There is something extremely fishy going on in the Court of The Hague.
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.
Things like these are only strange if you expect the legal system to be fair. Clearly its not. I think its a parody. :)
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...
There are several courts in the Hague, the international criminal court is one (and they don't just try Africans, they try war criminals from all over the globe). Then there is the 'regular' court in the Hague. Most major dutch cities have their own local courts.
This morning our pirate censorship battles were the first thing that popped into my mind when I woke up.
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 really like this idea. How an issue is framed is crucial to the battle because this may eventually make it to the public.
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.
Do you know how to frame things? You reminded me of Bruce Scheiner who advocated framing things. eg instead of Safety vs Privacy, state it's a matter of Control vs Liberty.
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."
I agree with you completely. Choosing the name "thepiratebay" was an immature move imo, and it doesn't pay proper creedence to the whole idea of stated rules and enforced rules.
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.
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.
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
We're all fighting in Australia. The problem is it's becoming akin to America in it's ability to ignore the general public and free speech.
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.
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?
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.
Thankfully, the internet is a distributed network full of computers. You can block the road between the user and his destination, but all he needs is another computer to forward the traffic for him and the block is useless. The ISP's knows this but they simply comply with the law because they have to.
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.
Yes, for you and me these are solutions. For the 99% of the internet population they cannot understand the words you've written, and cannot get around these filtering. So they'll still buy their CDs in the brick and mortar shop and the business model for the music & content industry will be unchanged, old fashioned and not disrupted. :(
Well, appearently the number of people understanding are such a threat to their existence that they have declared war on an entire generations of people.
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.
It is not entirely unplausible that the way forward for the courts will be to change tactics and make it illegal to visit the website instead of blocking it. At least it won't take long before they figure out that IP blocking is more efficient than DNS blocking. In any case it will only keep getting worse unless we make this a political struggle.
Exactly, that's why domain names by itself can not be illegal whatsoever and should be afforded immunity beyond seller-buyer relationship, including against court seizures. Even trademarks that are meant to be narrow are now being used as a broad weapon to kill domain names. eg Nissan
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.
The Pirate Party is the most digitally-advanced political party in the world. If any entrepreneurs want to fight anti-Internet laws (SOPA, Internet filter, etc) or injustice like this article (surveillance, etc), they're the best party to do it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_party
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.