Pirate Party Ordered to Shut Down Pirate Bay Proxy
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
BREIN (which is just a local front for the MPAA and RIAA, since NL barely has a movie/recording industry of it's own, and what there is is barely affected by piracy) has for years shopped around in various courts, but has now focused completely on The Hague where it has had a series of favorable results. Some of which, especially the censorship order, are considered extremely debatable within the legal community.
This one really takes the biscuit: the utter refusal of the court to even allow a legal democratic political party to defend itself is completely unprecedented.
In other news: BREIN is now also suing other ISP's (again, in The Hague), and the court has appointed the same judge that was responsible for the previous controversial censorship order. Attempts to have the judge removed from the case have failed.
The young guys behind Pirate Bay are the kind of heroes that hardly exists today because they dont give in to the threats from a broken industry.
And the corporations chasing them around consists of greedy, cowardly, corrupted, morally bankrupt old men. Not really the kind of guys we should even listen to. In fact, I think my mother told me to stay away from that kind of, errm, gentlemen...
http://www.france24.com/en/20120315-lubanga-kony-icc-african...
I thought how much more effective public outcry would be if we phrased things in terms of the creation of censorship infrastructure.
I object most to that. Here we see the criminalization of a note on where to find information. For now, it is only applied to illegal information like the Pirate Bay, but it's establishing a precedent that can be used against anything.
I am also bothered by the lack of proper due process afforded to these bastards. Don't tell anybody, but I am secretly a little sympathetic to the cause of protecting copyright. But that can be abused and without a strong set of guidelines for making a case it most certainly will be abused.
problem b: it is called the pirate party.
pirates are criminals. naming things like that and not expecting this to be huge problem is short-sighted and I would even say dumb.
if your goal is to reform copyright law and citizen rights/protection then why not call your party freedom party or reform party or more rights for ordinary people party.
"hi, my name is childharasser and I am your boy's new teacher."
By that I mean that society expects one thing in name, and will often accept something else in practice. Like we know politicians often have affairs, but in public they profess to have the goal of a traditional marriage. If we saw a politician who had public affairs, we'd all wonder what dirty behavior they were hiding, assuming it's much worse than usual.
If the site had a neutral name like "torrent search" we'd know they professed to be a neutral data sharing site, but the underbelly was piracy. If it starts out piracy, which is plainly illegal, we're left with much worse assumptions about what goes on behind the scenes.
Essentially, it has become a rallying symbol, created by the proprietors themselves.
I don't know if they're blocking it at the DNS level, or if there is some way of blocking the actual site. But that's the IP address. Why couldn't someone use any generic proxy to visit Pirate Bay?
I just don't see how governments can actually block websites, without confiscating their servers and/or forcing ISPs to monitor and block any attempt to get back online. As long as they've got a server and internet access, it seems to me like the government has failed.
The dutch pirate party had a specific proxy running which they were ordered to shut down so they're now running a generic proxy.
If you're dutch and haven't donated to the "Piratenpartij" yet, please do so now if you think these issues are important: http://depiratenpartij.wordpress.com/lidworden/doneren/
I'm saddened that wrt to the internet and censorship my supposedly progressive[1] country can now be added to the list of China, Iran and many other oppressive regimes.
[1] it hasn't actually been that for quite a while now
Welcome to joining UK and Australia as censorship countries.
I'm fighting in Australia.
Even worse is that they're doing it behind closed doors so we can't do or say little against it. I'll just say it... America, Australia & UK have fallen completely to corporatism. We are no longer a democracy and haven't been for decades. It's only recently started to show it's glaring infections/swelling.
Some pirate bay censoring schemes do block it at the IP level (e.g. the scheme used by Eircom the largest ISP in Ireland). Just using the IP address doesn't work. Even pings are blocked.
I just don't see how governments can actually block websites
Courts can force companies (ISPs) to do something, and the details are up to to the companies. Since the Pirate Bay is hosted externally, all the ISPs have to do is block their IP addresses.
Some ways to get around their silly blocks are:
Proxy servers (tons of these...too many to list)
VPN providers (https://torrentfreak.com/which-vpn-providers-really-take-ano...)
Unix shell accounts with port forwarding (you need one simple command to set up port forwarding: ssh -L 8080:thepiratebay.org:80 your_shell_server.com)
Seed boxes for downloading, sftp to grab the loot from them.
But you and me both know their actions are not to decrease piracy. However, its a perfect public reason, because the only way to gain control of the internet is to destroy the ability for people to be anonymous online. All humans using the web need to be monitored, just like in society. That is the intention behind all this.
But of course we cant really talk about that...
Seizing domain names only serve to create digital economic uncertainty, false sense of justice, let criminals still access content, etc. It is downright criminal for judges ordering ISPs to block access because it shows that judges are either aware that crime will still continue or too incompetent to see this.
You need to take action!
I'm sorry if it's a bit off-topic.