Piratebay.org raided, three men arrrested
May 31st, 2006 by Atomictumor
According to Wired News, premier bittorrent tracker site Piratebay.org has been shut down by Swedish police.
I was always familar with the Piratebay as the site that would receive legal cease and desist notices, reply back with fairly intelligent, law-aware, scathing responses, and fall back on Swedens lack of intellectual property laws. Unfortunately, the other shoe dropped, Sweden bowed down to Big Content’s pressure, enacted laws cracking down on these piratey dregs, and laid the hammer down.
If you check the Piratebay.org site right now, theres a little defiant blurb about the raid, and what will happen next. Hopefully this won’t go down like the Lokitorrent.com takedown a few years ago, where after the MPAA sunk the website, the owner allegedly sold the member list and logs to the MPAA, causing pits of fear and shrunken testacles for college students the world over.
What about me? Well, after my little brush with Johnny Comcast and the C&D Blues, I’ve been laying low on the downloading movies front. Instead, I’ve been renting em, ripping em, and copying em to DVD.
HA HA, MPAA, HA HA, Comcast, score one for ME! How about you and your lawyers come and kiss my unlawful use ass as we watch movies from my rapidly growing DVD collection and drink foul mexican tequila!
/just kidding, please don’t sue.
//no, seriously, don’t sue me, but do kiss my ass. Besides, how am I supposed to rip those scratched up crappy movies from Hollywood Video anyway? Damn, what do these weird bastards do with these DVDs anyway? Dog toys?
///sorry about the arr joke… couldnt’ resist.
////man, this tequila does suck…
May 31st, 2006 at 9:14 pm
AT, don’t you think that it is wrong to rip rented DVDs? Why don’t you get off the wallet and buy the damn things out right?
May 31st, 2006 at 9:39 pm
” . . . testacles . . .”
I think you are referring to the plural of testis. That would be “testicles.”
Now back to your regular daco-scheduled programming.
June 1st, 2006 at 5:50 am
Daco, you big ladies blouse, was it wrong back when we all did it with VCRs? Is it that because the technology improves, we now have a mighty moral obligation not to make inferior copies of rented stuff?
Balls to that man. If you would stop your luddite, apologist, business uber alles stance for a minute, you’d understand that every year these content companies close the window on things we’ve always been able to do, because the technology hasn’t improved as much for us enjoying them as it has for them monetizing them.
Think I’m wrong? What about when DVRs all come from the cable and satellite companies, and
a) you pay to fast forward through the advertisments (10 cents a pop, or so)
b) you pay to store the recorded stuff (lets say, 5 bucks for 30 days)
c) you’re renting the thing, so its going to be a violation of the TOS to hook your VCR up to it and copy Dora the Explora to watch on another TV. Comcast would be glad to let you rent another DVR and watch it on multiple TV, say, at about 3 bucks an hour?
What about radio? The .govs all about buying back the bandwidth doled out by the FTC right now, so when we’re all using satellite radio, keep in mind that RIAA and what not have sued the hell out of every company that has tried to make any kind of recording device to pull down this audio (no more making mix tapes off the Wednesday Zeppelin fix, or the Rush Limbaugh show, in some cases).
Haven’t this bastards made enough money off you, Daco?
June 1st, 2006 at 8:15 am
Joel, whats funny, is that I wrote testicles first, and for some reason it didn’t look right… I guess I just don’t know testicles.
June 1st, 2006 at 3:55 pm
All right devil’s advocate here.
Hasn’t it always been the case that video cassettes are copyright protected and therefore illegal to copy? I thought it was exactly the case that technology has improved to the point to make exact duplicates of a dvd, cd, or whatever.
So, I’m curious. How is peer to peer file sharing justified. Is this a case of civil disobedience to an unjust law? What’s the rationale?
June 1st, 2006 at 8:03 pm
Theres loose justification that its legal by default as a method of delivering legal software (linux distros, licensed games, etc). As far as the copyright debacle goes, I don’t think theres much defending it from a legal standpoint, frankly. That said, I do it personally for the principal of the thing. If theres an artist that needs my money (Whirlwind Heat, for example), then I pay em buy buying records, or going to their concerts.
Call it what you will, but I see the civil disobedience factor playing a part. The fact that its a victimless crime is a part of it. The fact that it pisses Daco and like minded off is kinda fun.
June 1st, 2006 at 9:08 pm
“. . . for the principal of the thing.”
Uh, that would be “principle.”
June 1st, 2006 at 10:19 pm
Joel, the wordpress spell check comes out in version 2.1. Patience.
June 2nd, 2006 at 5:17 pm
And now the website of the Swedish Police has been hacked!
As to the whole debate, well, technically speaking I don’t have problems with the whole BitTorrent universe and all it entails. While the recording and video industry has done a relatively good job getting things out that you can pay for, they still don’t do well enough. And I strenuously object to having to pay money to download a TV show and only be able to view it on the computer on which I downloaded it from a major network that would be free to watch and record and rewatch over and over again.
You can be strict, protect your assets, but eventually the big industries will lose out because people will get tired of having to pay for every last thing.
June 7th, 2006 at 9:25 am
Yesterday Wired reported Pirate Bay Bloodied But Unbowed “This week The Pirate Bay reappeared on the internet just three days after a police raid shut down the site, and sparked street protests in Sweden and intense international interest. The reborn site — newly relocated to servers in the Netherlands — appeared much as it was before the police action, but included a mocking message for the authorities, and a revamped logo that shows the site’s trademark pirate ship hurling a cannon ball at the Hollywood sign.”
They say they’ve been down longer because one of their people was sick or had been drinking too much.
June 7th, 2006 at 2:57 pm
Yeah, thats not a suprise at all. There isn’t going to be many safe harbors left, tho, I fear. To get into the WTO, evidently, countries have to get with the IP laws, even Russia and China are feeling the burn.