. Many industries are/have/will be dead, chemical film development, film shipment and retrieval, game pressing, shipping, marketing, TV demographic studies, TV advertising. As soon as the entertainment industry stops referring to these companies as part of the "we" they are going to realize that this isn’t a big problem for them it’s just going to be different.

  True the industries could wage a war with the coming tide but they will fail. The market forces in play here will not be held back for long. A good historical example would be the Pony Express; it was at one point successful and eventually was destroyed by better technology. This is not to say that communications industry died, just that those businesses that were considered irrevocably linked to the method and not to the service were doomed the moment the new technology became available. If game, film and TV companies continue to define themselves by their current distribution methods they will fail.

  I hate to say these words but there has been an enormous paradigm shift for the entertainment industry and there is going to be a lot of lost jobs but that’s not the pirates' fault. It's the internet's.  Piracy is the symptom and you can’t cure it without fixing the underlying problem.

[koboshi]

I'm curious as to how creators and innovators would ever see the profit from their works if there was no such thing as a copyright.

see: Christo

His art is public. He cannot and does not charge for admission.

[bhodi]

I'm curious as to how creators and innovators would ever see the profit from their works if there was no such thing as a copyright.

Copyright was intended as a temporary enforced monopoly, giving the creator some time to profit before releasing the work(s) into the public domain to enrich the collective knowledge. We got to where we are today by building on the knowledge of our forefathers. Keeping knowledge locked up does not allow civilization to grow.

Needless to say, that's not what it is now.

(I'm not using this as a defence of copyright infringement, but to legislated constriction of knowledge in general. Free as in speech, not as in beer.)

[JoeTF]

They all deserve jail time just for using bittorrent to pirate anything bigger than a 6mb MP3. People who think BT is a good way of sharing movies,TV shows, game ISOs, and anime episodes are fucking retards. USENET, USENET, USENET. It's a bajillion times faster than any BT, plus with a small amount of preparation it's pretty much untraceable.

Oh God! USENTET was made for transferring short text messages. It really was, it will even convert your damn multi gigabyte porn files into ASCII. It's also super_mega_unsafe, if you know what I mean. You have to pay those companies with your bloody CC and they have record of everything you ever downloaded (unless every USENET server is located in Palestine, which I doubt).

[Merusk]

I'm curious as to how creators and innovators would ever see the profit from their works if there was no such thing as a copyright.

There's copyright, and then there's idiocy.  Warner Brothers and Disney lobbied for the current extension to copyright law because Bugs Bunny & Mickey Mouse were about to become public license.  Rather than accept that, hey, that's a reality they had the law changed to - what is it now 75 years after the Creator's Death?  I know at one point I heard 100 years AD being volley around as well. 

My profession is protected by copyright, but wasn't for oh.. a few thousand years up until the 1970s.  You made money in Architecture by being BETTER than everyone else and knowing your shit.  Now you do it by producing a few copyright plans and cranking the shit out of them or selling them to plan shops.

Plus, it simply screws the little guy.  You can only come-up with so many ways to configure a 2000 sq. ft. home with 3 beds 2 baths and 4 rooms.  If it's anywhere near one of the larger builder's plans, the burden of proof is on the infringed to prove he didn't rip it off.

[bhodi]

BT is a better way than usenet for me, since my old ISP charges by the gig and I don't even know if my new ISP *HAS* a news server.

[Righ]

If we let people watch TV or listen to music without paying for it every time they do and for each differnt media type or device they own, it's international terrorism, and satan will eat our children. It's the hyperbole that's pathetic. Sure, fine these stupid wankers. But that's it. Calls for harsh criminal sentences for downloading copyrighted media are unwarranted, and attempts by media companies to outlaw my rights to rip my vinyl to digital formats and listen to it privately are absurd.

If people are looking for a good UseNet leeching service, I can recommend Readnews. It has good reliability, completion, retention and speed. Even for the binary groups where people post dodgy shit.

I use bittorrent for legal stuff. Like live shows of taper-friendly bands (see www.dimeadozen.org). And Linux distros.

[angry.bob]

Oh God! USENTET was made for transferring short text messages. It really was, it will even convert your damn multi gigabyte porn files into ASCII.  

Yes, but that doesn't change the fact that it works just peachy for distributing multi-gig files. On an average day I can download 10 to 16 gigs of files from USENET without breaking a sweat. I've never been able to come even close to that using any BT client. And there's none of the bullshit that you get with BT with client program resource use, finding a seed, hoping people are sharing it, and that they have a good connection. With USENET, if it's on the server you just download it at whatever speed your connection is.

It's also super_mega_unsafe, if you know what I mean. You have to pay those companies with your bloody CC and they have record of everything you ever downloaded (unless every USENET server is located in Palestine, which I doubt).

Well, yeah, if you're dumb about it. You can't use USENET without getting spammed with guides for anonymous downloading. There are quite a few free services that allow anonymous logins and downloads without keeping logs. Couple that with the same techniques used for surfing anonymously and it's just fine. Sure it's sad that you'd have to go to the same lengths to download an mkv file of the latest Black Lagoon fansub as a child molester would use to distribute video of him fucking a toddler, but there you go. That's a pretty good barometer if a regulation or law is unbalanced. If it puts a sizeable enough portion of the population in the same position as people who fuck babies, something is just wrong. Sort of like pot laws. If everyone who's ever held actually went to jail, the free population of the country would consist of me and about 1000 other people. And most of them would be in their 80's.

[sarius]

I get all my US TV shows from Bittorrent. Its just convenient to let it run overnight. I don't care about the speed. It has 6 hours to do its work while I sleep.

Know why I can't buy things like Battlestar Galactica? Because iTunes only allows sales of those in the USA. So fuck them if they don't want my money.

I feel the same way about British programming.  I really liked the recent Hyperspace series, but couldn't find a legal way to watch the thing over here.

[Chenghiz]

Certainly there is a point at which copyrighted works should become public domain. But that's a completely different issue than pirated Windows XP distros and the latest sequel to X-men getting tossed around on piratebay.

[Fabricated]

Most ISPs and Usenet companies don't bother keeping records of who downloads what since it's a waste of time and they can avoid legal hassles for record requests by saying, "What records?"

As for the Pirate Bay, as far as I know it was legal under Swedish law. If Long-Arm satutes or whatever apply, I dunno.

Here's a message from one of the founders.

As a co-founder & crew member of Piratbyrån (The Piracy Bureau), the Swedish pro-piracy organization that started The Pirate Bay a couple of years ago, I can confirm that several people were taken for questioning but as far as I know they are all released after being DNA-tested (!) and questioned. The servers seized are not only hosting The Pirate Bay, but also our servers at Piratbyrån (we're just a political organisation in favor of free information exchange) and several sites not related to piracy at all (like the humor site http://istheshit.net/, several private websites & irc shells etc), which were located in the same server farm (belonging to the hosting company PRQ).

The absurdity of this raid is sure to cause alot of debate in Sweden, since we pirates have a strong voice and good experience with dealing with the media. Also, there has been alot of discussions and debates on TV and in news papers, so even people not filesharing alot themselves are somewhat familiar with the terms and understand that it's not "evil hackers" or terrorists or something involved in this.

Even the police admits that they don't know if this is legal or not, so my guess is that they're simply doing this to be a nuisance and cause some problems (the bandwith usage in several Swedish cities has already declined compared to an ordinary wednesday), so the worst thing that will happen is that they keep the servers for a long time claiming "investigations", I doubt that anyone will be convicted. One strong reason to doubt this is that the high court in '96 or something stated that it's NOT illegal to supply links to copyrighted material if you're not hosting it yourself.

[bhodi]

Another problem with usenet (or as I mentally refer to it, news) is that it's like sticking a cup into a river; Servers don't keep more than maybe 3, 4 days worth of binaries online and then it's gone, unlike popular torrents which can stick around for weeks or even months straight. Generally you check usenet if you don't want anything in particular but want to see what's 'out there', or you check it once a day so you don't miss anything. Often times stuff's missing posts, or half the posts have been purged from your server to make room for more, etc... Add to that the crazy amount of post spam and I've found it's generally more trouble than it's worth.

[Fabricated]

Another problem with usenet (or as I mentally refer to it, news) is that it's like sticking a cup into a river; Servers don't keep more than maybe 3, 4 days worth of binaries online and then it's gone, unlike popular torrents which can stick around for weeks or even months straight. Generally you check usenet if you don't want anything in particular but want to see what's 'out there', or you check it once a day so you don't miss anything. Often times stuff's missing posts, or half the posts have been purged from your server to make room for more, etc... Add to that the crazy amount of post spam and I've found it's generally more trouble than it's worth.

You can get some USENET providers with really long retention. Not worth the cash IMO since it's basically a grabbag in terms of piracy. If you want the newest of the newest pirated stuff then you can reliably find what you want, but old stuff needs to be requested and you typically need to provide something in return for it.

[Hoax]

Been watching the front page (nice redesign btw! I like it) and I really couldn't resist the urge to check on this thread.

The only thing I "pirate" are anime and music.

Here is my logic:

anime:
I can't get the stuff without the fansub'ers.  I do buy stuff I really really like when it comes out on dvd but you know what kills me?  A hd encode by a good group is of higher quality then the fucking ugly plain subs that they use on commercial dvd's.  DVD's I'm supposed to pay $20 a pop for.  At least I get some stupid dvd extras and an ad for newtype though right?

music:
First of all, I hate music stores seriously I fucking despise them.  Secondly the amount of bad music out there is staggering.  I do buy cd's but usually only after I have listened to the whole thing already via the intranets.  I just can't stand spending $16 for one song I like that I heard and 14 other songs that fucking suck.  Really I haven't done any serious music downloading since the old Napster days its just not even worth the effort anymore.  I did get a complete Bob Dylan discography off piratebay once though, I wonder if I ran into him and asked if he would care?

When I'm older and more financially responsible and stable I'm  sure I will bother to pimp out my soundsystems and buy cd's or whatever we're using in the future for all the music I like.  But right now I listen to music as a backround for game sound effects on headphones.  A cd just can't compare to the temporary joy of a pair of 12-packs...


Anyways, judging from how sure the site operators seemed in all their mocking replies to companies that served them with C&D's I'm guessing they will be fine.  Here is hoping that somehow European countries like Sweeden and Germany can save the internet from over-zealous and crazy stupid American lawmakers.

[Krakrok]

Certainly there is a point at which copyrighted works should become public domain. But that's a completely different issue than pirated Windows XP distros and the latest sequel to X-men getting tossed around on piratebay.

It's the same.

When should Windows XP enter the public domain? 150 years from now when it's decaying in some landfill or sooner? What about Windows 1.3? Or MS-DOS 6.2? Under current law it will be around 2140.

When should the game Darklands enter the public domain? The company that published it no longer exists. Under current law it will be somewhere around 2140.

When should the 'Dorrie' book series by Patricia Coombs be public domained? The auther is dead and the ~20 some odd books are no longer in production from multiple non-existant publishing companies. A Coombs family member has no idea who owns the copyrights even. Under current law it will be somewhere around 2110.

The Mickey Mouse Act retroactively re-copyrighted works. Half of the John Carter series by Edgar Rice Burroughs is public domain and the other half got it's copyright retroactively extended.

Not to mention the WIPO treaty that the USA is pushing at the WTO which will allow broadcasters to own a copyright on anything they broadcast (re-copyrighting public domain works just by broadcasting them).

And it isn't about money at all. It's about control. DRM isn't about money just like the 'all internet radio stations must have DRM' segment in the proposed PERFORM Act from Senator Feinstein isn't about money. The RIAA already gets more money per song from internet radio stations than they do from regular radio stations so adding govt. mandated DRM to them isn't going to make them any more money. What it is going to do is add a control layer (and possibly drive some competition out of business).

[Kitsune]

Piracy is a line of communication from the consumer to the producer, in a language that the producer understands.  And it says, 'You're overcharging for your crap, and we know that your 'Special Edition' DVD will be replaced with a 'Super Special Edition' DVD in six months to try to fuck us out of more money.'

In Galactic Civilizations, when you cross a certain point with your tax meter, you actually start to get less money, under the theory that citizens have turned to tax evasion rather than pay you.  In the real world, when people don't like something about a product, they don't buy it.  Except now with digital media, people can steal it on top of not buying it.

Would eradicating piracy increase sales?  No.  The people pirating something have no intention of purchasing it, that's why they're stealing it.  If they had any motivation to buy it, they would've.  And while some people would actually pay for something they couldn't pirate, they'd be balanced out by the people who pirate things for a 'try before you buy' and wind up purchasing the product because they pirated it.  Several people I know will download music, then go and buy the album if they like it.  What the RIAA decries as blatant theft actually gets them sales in those situations.

Meanwhile, going apeshit and suing everyone, suing the consumers, suing the hardware and software writers, stifling innovations that 'help infringe copyright' like DVD burners, well, that's not making them any friends.

[Righ]

Piracy is armed robbery commited at sea not under the flag of sovereign nation. Downloading Johnny Depp movies doesn't make you Edward bloody Teach.

[Samwise]

I tend to agree with your assessment, Kitsune, even if it is impossible to prove - no two studies on the matter every say the same thing, since it's impossible to know with certainty whether someone who downloaded something would have bought it otherwise.  There are many CDs I own which I would never have bought if I hadn't downloaded portions of them first and found out I liked them, so I personally find it very hard to buy the notion that music "piracy" actually costs the record industry money.

I agree 100% that control is the bigger issue.  This is all a smokescreen for the evil master plan to shift the record industry to a per-play micropayment system.  Why sell a CD for $20 when you can rent it at 5 cents per time played over the buyer's lifetime?

[Righ]

There are many CDs I own which I would never have bought if I hadn't downloaded portions of them first and found out I liked them

That's probably true of a good number of current and prior music collectors who are downloading songs - and in fact its supplanting radio, which has ceased to be a viable source for discovering new music. However, there are many more people who download music and won't ever buy a CD at all. Many of them will keep huge collections of MP3s and many will simply discard the music once they've listened to it, and just download it again if they want to listen to it again. These will inevitably be the younger music listeners, and no matter what legal systems you put in place, they'll simply not buy in. The problem is that the music industry was built on the fatted calf of singles sales, where millions of teenagers would buy the latest dreck and get together to be able to listen to more than they could afford. Home taping cut into that, CDs cut into it, and so has digital distribution. The kids spend their money on other shit now - they see the music as free. You can't get their dollars back, all you can do is use prosecutions and threats to drive them away from music altogether, which is what is happening.

The music moguls who grew fat and lazy in the 50s and 60s are now old dogs who can't learn new tricks. And the old tricks don't work. That's why the music industry is failing. Not because of the cassette tape or the Internet.

[Margalis]

I actually don't think Mickey Mouse should EVER be public domain. Should 60-year-old Disney movies become public domain? Sure. But the character itself? That doesn't make any sense to me, and I don't see how Micky Mouse being public domain improves society or anything like that. I may be getting lost in the whole copyright, patent, trademark differentiation though.