[Solar-general] Fwd: Pirate Party Hosting Pirate Bay in Pro-P2P Gesture

[Diego Saravia]

no solo censuran en solar


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Seth Johnson
Date: 2010/5/24
Subject: Pirate Party Hosting Pirate Bay in Pro-P2P Gesture

> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/05/pirate-party-hosting-pirate-bay-in-pro-p2p-political-gesture.ars


Pirate Party hosting Pirate Bay in pro-P2P political gesture


By Nate Anderson

Last updated May 18, 2010 10:43 AM


After a German injunction took out its ISP, The Pirate Bay went dark
yesterday. Today, it's back up. Just another round of Whac-A-Mole?
Yes, but this time the game got more serious: Sweden's Piratpartiet
(Pirate Party), a legitimate political party with two members in the
European Parliament, has taken on direct responsibility for hosting
the site.

"When other politicians appoint committees and try to pass the buck,
the Pirate Party instead takes responsibility and acts with its own
resources to protect the nation’s information safety and fundamental
freedom of speech. We are now The Pirate Bay’s Internet service
provider," said Pirate Party leader Rick Falkvinge
(http://press.piratpartiet.se/2010/05/18/piratpartiet-levererar-pirate-bays-bandbredd/).

This sounds principled—noble even. The Pirate Party goes on to say
that "the proposals to censor The Pirate Bay from the Internet [are]
an attempt to silence one of today’s most important voices related to
civil liberties and freedom on the net. It is nothing less than
political censorship, which every democratically minded person must
condemn."

Enter Dr. Lolcat

If you're a Pirate Bay administrator, however, here's how you sum up
all the high-minded talk about censorship, free speech, and democracy:

   LOL! AS U MITE HAS READ OR NOTICD, PEEPS ONCE AGAIN R TRYIN 2 SHUT
US DOWN. DIS WILL NOT SUCCED, LOL. OURS RLY NICE WEBHOST WUZ THREATEND
WIF RLY HUGE FINE, SO WE DECIDD 2 MOOV TEH SIET SO DAT THEY DIDNT GOT
INTO TROUBLE, LOL. TEH DECISHUN 2 MOOV WUZ TAKEN BY US, TEH PIRATE
BAY, LOL.

   TEH PIRATE BAY IZ AN UNSINKABLE SHIP. IT WILL SAIL TEH INTERWEBS 4
AS LONG AS WE WANTS IT 2. REMEMBR DAT, K THX.

   TPB, ONLY IN IT 4 TEH LULZ SINCE 2003.

Are they in it "4 the lulz," or for democracy? A set of bolded letters
in the all-caps blog post gave us an answer: "ASSCLOWNS OV TEH RIAA."
The post was authored by one "Dr. LOLCAT."

The Pirate Party's decision to host the site poses a direct challenge
to the Swedish legal system, which has already found the site
operators guilty of copyright infringement (an appeal will be heard
later this year). Christian Engström, the first Pirate MEP sent to
Brussels, wants to alter the legal structure of copyright Europe-wide,
and this move will certainly raise the question more urgently in the
Swedish press.

"Limiting file sharing with laws and punishments doesn’t work," wrote
Engström recently. "More of the same won’t either. File sharing is
here to stay, like it or not. We should keep copyright, but limit it
to when there is commercial intent. All noncommercial copying and use,
such as file sharing, should be legalized... What the society has been
doing so far isn’t working. There is no way to stop file sharing. It’s
time we tried something else."

He believes that people will always spend the same amount of money on
entertainment, and the file-sharing doesn't reduce this pool of money.
Instead, it merely shuffles it around, away from plastic discs and
toward live music, for instance. Copyright should only cover
"commercial" use.

"All it takes is the political momentum to get things moving," he
wrote. "I am hoping that we can build that momentum in the European
Parliament. I think it can be done."

Ways to comply

The record labels aren't so keen on this approach, and they have
traveled across Europe grabbing injunctions against ISPs, against
BitTorrent search engines like Mininova and The Pirate Bay, and
against The Pirate Bay's own hosting services. This week, they secured
such an injunction against Cyberbunker, a German ISP that was hosting
The Pirate Bay's front page (the trackers are hosted elsewhere).

The first page of the injunction:
http://static.arstechnica.com/2010/05/18/hamburg-injunction.png

While Sven Olaf Kamphuis, the man who runs Cyberbunker, has unabashed
sympathies for the Pirate Party and The Pirate Bay, he was facing
fines of €250,000 per infringement and possible jail time as long as
he kept hosting the site. Despite his desire to fight, Kamphuis had no
real choice but to honor the injunction.

"Yes, we did [take down the site]," he told Ars, "as it is a legally
valid prohibition for us to provide Internet for the servers of The
Pirate Bay as long as there are torrent files on it for those six
movies."

According to the injunction from a Hamburg court, the six films
referenced by Kamphuis are: The Bounty Hunter, Alice in Wonderland,
Our Family Wedding, Green Zone, Repo Men, and Cop Out. These were the
films cited by the studios in their complaint to the court.

Kamphuis told us The Pirate Bay faced three options. First was the
choice to remove all torrent files from the site and use magnet links,
which don't require a tracker. This is "not desirable as a lot of
clients still require .torrent files."

Second, the site could filter out those six particular film names from
its index, but this "could lead to the movie torrent files still being
available under a misspelled name."

Finally, The Pirate Bay could get another ISP. "They are working on it
as we speak," said Kamphuis.

He was right. Though the site still conceals the location of its
servers, it has now returned to Sweden for its connection to the
Internet, and The Pirate Party has decided to get involved.




-- 
Diego Saravia
Diego.Saravia en gmail.com
NO FUNCIONA->dsa en unsa.edu.ar