
Pirate Party Shuts Down Pirate Bay Proxy After Legal Threats - Libertatea
http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-party-shuts-down-pirate-bay-proxy-after-legal-threats-121219/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Torrentfreak+%28Torrentfreak%29
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lgeek
Just got an email from them:

Dear Donor,

Thank you for your support in the last few weeks, the donations we received,
as well as the overwhelming number of messages of support made it clear that
our efforts over the last year or so have not been in vain.

It is however with a heavy heart that I write to inform you that the proxy
server the Pirate Party UK initially provided in solidarity with other parties
in Europe, but later as an anti-censorship resource for UK users, has now been
been removed.

Obviously this is not the outcome you wanted, nor that we had hoped for, so if
you would like us to return your donation please reply to this email, or email
returns@pirateparty.org.uk with the email address you provided (either your
paypal email address or the email address you contacted the party with when
making your donation). We will return your donation as soon as we can.

As you know, elected members of the parties National Executive Committee,
along with the head of IT, received letters from lawyers acting for British
Phonographic Industry (BPI), threatening them personally with High Court legal
action.

After seeking exhaustive advice and initiating the fundraising campaign that
you contributed to we managed to raise just over £9,000. A significant sum and
an indication that this issue is important. Unfortunately the advice from a
variety of legal sources was bleak and even to get to this point we spent just
under £1600, the cost involved in taking this forward is out of our reach with
no guarantee of a positive result.

We also made attempts to open dialogue with the BPI, but it has become clear
that the law as it stands makes any decision to continue hosting the proxy
untenable and counterproductive.

We will continue to fight for digital rights despite being threatened with
legal action by the UK’s music industry body over links to the Pirate Bay
website.

Again if you would like us to return your donation please reply to this email,
or email returns@pirateparty.org.uk with the email address you provided
(either your paypal email address or the email address you contacted the party
with when making your donation). We will return your donation as soon as we
can.

Gavin Meredith Treasurer Pirate Party UK

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kyboren
Why don't they just replace the proxy with a list of other proxies for TPB?
Any problem can be solved with just one more level of indirection...

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belorn
Odd move. While the Swedish Pirate Party actually supply the site itself with
bandwidth, one would think the UK side would dare to maintain a proxy.

Will be interesting to see more details on the more precise details of the
threats.

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lewisflude
I wonder how significant the dropoff of users will be!

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Nux
I don't think it will be significant. People who use the torrents know to
quickly google something like "the pirate bay proxy" and get access back.

"Can't stop the signal, Mal."

~~~
mtgx
At least until Google starts censoring keywords like that (probably not too
far out), and then they'll have to use DDG or Blekko.

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Xylakant
Given that DDG mainly relies on bings index I'd be surprised if they'd resist
much longer than google if the keyword filtering starts.

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greglindahl
blekko has its own crawl and index, but your guess is as good as mine as to
what we might do if we are sued.

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cdooh
A little disappointing but not entirely unexpected considering. What's sad is
an industry that fails to realise they have a supply problem and will never
win that war

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philhippus
<http://194.71.107.80/> still works at least here in Belgium.

~~~
eertami
not in the UK

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meaty
Bin your shitty ISP. I just switched to Andrews and Arnold and the main site
still works. They have an active no censorship policy.

~~~
eertami
An ISP complying with a court order does not make them inherently shitty.

Looking at A&A, the max bandwidth/mo they offer is 500GB? We pull that in per
week and at a much lower cost.

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eertami
Can they not host it on a webserver outside of the UK?

