ThePirateBay.org Raided and Shut Down

Source
Swedish police has today taken all the servers of The Pirate Bay into custody, along with the servers of a number of other unrelated web hotel customers. The polise chose to do this despite the fact that the services provided by the world's largest bittorrent tracker has been deemed fully legal in Sweden.

Piratbyrån, a Swedish pro-pirate lobby organisation, also got their servers taken, since they where located in the same server rack.

Three operators of The Pirate Bay are in police custody, and can not currently be reached for comment.

So it doesn't matter if what you are doing is legal in your country, if you piss off American big business your going to get shutdown anyways. I can't say that I'm really surprised though. One thing that I didn't know was that thepiratebay.org formed a new political party in Sweden this year that you can read about here. Could this also be a reason for the raid?

One thing that I didn't know was that thepiratebay.org formed a new political party in Sweden this year

I bet that is the reason for shutting them down. But what do I know about Swedish politics?
It looks like there is a conspiracy here.

Originally posted by deadboi

Source

So it doesn't matter if what you are doing is legal in your country, if you piss off American big business your going to get shutdown anyways.

How in the #%#%$$@ is this America's fault... I Don't get it.

MOD EDIT: Fixing external quotes.

[edit on 5/31/2006 by cmdrkeenkid]

Shouldn't people who create an object, no matter what it is, have certain expectations of property protection? If I work my butt off creating, say, a thread proposing that alien mice have infiltrated a Wisconsin cheese factory, why should someone be able to come along, and with out even a thankyou, or a goodbye kiss, start using it for whatever purpose they deem apropriate.

The laws concerning intellectual properties should be strengthened not weakened.

so according to this, the swedish police have broken the law
this is really sick. how will i now get reruns of smallville. hehe,
smallville airs on a countrywide tvchannel call tvNorge in norway, once a week on sunday. if you miss that..... you don't get to see that episode. and further more, when it comes to the international tvchannels. start airing popular tvshows over satelite in europe (sci-fi channel) then, maybe we won't download the shows.
waiting 5-10 years to see a new season of stargate don't cut it for me.

First off I am neither condemning no condoning what thepiratebay.org does. Second of all I am a software developer so don't get all high a mighty on me about the effects of piracy cause I know all about it.

How in the #%#%$$@ is this America's fault... I Don't get it.

Major American media companies have constantly been harassing thepiratesbay.org but because what they are doing is legal in Sweden there is nothing they can do about it. Now they get raided and shutdown for running a legal business? I think certain people have had their pocket lined cause laws are being ignored.

[edit on 31-5-2006 by deadboi]

Originally posted by elevatedone
How in the #%#%$$@ is this America's fault... I Don't get it.

The Copyright laws are different in Sweden. The majority of companies that were making complaints and hiring Internet Bounty hunters like the Internet Sheriff to threaten TPB were American Companies. The RIAA and MPAA as well as Microsoft were probably 3 of the big ones. For them to have just shoved aside laws of their own country in order to satiate the corporations wishes shows there was great power exerted. I think its pretty damn sad. Just another country and their civilians rights down the tubes.



Pie

Hate to break it to people but the original intent of Copyright was to Protect the Consumer, not entrenched business models struggling to remain relevent in this day and age.

How was it supposed to protect consumers? Well for one thing, it protects US from shady business practices of companies who would label a product in another brand to make it sell better, with potentially hazardous ingredients, it was a public health threat. Now it's being twisted and warped by the incumbant monopolies to suit their own end.

The Copyright Cartel wants to bring similiar US-style copyright laws to my country saying they are losing business left, right, and center. Well according to the Heritage Ministry's report on this subject, that's utter rubbish.

www.canada.com...

Turns out they tried to suppress the report and downplay the findings almost immediately because it didn't "tow the party line." Such laws only benefit the US Copyright holders and not the locals. The Canadian equivalent of the RIAA is pretty much controlled by the RIAA.

You want to know why Piracy is such a "Big Problem?" The reason why is because they were slow in adapting.

Lets take Television shows as an example. With Bittorrent the Copyright Cartels could make much more money, have much more targetted advertising and save on bandwidth by an extreme degree. The software to Localize the commercials already exists. Ever been to a website with a advert saying "Meet hot local singles [Insert your city here] now!" You IP address broadcasts you general locale. They could use that to direct you to the proper episode of LOST with local advertisments. The big plus here is that they no long need to use Neilsen ratings services as they know exactly how many people downloaded a given copy of LOST. This adds up to a much more lucrative business model. Plus add in the option to download a Hi-resolution copy of an episode, sans commercials for a buck or two and you got another revenue stream.

Now onto the Music industry. It is true that since the mid-ninetys they have been losing money for a few reasons, the top reason being that the majority of their wares are targetting at the 13-24 demographic, who are usually not well off, are extremely computer literate, and have gotten use to getting free content along with the pay per month subscription fees that comes with Cable, or the 100% free content on the Radio. One thing that they conventiently leave out is taht since Filesharing became popular, the poorest, most struggling labels, the indie labels, have been going through a Boom period of growth as they target all the other niches that the major players leave alone. My point is, if they stop trying to fight technology and make it bend to their wishes and start adapting, we'll all be better off.

Here's an update I got from Slashdot with a translation for Swedish.

Source
www.aftonbladet.se... ,834356,00.html [aftonbladet.se]
For the benefit of those who don't speak swedish, here's a short summary:
3 people have been arrested, age 22, 24 and 28. They have not been charged, but are taken in because they the police suspect they have violated copyright laws. The persons are directly connected to TPB.org. They are as of an hour ago still under interrogation. 50 police men have worked on the case.

50 police officers? That seems a little excessive to me.

Didn't you know? This is all part of the War on Terrorism as everyone knows that Piracy funds Terrorists.

Originally posted by sardion2000
One thing that they conventiently leave out is taht since Filesharing became popular, the poorest, most struggling labels, the indie labels, have been going through a Boom period of growth as they target all the other niches that the major players leave alone. My point is, if they stop trying to fight technology and make it bend to their wishes and start adapting, we'll all be better off.

Because of filesharing, I now listen to bands that I have never even heard of, there are a lot of excellent metal bands that never get heard on the radio. If they came to town I'd be at their concert in a flash.
If I had to pay for downloads I would be much more careful for what I DL, and as a result I would discover a lot less music that needs to be discovered.

I think one of the big thrust's behind DL'ing is that people are PO'd at the recording industries high prices and control of the market.

If a band wants to get discovered the best way is to give it (the music) away, If I was in a band I would do just that, build a fan base. Nobody wants to buy an album or go to a concert when they don't know their music.

People see the recording industry for what they are, a bunch of whiny excessively rich, rich guys, that whine too much!
"Ahhhh, Whaaah! (stomp, stomp) I'll never top off my billions in profits with these DL'ing miscreants , hello, Metallica, I need a favour".

Here is a music service that sells and rents music, all without Digital Rights Management. They have access to ITunes music store as well.

www.extremetech.com...

Boasting 50,000 albums, eMusic touts itself as the second biggest online music store on the web after Apple's iTunes in terms of total downloads sold. With its $10/month for 40 downloaded tracks, eMusic can also boast the lowest effective per-track price of about 25 cents. Another big upside to eMusic: its DRM-less MP3 format.

Once you've paid for a download, it's yours to burn, move around your network and copy to your portable player as you please. But (and you knew there was a but), eMusic spotlights "established and emerging artists," and while you'll find many artists you already know and just as many promising artists headed for high-profile careers as mainstream performers, you'll also find a fair number of holes in the area of established artists.

www.emusic.com...

Can't beat DRMless tracks for 25 cents each(on average). I wouldn't be surprised if the musicians who use this service for distrobution make more money then their RIAA counterparts. If they even get 9 cents a track per download, times that by 15(average album) and that's around $ 1.45 per album, roughly speaking. Emusic can keep 10 cents per track and Apple gets the rest as the facilitator. I see a bright future in this business model.

[edit on 31-5-2006 by sardion2000]

Originally posted by sardion2000
Didn't you know? This is all part of the War on Terrorism as everyone knows that Piracy funds Terrorists.

Here is a funny post I found on Slashdot linking this to the war on terror.

Source
It's really quite simple.

Terrorists can download .torrent files. And if terrorists can download .torrent files, then terrorists can obtain unlimited copies of material by Britney Spears, Kelly Clarkson, etc.

This will (obviously) lead to a greater hatred of America, and western culture in general.

This will impact the safety of all of our children as terrorists *snip* watching Britney in that video with the short skirt will erupt *snip*... and this will greatly impact our war on terror.

This has nothing to do with copyright law, and everything to do with the safety of the free world.

MOD EDIT: Removing less than appropriate content. Please review: ATS Terms and Conditions of Use

[edit on 5/31/2006 by cmdrkeenkid]

The PirateBay will be back up in a day or two. Some victory eh MPAA/RIAA?

www.slyck.com...

[edit on 1-6-2006 by sardion2000]

Thanks for the update sardion2000, got busy at work this morning and haven't had a chance to check on it yet today.

I figured they would make good on their promise to move it to another country but I didn't think it would happen so fast. Nice to see that they were prepared, too funny.

Originally posted by elevatedone
How in the #%#%$$@ is this America's fault... I Don't get it.

It might have something to do with this?:

"US government behind Pirate Bay raid"
The American film and music industry rejoiced over the raid by the Swedish police on The Pirate Bay. But reports that the US government was behind the action against the Sweden-based file sharing site have now resulted in the Swedish government being reported to the country's Constitutional Committee.

Just my 2 cents.

Originally posted by seagull
The laws concerning intellectual properties should be strengthened not weakened.

- I disagree.

I think the laws concerning 'intellectual property rights' should be sensible and workable, qualities the current situation is sadly lacking.

First and foremost there should be a recognised element of 'fair use'.

Going by the industries' statements one ought to be charged for listening to a song on the radio or watching a film on 'free to air' TV!
Those *%@)"rds think everything should have a charge attached at all times.

But the truth is that this is merely more stamping on the little guy.
They aren't losing money (they are making more than ever) and they imagine that every download is a lost sale when it is nothing of the sort.

Even ADSL is only 'asymmetric' because their 'vision' of the net is one big shopping mall right in your living room.

One thing is for sure you won't see someone like Bush in court over his illegal Ipod tunes (he claimed to have the Beatles on his, which must be illegal because they aren't legally available on the Ipod).
No, it'll be the powerless working and middle classes that get ruinous fines and threatened.

But you can at least be sure of one thing, they aren't stopping anything with this approach.

@*&% 'em, the greedy &@$*@rds in the industry have brought this on themselves.

Hopefully those people making use of TPB for all the up and down loading their normal and totally legal businesses need sue the Swedish government people, their police and the people in the business who instigated this raid mightily.

After three days of beeing offline ThePirateBay.org is up and running.
With a new logo, servers moved to the Netherlands and an already paid PR campain, the crew behind the disputed .torrent sharing site continues to annoy the film/music industry.

The Torrent scene strikes back.

Cyber vandals have attacked the website of the Swedish police, forcing it to shut down.

Full story below.
news.bbc.co.uk...

If you use public P2P filesharing, you're asking for it.

If you are making money sharing/selling files, you're seriously asking for it.

Downloading and installing files from questionable sources is just plain foolish.

Anyone can seed these torrents with malware disguised as something of interest.

A song, a movie, photos, or software.

There are piggyback programs that just wait for you to use your authorization password
and you're hacked.

Be careful out there.