
Pirate Bay may finally be sunk after EU copyright ruling - Errorcod3
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/06/pirate-bay-copyright-ruling-cjeu-communication-public-right/
======
CM30
Here's the thing with the Pirate Bay:

They don't care what the courts say or think. They've had founders get in
trouble before, the site kept going. The servers were seized, the site kept
going.

And after this... well the site will still keep going. That will never stop.
People will always keep running torrent sites, and there will likely always be
people from The Pirate Bay who'd set up their own version/fork/whatever the
second it goes down.

In other words, this court ruling will mean nothing for it. They didn't care
before, and they probably won't care now either.

~~~
endorphone
A number of the biggest torrent sites are down. Others are mere shadows (e.g.
kickass). I would say the law in this case is winning, perhaps because there
are so many streaming options now that the demand has dried up.

~~~
soared
It seems more like the market is winning rather than the law. I pirate way way
less now that netflix and hbonow are available. And when somebody creates a
service for $15/mo that lets me stream live sports, I'll stop pirating those
too.

~~~
cholantesh
This is fine for Americans, but because of increasingly sophisticated (and
bizarrely aggressive[1]) VPN detection, it's not necessarily an option to
people elsewhere.

[1] - [http://mobilesyrup.com/2015/04/22/hbo-says-it-will-
terminate...](http://mobilesyrup.com/2015/04/22/hbo-says-it-will-terminate-
the-hbo-now-accounts-of-canadians-who-use-a-dns-or-vpn-service-to-access-the-
app/)

~~~
zzalpha
No kidding. I can't even use Hurricane Electric IPv6 tunnels because Netflix
thinks I'm trying to intentionally circumvent geolocks when I just want V6
support... _sigh_

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runeks
Wasn't this to be expected, though? I'm no way near being a lawyer but, as I
understand it, intent is quite important in law. If you design something with
the intent of breaking a law, it makes sense that you should be liable.

That being said, I'm no supporter of copyright law, and I think whoever
depends on owning information to generate an income will have a very limited
life span (decades, at most), since they're essentially fighting against
technology. The Pirate Bay is _extremely_ simple technology (web
page+BitTorrent), and after a decade of fighting I can still access it because
I don't use my ISP's DNS servers -- just imagine how long the next innovation
will take to suppress in court.

~~~
Dylan16807
Intent is important, but mechanism is important too. If you're running a
directory and doing nothing else that should not be illegal[1], even if your
intent is causing the sun to explode.

[1] as far as contributory crimes go. A directory could directly violate
something like privacy laws and it would be fine to take that down.

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redm
"Pirate Bay may finally be sunk after EU copyright ruling" \-- As if we hadn't
heard that a few times before. This ruling opens the doorway for blocking but
if history is any evidence, it will 1) take some time before this turns into
real blocks and, 2) technology will adjust accordingly.

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ewams
New attack method: go to site that you don't like, post magnet links in their
comments section and then start legal proceedings.

~~~
menacingly
I think technical people (including myself) tend to view legal systems as dumb
machines that can be tricked into executing any possible permutation of their
own rules, and this is how you get "clever" ideas like warrant canaries.

Laws are precise, but unlike the rigid systems we work with, ultimately there
is going to be human somewhere who can classify events into buckets like
"horse shit" and "not horse shit"

~~~
Dylan16807
Warrant canaries are valuable even if they don't have a legal basis. A canary
might not fail, and if it does fail it invites a massive media storm about
being forced to directly lie.

~~~
menacingly
If they can compel your silence on the original matter, thus necessitating the
warrant canary, why can't they compel your silence on being forced to update
the warrant canary?

If warrant canaries were ever a real threat, what's to stop them from simply
deciding that the only legal direct or indirect answer to "have you ever
received a super duper secret subpoena" is "no comment".

The issue is not whether or not the concept of secret access to my data is
just, it's whether or not you can actually play silly games with the party
literally writing the rules to the game you're trying to play.

~~~
Dylan16807
> If they can compel your silence on the original matter, thus necessitating
> the warrant canary, why can't they compel your silence on being forced to
> update the warrant canary?

For a while, but not forever and in every case.

> If warrant canaries were ever a real threat, what's to stop them from simply
> deciding that the only legal direct or indirect answer to "have you ever
> received a super duper secret subpoena" is "no comment".

I think a lot of people would immediately break that law in protest. It would
be interesting, to say the least.

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revicon
I wonder how easy it would be to build a distributed torrent aggregation
service on top of Ethereum. Something similar to what openbazaar is doing.

~~~
runeks
What would the point of using Ethereum be?

~~~
kentt
I think revicon was getting at using a decentralized system to track magnet
URIs.

~~~
revicon
Correct. Because it's decentralized it's not susceptible to being taken
offline by a single blocked site

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metalliqaz
And the whack-a-mole continues...

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sctb
This link appears to be dead and redirects to [https://arstechnica.com/tech-
policy/2017/06](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/06). Can anyone
suggest a replacement?

~~~
psittacus
[https://web.archive.org/web/20170614180327/https://arstechni...](https://web.archive.org/web/20170614180327/https://arstechnica.com/tech-
policy/2017/06/pirate-bay-copyright-ruling-cjeu-communication-public-right/)

also, the story is still present on their UK website

[https://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-policy/2017/06/pirate-bay-
cop...](https://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-policy/2017/06/pirate-bay-copyright-
ruling-cjeu-communication-public-right/)

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skookumchuck
I can buy VHS tapes at Goodwill for $.49 a movie. Oddly enough, this price
being essentially free, means that my time spent watching the movie is the
real price. I wind up not watching them because they are not worth my time.

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Theodores
A colleague watches everything with Thai subtitles. This works great as his
girlfriend is Thai. By everything I mean everything. Pirate Bay is hard work
by comparison, as is a real DVD. I think that the warez game has moved on for
serious movie watchers.

