

Pirate Bay Founder Devises DDo$ Attack - mcantelon
http://www.blogpirate.org/2009/05/10/pirate-bay-founder-crafts-distributed-denial-of-dollars-attack/#

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nop
Some say this is infantile like the previous poster said, some think it's
awesome. I'm not sure it's either, I can't decide if this is civil
disobedience or a weird form of vandalism. I'm by no means on the fence on the
issue of piracy and I think the ruling in the case was absurd but I can't
bring myself to take part in this action.

Maybe if this action was targeted at the plaintiffs rather than the law firm
I'd think differently but it's destructive to punish those who choose to
represent those we don't agree with.

I just can't shake the feeling it's wrong, I don't like it.

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mseebach
The lawfirm is hardly at fault. What exactly will be achieved by harassing
them?

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ciupicri
The law firm could have chosen not to take this stupid case. Before thinking
that I'm exaggerating or infantile or whatever, I would ask you to think about
Richard Stallman and his "obsession" for free software and freedom in general.

~~~
paulgb
What's "stupid" about the case? I've been following the case when topics came
up on HN, but I still can't understand why everyone is siding with TPB, an
organization that advocates piracy. Yeah, they weren't hosting the material
themselves, but they encouraged their services to be used to illegally
distribute content that did not belong to them, did they not?

~~~
cousin_it
I side with TPB because I consider them a great example of civil disobedience.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonny_Bono_Copyright_Term_Exten...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonny_Bono_Copyright_Term_Extension_Act)

"The Act extended these terms to life of the author plus 70 years and for
works of corporate authorship to 120 years after creation or 95 years after
publication, whichever endpoint is earlier."

~~~
paulgb
The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension is a U.S. law. Sweden was actually
life+70 before the Sonny Bono act.

I'm not a big fan of life+70 myself, but I don't see what the Pirate Bay case
has to do with copyright terms. The infringements claimed are on works like
Walk the Line and Harry Potter, which are far from the end of their copyright
terms, Bono act or not.

Rosa Parks was a great example of civil disobedience. To me this just looks
like people who don't want to have to pay to watch Prison Break.

~~~
cousin_it
No, it's civil disobedience. The Pirate Bay wasn't started to facilitate
watching Prison Break to couch potatoes, or to make money, or even to fix such
"deficiencies" of copyright as life+70. It was founded by an activist group
explicitly against the whole institution of copyright. That's why they go to
court where couch potatoes would have surrendered already.

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dfranke
This is infantile. I hope it gets him new charges if he goes through with it.

~~~
jrockway
Why should you be nice to a corporation that wants to take away everything you
own, and prevent you from ever owning anything again in the future?

(As an aside, I wonder why more terminally-ill people don't go on last-minute
killing sprees.)

~~~
lucumo
_> Why should you be nice to a corporation that wants to take away everything
you own, and prevent you from ever owning anything again in the future?_

Yeah, I wonder that too. Why exactly are we nice to _The Pirate Bay_?

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cedsav
I don't see how that can even work. The site is in Swedish and they only
provide a 'Plusgiro' number, which I think is insufficient for international
money transfer.

Plus the bank can close or suspend the account whenever they want.

oh, and did anyone actually check that it's not a scam?

~~~
nop
When we register a plusgiro-account to make a payment to it you see the name
of the account holder. Since this has been making the rounds around the
Swedish blogosphere for one or two days now I'm sure someone would have
noticed especially considering how paranoid my fellow pirates are.

Even if it was a scam the scammer would essentially make himself loose money
by the nature of the action.

~~~
Retric
The core banking system is fairly fragel, under some system a transfer of
money to an account let's the other party keep transfering money to that same
account.

~~~
nop
There's a fee attached to receiving money over a postgiro-account as the
article explained, the hack is that the fee is larger than the money they
receive and not that they could keep it. Your ability to (maybe) get the money
back is just an extra step you could take if you wanted to cause more harm.

In Sweden there are laws that if you transfer money to someone by accident
they are required to return it and this is a Swedish bank account and a
Swedish law firm. I have no idea if those laws would actually apply in this
case though, seeing how I'm not a lawyer or anything.

On a related note it's nice to know those laws exist when you accidently pay
the rent to your webbhost.

~~~
fatdog789
Except that the bank can also refuse to consider these transfers to be made
"in error", given the vast publicity this has been given on the web. Indeed,
given the fraudulent intent behind these transactions, the bank can simply
keep the money (without forcing the intended recipient to swallow the costs of
the transfer) to pay for its own costs in handling the transfer.

On top of that, above a certain dollar limit (don't know what it is in this
case), this gives the Swedish court jurisdiction for criminal charges for the
mastermind, for bank fraud.

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amalcon
That's... clever... but I can't see it working very well. They'll probably
just lock out payments at values smaller than the transaction fee.

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jrockway
How long until Peter Sunde returns T when invoked on this law firm? (</lisp
joke>)

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mahmud
for those who didn't get it, Sunde's handle is "brokep".

<http://www.ccil.org/jargon/jargon_5.html#SEC8>

[edit: ignore the examples of possible uses]

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mojonixon
Some naive comments. Might makes right, especially when it comes to the law.
If PB has found a way to kick the motherfrackers in the shins, more power to
them.

