
How the US Pushed Sweden to Take Down the Pirate Bay - pawal
https://torrentfreak.com/how-the-us-pushed-sweden-to-take-down-the-pirate-bay-171212/
======
cup-of-tea
The copyright industry has had far too much power for many years now. But when
I talk to people about this nobody cares. For most people the products of this
industry are just "content" which they use to waste their time so I suppose it
makes sense that they don't care too much about it. The tragedy is that the
copyright industry controls a large and continually growing part of our
culture and their power is only increasing.

I was there when a UK music tracker called OiNK's Pink Palace was shut down.
The police raided the home of the site owner before dawn and even the home of
his father who had no idea what his son was up to. Copyright industry writers
wrote the news article, claiming it was "extremely lucrative" and included
gems such as "Within a few hours of a popular pre-release track being posted
on the OiNK site, hundreds of copies can be found".

The site's owner was found not guilty in court several years later, but not
before the copyright industry essentially ruined his life.

But how does this happen? If you talk to most people they don't understand
copyright at all. They think it's some kind of privileged status that you have
to pay for, like a trademark or something. Most people are not even aware that
they hold copyrights. And why would they? Can the average person summon the
police to help protect their copyright? Of course not. It's not even a
criminal matter. The police being involved seems nothing short of corruption.

~~~
marcoperaza
He was running a website that revolved around violating millions of
copyrights. Why shouldn't he go to jail? What gives you the right to take
someone else's painstakingly created artistic creation and give it away for
free to thousands of people, depriving them of the exclusive right to sell
their own work.

Copyright is both a criminal and civil matter. The civil court system is
useful for many things, but it is limited to monetary damages, which is not
very helpful when the damages are in the millions and the defendant isn't very
wealthy. The penal power of the criminal system is not appropriate for
individual people downloading music, but it certainly is for a sophisticated
operation involving the illegal distribution of millions of copyrighted works
to hundreds of thousands of users.

== Edit ==

Some responses, since I'm rate-limited:

> _In most cases i read about it 's more a matter of the current copyright
> holder versus the facilitator. Not a matter of the creator versus the actual
> downloader._

Two points.

1\. How do you think the current copyright holder got the copyright? They
acquired it from the creator by either paying in advance or after the fact or
as part of some ongoing deal.

2\. If you run a market that you know is used almost exclusively by people
selling contraband, do you think that's legal just because you're not the
buyer or the seller? In case you don't know, it's not, and you'll go to jail
just as if you had sold the contraband.

> _If the defendant isn 't wealthy after distributing all that content, is the
> content worth millions? Or is the government-enforced business model worth
> millions?_

Yes, intellectual property isn't worth anything without government
enforcement. But we've decided to, as individual societies and as an entire
world by treaty, to provide such enforcement, because we think recognizing
such property rights is good for our society.

And as for the first point, how much you make by violating other people's
rights isn't that relevant. If I steal a truckload of iPhones and give them
away for free, I still stole them. I realize IP is very different from
physical property, but the profit of the crook isn't that relevant in either.

~~~
gatmne
Legality aside, whether sharing copyrighted information is amoral or not is
determined by one's own values. Some people, myself included, see a person's
right-to-share to be far more important to humanity than the authors ability
to employ an ill-suited business model to profit off his or her work. There
are many ways to generate profit other than to infringe on others' right to
share. Humanity does not owe you a successful business model, and certainly
not at the expense of it's right to share.

> What gives you the right to take someone else's painstakingly created
> artistic creation and give it away for free to thousands of people,
> depriving them of the exclusive right to sell their own work.

Users sharing copyrighted work does nothing to prevent authors from profiting
off their work. Conflating sharing and business is what got us in this mess in
the first place.

~~~
msc1
Think about 3rd world countries. I'm relatively better off than my peers (2
cars, own a house etc.) but I can no way afford Hex Rays IDA Pro, Burp Site
Professional, Navicat Premium or JetBrains and this list goes on... They cost
more than my two or three months of rent.

My parents are both medical doctors and their medical books are not affordable
if they were sold in US prices but they have 3rd world print editions and they
can legally buy these copies. Software vendors have to adapt to tthis too.
Gaming companies already adapted this and I've never pirated any games since
Steam. I'm a paying netflix, spotify customer because they are priced for the
country they operate and as you can guess I'm not torrenting music or movies
either.

Internet is global but purchasing power is not. Ethically, I see no problem in
torrenting. Human knowledge is "on the shoulders of giants" and in
philosophical perspective -I'm not advocating this- even copyright is on shaky
grounds (Property is theft! - Pierre-Joseph Proudhon)

~~~
freeflight
> Gaming companies already adapted this and I've never pirated any games since
> Steam.

The first to adopt this, very successfully, had actually been Apple with their
approach to selling mp3s.

While everybody was still busy trying to sell overpriced physical albums,
complaining about the "digital thievery", Apple took this as an opportunity
with iTunes. iTunes made buying music digitally as convenient as it was
pirating it, at the same time iTunes allowed customers to only buy specific
songs (at reasonable prices), instead of forcing them to buy whole albums.

Valve did something similar for gaming with Steam, that's true, but it took
Steam way longer to get there than it did take iTunes. Imho Steam has also
regressed quite a bit in that regard, it used to be a place for good deals but
increasingly feels like a platform to shovel around shovelware for badges and
trading cards.

~~~
drewmol
Apple is an interesting case. While they may have flirted with 'legal' music
as a revenue stream, the big bucks came from adding utility and simplicity to
the ubiquitous collections of 'stolen' music. A very small subset of iPods
were filled up with the plus +$10K cost of 'legal' music. No strong opinion,
but it's a somewhat unique situation in the economics of IP.

~~~
freeflight
> A very small subset of iPods were filled up with the plus +$10K cost of
> 'legal' music.

But they were actually filled with some legal music, prior to iTunes there
wasn't really "one unified place" for purchasing digital music, most mp3's
came from physical CD's people ripped privately.

A couple of flatrate services popped up before/around the same time, but these
mostly turned out to be illegal offerings, so it was mostly iTunes which stuck
around in the beginning and formed the market.

> While they may have flirted with 'legal' music as a revenue stream

They still have impressive market shares in digital music distribution, they
have started to lose ground to streaming services like Spotify and music
labels finally adapting to the digital age but afaik iTunes was and still is a
major player in digital music distribution.

~~~
drewmol
Certainly. I wanted to provide some insight to the dynamics of the iPod/iTunes
situation.

Interestingly as you noted >A couple of flatrate services popped up
before/around the same time, but these mostly turned out to be illegal
offerings, so it was mostly iTunes which stuck around in the beginning and
formed the market.

I think Apples success at creating this market was a byproduct of it being
fundemental pairing for the iPod's sucesss. Without the iPod, iTunes would
likely have gone the same way as the rest of the early legal digital music
sellers.

Without the existence of a large collection of mostly 'pirated' mp3's sitting
on home desktops and office networks across the globe, the iPod probably would
not have taken off.

Apple provided great utility for those collections by selling the iPod. Apple
only briefly had any barriers to allowing the seamless transfer/sharing of
entire iPod collections of copyrighted music, before concluding it would be
much more lucritive to embrace the prevelance of 'pirated' music collections
by investing in software to clean & organize it, and simple to use hardware
that makes it portable.

~~~
freeflight
> Apple only briefly had any barriers to allowing the seamless
> transfer/sharing of entire iPod collections of copyrighted music, before
> concluding it would be much more lucritive to embrace the prevelance of
> 'pirated' music collections by investing in software to clean & organize it,
> and simple to use hardware that makes it portable.

True enough, and you most certainly have a point about the iPod also helping,
that's something I haven't really factored in that much.

To me, iTunes was mostly a great example how usability, pricing, and ease of
legal access to content matters. Much earlier versions of iTunes UI was very
reminiscent of mp3 sharing clients popular at that time
(Limewire/Napster/Whatnot) by sorting titles in long lists and making getting
them as easy as pressing a "download" button right next to it.

The choice of pricing, single songs for $.99 [0], also felt like it
contributed a lot to a paradigm shift how music is sold and consumed,
acknowledging established trends in priacy by allowing legitimate customers
more freedom in paying for only those songs they want.

[0] [https://apple.slashdot.org/story/03/04/28/1723226/apple-
intr...](https://apple.slashdot.org/story/03/04/28/1723226/apple-introduces-
itunes-music-store-itunes-4-new-ipod)

------
coldtea
> _At the time there were some rumors that Sweden would be placed on the US
> Trade Representative’s 301 Watch List. This could possibly result in
> negative trade implications. However, in a cable written April 2006, the US
> Embassy in Sweden was informed that, while there were concerns, it would not
> be listed. Not yet at least. “We understand that a specialized organization
> for enforcement against Internet piracy currently is under consideration,”
> the cable reads, while mentioning The Pirate Bay once again._

Typical, not so subtle, blackmail.

One wonders what would happen if, say, the leader of some disclosure website
was residing in Sweden and a superpower wanted him...

(From a comment below on TPB case: "The judge was Thomas Norström. Swedish
public radio revealed that the judge, Thomas Norström, is a member of several
copyright protection associations, whose members include Monique Wadsted and
Peter Danowsky – attorneys who represented the music and movie industries in
the case. According to the report, Judge Norström also serves as a board
member on one of the groups of which Mrs. Wadsted, the Motion Picture
Association of America’s attorney, is a member." \-- hurray for independent
justice in any case..)

~~~
robert_foss
Overall the whole series of events was pretty offensive, and it paints the
picture of the US being a schoolyard bully.

~~~
RobertoG
Business as usual, but better the bully than the psychopath.

From Wikipedia's "1954_Guatemalan_coup_d'état":

"[..] The United Fruit Company (UFC), whose highly profitable business had
been affected by the end to exploitative labor practices in Guatemala, engaged
in an influential lobbying campaign to persuade the U.S. to overthrow the
Guatemalan government. U.S. President Harry Truman authorized Operation
PBFORTUNE to topple Árbenz in 1952; although the operation was quickly
aborted, it was a precursor to PBSUCCESS."

Reading about those things, one get the impression that the Department of
State works for the Camber of Commerce, instead of the USA citizens.

(1).
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27%C3%A...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat)

~~~
paganel
> Reading about those things, one get the impression that the Department of
> State works for the Camber of Commerce, instead of the USA citizens.

If I'm not mistaken the first permanent "embassies" were set up by the
Venetians (mostly) and the Genoese, and their role was essentially just that,
i.e. protecting the economic interests of their "home" entities. It so
happened that most of the time protecting the citizens who happened to reside
in foreign countries also meant protecting their home-city economic interests,
but that mainly happened because the citizens involved were traders
themselves. So, in a way, you could say that what the Department of State is
now doing is just the continuation of the initial idea of a "foreign embassy".

~~~
RobertoG
Surely, the role of the embassy of a power, ruled by a oligarchy of merchants
and aristocrats, it's very different from the expected role of the embassy of
a democratic federal republic.

Just joking. As you say, business as usual.

------
ckastner
It never ceases to amaze me how much influence the MPAA has.

Movies, while extremely popular, don't generate _that_ much money: in 2016,
total box office results in the US were under $12bn [1]. That's _the entire
industry_.

Apple alone makes that much money in three weeks' time.

Amazing, that you can apply such pressure to politics, with so little.

[1] [https://www.statista.com/statistics/187069/north-american-
bo...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/187069/north-american-box-office-
gross-revenue-since-1980/)

~~~
digi_owl
It's because so few care about copyright. It is seen as something dry and
stodgy that only affect artists and their publishers/labels.

This perhaps because once the cassette recorder, never mind the VCR, came to
be, most nations on the western side of the wall decided to not go full police
state and thus added a "friends and family" clause to their copyright laws.

This meant that a person could create a copy, if it was meant for a direct
friend or a relative. This avoided having to park a copyright cop in every
home in the nation.

Never mind that producing analog copies from tape to tape cause of a
noticeable loss of content with each generation removed from the original.

But the computer, never mind the internet, changed all that. It made mass
copying not something that required massive machinery in a warehouse, but
something every kid could do in their own home. Especially as bandwidth and
storage capacity kept improving at a massive rate.

And digital copies do not degrade like an analog one does.

~~~
icebraining
The organizations also play a game of the Boy Who Cried Wolf. Remember _Home
Taping Is Killing Music_? By their propaganda, the music industry should have
died multiple times in the past few decades.

------
jakobegger
And despite all these efforts, I'm still a happy user of the pirate bay
whenever I want to watch something that I can't find on iTunes or Amazon. For
me, the Pirate Bay has been the most reliable way to find stuff over the last
years, for so many things it's still better than all the paid alternatives
that I use.

So much money wasted on futile attempts to suppress a website...

~~~
sveme
There's the extremely annoying tendency at least at German streaming providers
(iTunes, Amazon/Google Video) to remove rental access to movies about nine
months after DVD release or when a second movie of a series is about to arrive
at the theatres. Only buy access remains accessible. Now that physical video
rental stores are on terminal decline, online stores have an effective
oligopoly without real competition and push customers towards paying a
maximum. The only alternative in this case remains thepiratebay.

~~~
madez
Aren't you afraid of receiving a 'Abmahnung' for torrenting?

~~~
tekmate
I'm still dumbfounded that the practise of setting up torrent honeypots by
agencies like waldorf&frommer is actually legal

------
ploggingdev
If you're interested in learning more about The Pirate Bay, the founders and
the trial, watch the documentary called TPB AFK (The Pirate Bay : Away From
Keyboard) :
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTOKXCEwo_8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTOKXCEwo_8)

One of the founders of TPB, Peter Sunde started:

* Njalla ([https://njal.la/](https://njal.la/)) - a privacy focused domain registration service

* Flattr ([https://flattr.com/](https://flattr.com/)) - a tipping/micropayment service to support content creators

* A VPN service - [https://ipredator.se/](https://ipredator.se/)

Another link that you might find interesting, his interview with Vice :
[https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/qkjpbd/pirate-
bay...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/qkjpbd/pirate-bay-founder-
peter-sunde-i-have-given-up)

~~~
Marazan
Does it talk much about the financier Carl Lundström's role in TPB?

He never gets mentioned much for some reason*

* Because of his far right connections

~~~
ploggingdev
IIRC it does, but only briefly. He bought advertising space on TPB and it
became a controversy. The TPB guys were falsely accused of being right wing
extremists for doing business with Carl Lundström.

~~~
Marazan
Woah, woah. He was a co-defendant at the trial. He was more that just a dude
who bought some ad space.

------
beloch
I'm sure there are many reading this who have absolutely no sympathy for
pirates. They're stealing and that's that.

Well, how do you feel about your government blackmailing, extorting, or
otherwise "strong-arming" other sovereign nations in order to foist its laws
upon them and then hiding that from you? (It really is a minor miracle this
cable was released _at all_.) Is it truly worth stooping to such measures to
ensure that Micky Mouse remains copyright protected for all time _everywhere_?
Don't other nations have the right to make their own laws? How would you feel
if some other nation foisted it's laws on the U.S. in such a manner? Why does
the U.S. government go to such extremes for private enterprise anyways?[1]

Piracy is bad. What the U.S. government has done in response is worse.

[1]I suggest you google the United Fruit Company's history the next time
you're eating a Chiquita banana for a _real_ eye opener.

~~~
Daycrawler
Copyright holders lose customers because of piracy, but that's not stealing.

If I sell some object and my logistics is that I sell 3 per months, then I
manufacture 3 objects per months and wait for customers to buy them. If
someone steals one, then I've only 2 remaining objects. I've the choice
between telling the 3rd expected customer that I'm out, or to manufacture one
extra, which in any case result in a direct loss of money. I'm a victim of
theft.

If I'm a film producer and my logistics is that I sell N viewings per month,
and someone pirates the movie, then this doesn't interfere with my ability to
sell the N viewings to my expected customers. So this isn't theft. Of course,
I would like the pirate to be my customer so that I can step up to N+1 viewing
per month, but if I want to enforce that I need to turn to who made the copy
available to the pirate, which is counterfeit.

------
realusername
I remember the piratebay trial being a gigantic farce where some of the judges
had ties to copyright organisations. It's crazy how much power have these
mafia-like organisations.

(edit: spelling)

~~~
draugadrotten
The judge was Thomas Norström. Swedish public radio revealed that the judge,
Thomas Norström, is a member of several copyright protection associations,
whose members include Monique Wadsted and Peter Danowsky – attorneys who
represented the music and movie industries in the case. According to the
report, Judge Norström also serves as a board member on one of the groups of
which Mrs. Wadsted, the Motion Picture Association of America’s attorney, is a
member.

That this passed without causing a conflict of interest is astonishing.
[https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-
News/2009/0423/pirate...](https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-
News/2009/0423/pirate-bay-judge-under-fire-for-conflict-of-interest)

Also worth mentioning is that the lead investigating police got a job from
Warner Brothers very soon after the trial was successful. Thank you, job well
done. [https://techcrunch.com/2008/04/18/officer-who-
investigated-p...](https://techcrunch.com/2008/04/18/officer-who-investigated-
pirate-bay-took-job-with-warner-brothers-will-still-testify-against-pirate-
bay/)

In recent news, the chair of Swedens Supreme court judge Stefan Lindskog has
been implied in shady financial transactions, and is under investigation by
the police. The belief we once had that Sweden had a low level of corruption
can be put to history. And of course even having a low level still means there
is some corruption. [https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/polisen-utreder-hogsta-
doms...](https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/polisen-utreder-hogsta-domstolens-
ordforande/)

YMMV.

~~~
Cthulhu_
> Also worth mentioning is that the lead investigating police got a job from
> Warner Brothers very soon after the trial was successful.

Can you blame them? Thanks to that case the guy got a lot of experience in the
area of copyright violations and online piracy, that's valuable knowledge to
have and they could use someone to advise them.

You're implying that he did it for the cushy job he got for it, but I have my
doubts. Maybe if you can prove he got the offer before the investigations
started?

~~~
tonyedgecombe
It's hard to prove but there is still a dirty smell around it all.

------
thomastjeffery
Let's get one thing straight: Torrent sites _do not host content_. They host
_community_.

The only thing thepiratebay.org, what.cd, kickasstorrents.cr, etc. did or
continue to do is the _same_ that a forum or news site like reddit or
hackernews does: provide a community with a purpose.

While hackernews is a community for discussing news or interesting things,
etc. WhatCD was a place for discussing music, quality releases, and sharing
good encodings, rather than the transcoded lossy->lossy formats you see flying
around most places. Naturally, WhatCD's _as a community_ wasn't concerned with
things like copyright owner's profits, etc., even though many of its users
certainly were, but _simply couldn 't find an alternative_, as a lot of music
is not even to be found, let alone sold in particularly high quality lossless
formats.

When what.cd was taken down, _none_ of the copies of _copyrighted content_
were deleted. The _community_ was broken up.

If piracy is to be considered such a serious crime, taking down torrent
trackers is like going to a meeting of known criminals, and - rather than
arresting them - evicting them. It has only a minimal effect, as they are free
to gather elsewhere.

What bothers me the most is that the only thing being dismantled is the thing
that clearly contains the most value to individuals, and society at large.
Community is a _good thing_.

When WhatCD was taken down, a countless amount of valuable data that could be
found practically nowhere else was suddenly destined to be hidden from society
at large, and the community it had cultivated was scattered, without a care
for what that meant.

Sure, quite a few people find that, while using copyright enforcement as a
business model, piracy significantly detracts from sales. Sure, there is a
culture that undervalues creators, but it is not a black and white problem,
and most popular solutions have serious consequences that go practically
ignored.

------
pferde
Got to love the 'privacy' instead of 'piracy' typo in the first cable
screenshot:

"2\. Summary. In a visit to Sweden last month to raise the growing concerns
about Internet privacy in Sweden, the Motion Picture Association of America
(MPA), together with ..."

~~~
gcb0
was it a typo or a huge backdoor of piracy into privacy talks?

------
upofadown
Canada has been on the 301 watch list for a long time now. There have been
some attempts to get off it (theatre camcording law) but it turned out that
that the real reason a country is put on the list is a lack of fawning
obedience to the US copyright cartel. A country that is perceived to not be
toeing the line is put on the list. If there no actual policy reason to be
there the copyright cartel just makes stuff up.

So these days the list is meaningless and is roundly ignored by Canada. Sweden
probably should of did the same thing.

------
fsloth
"The new confessions of an economic hitman" by John Perkins is a very good
exposition of the close ties of state and corporate powers in the US and how
they co-operate to increase the capital wealth of the elite.

It's more autobiographical than a research document, and has some unproven
claims, but no one has punched holes in the important claims there AFAIK.

------
jesperlang
Wow, 10 years ago already? This was quite big here in Sweden back when it
happened. It's scary how quickly these things slip out of our conscience (at
least mine). It's chilling what you can get away with by just staying cool for
while... Or is the short term damage in PR not worth waiting it out for the
long?

------
dghughes
People aren't stupid they know it's wrong to download a movie or music they
didn't buy. But everyone agrees the response by the US law enforcement is
overreaching and out of proportion.

Convenience is the real reason people went to websites such as the Pirate bay
not stealing, people don't buy fast food for their health.

The rise of cheap and reliable streaming video websites such as Netflix
changed that. That's all anyone wanted a convenient reliable way to legally
watch and pay a reasonable amount.

------
wimagguc
To remove pirated movies from the interwebs there are two options really:
either attack content providers / trackers etc, or, find the users directly.

In Germany, as soon as you start a torrent client, your traffic is being
monitored by bots and agents, and if you upload something inappropriate you
(or your host) will get a letter from a law firm with a heavy fine. (I know of
two friends who had to pay $600 and $3000.)

~~~
_Codemonkeyism
"In Germany, as soon as you start a torrent client, your traffic is being
monitored by bots and agents"

How is traffic monitored when I start a client? Don't I need to
download/upload something to get monitored? Is the monitoring connected to
trackers I download from or ISP monitored?

"[...] with a heavy fine."

Was it a fine or some kind of fee? ("Abmahngebühr")

~~~
wimagguc
I'm not familiar with the German legal system but the sum did depend on what
they've uploaded. (It was detailed in the letter, if I remember correctly,
$600 for half an episode-of-whatever and $3000 for multiple movies.)

As for the traffic monitoring, indeed, I'd imagine it to be honeypot tracker
where all content/traffic is visible rather than something installed on the
ISP side.

~~~
JohnStrange
No it's not the tracker, it also works for magnet links and people get letters
for downloading.

There are companies who join the download swarm and register all other
downloading parties. That's very easy with bittorrent, since the protocol is
(originally) designed for fast download sharing without any regard to
anonymity or pseudonymity.[1] The process is not reliable for providing
evidence of copyright infringement, though, and the German system mostly works
by scare tactics of lawyers - many people don't want to risk a lawsuit even if
they could win it.

[1] [https://torrentfreak.com/thousands-of-spies-are-watching-
tra...](https://torrentfreak.com/thousands-of-spies-are-watching-trackerless-
torrents-151004/)

~~~
zaarn
These companies are the scum of the scum, tbh, I recall I once got a letter
claiming I must pay about 6000€ for illegally downloading "Debian 5 Linux
Netboot ISO" and "Ubuntu 12.04 x86 Full ISO" or something along those lines.

They sent some awfully scary letters for what amounts to legally obtaining an
ISO file.

~~~
notzorbo3
I used to run an abandoned warez site when I was young. I received a lot of
cease and desist letters from "lawyers". They usually failed to identify the
infringing material, failed to show they had the right to act on the
copywriters behalf and a staggering amount of them confused trademark
infringement with copyright infringement. Also, every last one I received via
email. Yeah, right, like that's going to hold up. I ignored all of them and
never got even so much as a follow up.

In other words, such things are considered low-hanging fruit by these
companies. Just throw it out there and see what sticks.

~~~
zaarn
Luckily the german system is less strict than the DMCA, you can fact-check any
letters you get, you only need to act if you know (for certain) it's illegal

------
vinceguidry
The copyright industry is a direct arm of American soft power projection into
the rest of the world. For the content industry it's about money, but for
policy makers and the geopolitical strategists who have the ear of those
policy makers, it's about furthering the nation's position in the world.

The content industry punches above its weight in getting the government to
protect it overseas for this reason.

------
koliber
Interesting aside: is the redacting technique vulnerable to an analogue of the
"timing attack" on certain crypto?

The name of the employee in the wires has been redacted. I wonder if the
physical size of the redacted box, together with the fact that this is a name,
together with a database of public employees, could be used to uncover the
identity of the person.

By comparing the size of the redacting box with the lines above and below, we
can guess that 6-9 characters are masked out (including the space). This is an
a rough parallel to a timing attack used against crypto. The DB of public
employees could be thought of as a list of candidate inputs.

Weak redacting?

This reminds me of a law in Poland where a person accused of a crime can not
be named. Media will blur out photos and state something to the effect of
"Mark W. an executive at XYZ Corp., stands accused of ...". If the accused is
a well known actor with a unique first name, this becomes a running joke.

~~~
andrewla
The 2008 Underhanded C Contest [1] had an exercise in "leaky" redaction. The
winner, [2], used a very fun approach.

[1]
[http://www.underhanded-c.org/_page_id_17.html](http://www.underhanded-c.org/_page_id_17.html)

[2] [http://notanumber.net/archives/54/underhanded-c-the-leaky-
re...](http://notanumber.net/archives/54/underhanded-c-the-leaky-redaction)

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ksk
It's interesting that even after all the scummy things the movie industry has
done, people still desperately want to pirate their content. People who base
their opinion on a principled opposition to copyright, should be leading the
charge in promoting other means of compensating content creators. Stop
signalling how much you desire the copyrighted product, and start signalling
how much you desire the non-copyrighted one! IMHO The only people who should
be pirating are the people who don't have a principled stance on copyright.

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thriftwy
I wonder why isn't there torrent-search-over-DHT yet?

I mean, this is known point of vulnerability.

Maybe it's because owners of popular bittorrent software don't want that
feature?

~~~
jokoon
btdb.io and btdig

btdig seems better as it doesn't have annoying pop ups, which are constantly
brought up on btdb, even with ublock origin and noscript. I would not be
surprised that btdb is buying ads from an ad provider that sell js injections
to a MPAA operated third party.

btdb is nice because you can sort by seeds, you cannot with btdig.

To be honest I stopped using classic torrent indexers entirely since I started
using DHT indexes. They have much larger choice. The issue is that you cannot
"post" magnets links on the DHT automatically (I think you cannot), so the DHT
works as long as people are finding magnets or torrents elsewhere. It's
bringing more decentralization, which mean more chaos but much less
traceability.

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belorn
Many interesting points which contradict the behavior of the lawyers of said
MPA during the court hearings.

“However, it is not clear to us what constraints Sweden and even U.S.
authorities would be under in pursuing a case like this when the site is
legally well advised and studiously avoids storing any copyrighted material.”

A focus by the prosecutor was the claim that the founders did not have well
legal advice. The idea was to prove to the court that the accused did the
infringement knowingly and was aware that what they did was illegal. Here we
can read that this supposedly obviousness of wrong doing was not so clear to
the very high paid lawyers arguing it.

 _" Both Bodström and Eliasson denied any direct involvement of the Justice
Ministry with the work of the police and prosecutors in the Pirate Bay case."_

That they surely did. It is very illegal for them to directly act in any
specific legal case. If it ever was proven it would directly end any political
carer. When similar document was earthened it was said that just because the
US believe they influenced Swedish politicians it still doesn't mean that they
did it, so no proof of foul play has been made.

------
implosificated
I wouldn’t be as miserably ashamed for this as I am, if it weren’t for the
fact that the popular artists my country has produced since, oh... 1996?
Aren’t worth defending from piracy.

You can harp on how there’s no accounting for taste, but the truth is that the
industry this sort of thing protects certainly does account for taste, and
only invests in the kind of lowest-common-denominator/mass-appeal trash that
makes them the most money.

And so, we are left to suffer the guilt trip that because we don’t adhere to
an honor system of donating funds for better artists (paying and not pirating,
copying, stealing, sharing, music and movies), we get the artists we deserve.
But that’s clearly not true, because the money made off the garbage produced
today, doesn’t make it into any kind of honor system that benefits the
interests of better artists.

How about producers of bad music and movies demonstrate that they are willing
to donate into the honor system first?

The profits that the industry sees are not reinvested. The artists,
mysteriously, continue to worsen.

------
spodek
The framers of the U.S. Constitution knew the risks of the government creating
and granting monopolies, however limited. The incentives are to remove the
limitations and expand them.

The industries formed by these government-granted and defended monopolies have
removed most of their limitations and keep growing. We see the benefit to
them. They make big blockbusters that people enjoy watching, so we see that
benefit.

The costs keep growing too, such as this article and the deprivation from the
public domain of nearly a century of work. Meanwhile, technology has lowered
the costs of production and distribution, making investment for most works
unnecessary, obviating the need for a monopoly.

Have the costs grown to outweigh the benefits? The monopolists' power can
maintain the monopolies past when that point so it's hard to tell, and people
with different values will disagree, but this article points in that
direction.

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Feniks
Still up though. I use it every once in a while because its on TOR. My ISP has
to block some pirate sites now.

I'm from the generation that grew up with digital piracy. I am accustomed to
have all media available. From nineties anime shows to strategy guides for
videogames.

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frabbit
Why is the name of the official who spearheaded this initiative REDACTED?

Is this undercover, spy-type work as opposed to public, legal actions carried
out by a legitimate government agency?

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louhike
I've discovered some days ago that the thepiratebay.org domain was available
again. Is it linked to the original one or is it just a proxy?

~~~
kowdermeister
I use it often so somebody keeps it running, actually there are dozens of
mirrors running on various ccTLD-s. The source must be available somewhere
online so you can spin up your own instance.

~~~
Mayzie
It is. As The Pirate Bay don't host any .torrent files, only magnet links, on
memory the entire site came to under 200mb.

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l33tbro
Funny, the "brand equity" of The Pirate Bay is really something. After over 10
years of use, there's almost a nostalgic bond to the site for me now which
makes the downloading of material a familiar ritual with only positive
associations.

Not necessarily proud of this, just something I've noticed.

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casualtech
I don't care indeed, but someone has to think about the potentials and
ecosystem that it could lead. Don't block the possibilities and help them to
be in right way.

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kwhitefoot
> U.S. authorities provide concrete suggestions for improvement

I don't think improvement is quite the right word.

------
parski
"In your face, Hollywood."

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paul7986
With Net neutrality repealed say hello the blocking sites like this one ..
well without a vpn.

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scopecreep
You mean the one I used last night to watch Dunkirk? Great detective work
there Lou.

------
ketsa
Amazing how Yankees are annoying g the whole world...

------
antigirl
do people still use piratebay ? there are better alternatives now

~~~
mac01021
For example?

~~~
jokoon
DHT indexes, btdig and btdb.io

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ronjouch
Honest question: why is this surprising / newsworthy?

~~~
jacobush
At least to me a Swede, this [datacenter] _"... was raided by 65 Swedish
police officers"_ is so incredibly out of touch with normal reality in this
country, on so many levels.

* Copyright infringement case assigned to that many officers? Unheard of. High profile murder investigations don't get that many.

* We have this peculiar law, that ministers are NOT TO meddle in the running of government agencies. Yet, this is what we got.

* From cautious "see what happens" attitude among prosecutors with regards to copyright infringement and copying for personal use - to a big leap: not only an attempted (though only partially successful) witch hunt of Pirate Bay founders, but _also_ inventing a whole new crime, called "accessory to copyright infringement".

Not that I don't agree that what Pirate Bay did was at times shady, but the
whole thing made me believe without a doubt a few things:

\- US as a case of "wag the dog". The trade associations (RIAA etc) in the US
can easily make the state do their bidding. And the US state as an institution
is quite weak, when it does these things so quickly. What that implies, is
that there is no thinking things through. No serious cost/benefit analysis can
possibly have been made. "How much ill will from foreign countries is this
move worth? Fuck that, do it now."

\- That Sweden would be pushed around so quickly. I must have been naive, but
it _was_ surprising how not even a symbolic attempt at saving face was made
here. Our domestic response was decisive and swift. Can't help but make you
wonder what we could be made to do to ourselves over something more serious
than fucking copyright infringement. Dance, monkey, dance.

~~~
staticelf
Yes especially when pretty much all other crimes except murder and stuff like
that are disregarded nowadays. Swedens judicial system is completely broken.

~~~
bionoid
Norway is the same for the record. There was a local case recently where the
police knocked down an innocent man on the street, handcuffed him, and charged
him with assaulting a police officer. There were something like 30 eye
witnesses, still he lost in court, police clearly giving false testimony.
Luckily he did win the appeal.

~~~
staticelf
The difference is that in Sweden the police doesn't do anything. Even if you
give them a lot of evidence they drop the cases all the time.

I have personal experience of this.

~~~
digi_owl
"Henlagt grunnet bevisets stilling" (effectively claiming that the case will
not be investigated due to lack of evidence) have become a running joke in
Norway.

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redm
I don't understand why there is so much controversy over this. I've been
reading about the reasons TPB is a bastion of freedom for years and they read
like a list of reasons its ok to cheat on taxes, or put recyclable materials
in the compost bin. We all know its illegal in the US, we know TPB knows it,
and instead of changing copyright laws, it is continually justified. It feels
disingenuous.

I'm tired of the same conversation for the last 20 years.

~~~
spraak
20 years seems like a huge exaggeration unless you're talking about something
more than just TPB.

~~~
redm
On the Internet, the conversation about mainstream piracy goes all the way
back to Napster (1999).

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jmull
(rant, sorry in advance)

Eh, f--- Pirate Bay and everyone else who makes a living stealing the efforts
of others.

(And F-you too if you're a supporter/user of theirs.)

Of course the various governments were stupid, clumsy, ham-fisted, and in the
pockets of corporations. So what else is new?

How does that make it OK to steal stuff?

People want to talk about what total hipocrite jackasses they are (which is
true) to deflect attention from the fact that they are casually and constantly
taking stuff they don't have a right to (also true, come on why don't you want
to talk about that?!?).

If you don't like the terms, prices, availability, etc, of the Taxi reruns
they are selling, well, then, don't watch the Taxi reruns. Trust me, despite
Danny Devito, you aren't missing much. Likewise for all the pop music, old
software, movies and virtually all the other content people are stealing
through PB and similar.

Is this the stuff you really what you want to sell your integrity out for?
Think about it.

If you all were mainly -- well, even just somewhat sporadically -- taking
enlightening, high-quality stuff with an ounce or 1/2 of cultural importance
that was otherwise too expensive, then I might be able to understand. But no.
You're just mainly swiping bad superhero movies and video editing software
that you'll never learn to use.

I think we need to proceed on all the right paths here:

1\. yes, the governments and their associated law-enforcement, and regulatory
bodies are a-holes who are beholden to petty, stupid, obsolete, obnoxious
corporate ip holders.

AND

2\. Stealing is wrong (and that doesn't change if you are stealing from 1.)

~~~
executesorder66
Piracy is not stealing. If I make an exact copy of your car and drive off in
the copy, did I just steal your car?

~~~
jmull
Your analogy is terrible, but let's go with it:

If I spend a million dollars inventing a nice car that can be freely
replicated I don't have to sell it for a million dollars to break even. I
could sell a copy of it to 1100 people for $1000 each and everyone wins: Nice
cars are inexpensive for everyone and I make a living, so I can keep inventing
nice things.

But if there are 200 pirates among the 1100 who take a copy of the car but
don't pay the $1000 things are different.

Now I'm selling 900 cars and losing money so I have to do something. Such as:

* charge $1200 per car. Pirates win but car buyers lose, to the tune of $200 per car. Don't call it stealing if you don't want to, but your pirates are getting something and someone else has less money as a result. And of course you can't simply raise the price without losing some customers, so this can only go so far.

* invest less to make up the difference (making a crappier car). Pirates win and car buyers lose. The pirates don't win as much, though, since they have to drive the crappy cars too.

* enact stringent anti-copying mechanisms to try to precent unauthorized copying by pirates. This costs money, raising the price of the cars and is inevitably user hostile. So, again pirates win and customers lose. But again, the pirates don't win as much because they have to deal with the user-hostile anti-copying features as well.

Note this is a vicious circle. As piracy makes the product more expensive and
crappier, more people will be motivated to pirate rather than pay, causing the
product to get even crappier or more expensive. And anything that makes buyers
lose also makes my car company lose, with fewer sales at lower prices to less
satisfied customers.

* Ultimately, I might find I can't make money doing this at all: that there isn't a price high enough to make up for the piracy and low enough that anyone will pay for my crappy cars and I just stop making things altogether. Here pirates lose, buyers lose, and, of course, I lose.

Don't call it stealing if you don't want, but you are getting something
without paying for it and it is costing other people more money as a result.
Not only is your piracy making stuff more expensive for everyone else, it's
also making it crappier for everyone and ultimately lead to less nice stuff
being available at all.

~~~
executesorder66
> If I spend a million dollars inventing a nice car that can be freely
> replicated I don't have to sell it for a million dollars to break even.

So do filmmakers make movies or an implementation of the bittorrent protocol?

That analogy is terrible.

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marcoperaza
And why shouldn't the US have pressured Sweden to take down the Pirate Bay?
The people running that site are openly and proudly flouting copyright laws
and allowing American-owned (among other) content to be downloaded without
payment to the owners.

Very large portions of the US economy are dependent on international
enforcement of copyright and patent law. If the US isn't using its leverage
over other countries to make them enforce intellectual property laws, then it
is failing to protect its citizens' economic security.

~~~
Strom
Yes it might be very much fine from the US perspective to do this. Things
change however once you look from the other side. It can easily be in the
economic interest of other countries to not pay the US copyright holders,
especially 100 years after something was created.

So this is not so much about claiming the US is doing something against the
interest of US citizens. This is about other country politicans/judges/police
being corrupt, taking benefits from USA and acting against the best interests
of the people they promised to defend.

