High Court: The Pirate Bay must be blocked by UK ISPs

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17894176

by udp • 14 years ago

253 214 14 years ago

bbc.co.uk

TamDenholm• 14 years ago

Does anyone know when this comes into effect? Also, does it only affect the ISP's mentioned in the article or ALL ISP's?

Guess i'll just have to use a TPB mirror from now on then...

seabee• 14 years ago

Or VPN through a server located outside the UK.

As far as I know this is dealt with on a case-by-case basis (i.e. just these ISPs and just TPB) because it's a civil matter - the govt would need to make a new law to force all ISPs to block The Pirate Bay and similar websites.

naich• 14 years ago

Or a VPN within the UK, as long as it's not one of the ISPs mentioned here.

drucken6• 14 years ago

Five ISPs - Sky, Everything Everywhere, TalkTalk, O2 and Virgin Media.

Sixth ISP, British Telecom, has requested a few more weeks to further consider its position and the claimant, BPI has agreed.

However, since these ISP, in particular Virgin Media, cover by far the largest broadband users in the UK, for most intents and purposes this affects the whole UK.

rlpb• 14 years ago

> However, since these ISP, in particular Virgin Media, cover by far the largest broadband users in the UK, for most intents and purposes this affects the whole UK.

It will cover the majority of non-piratebay users. The piratebay users will just switch to one of the ISPs that is not one of those five.

anons2011• 14 years ago

Are we trying to emulate China or Iran? Obviously a block like this for any tech-savvy person is absolutely meaningless.

af3• 14 years ago

yep! tunnelr?

viraptor2• 14 years ago

That's advanced technology! Not needed really:

google: site:thepiratebay.se windows

Cached site from google includes the magnet link.

rmc8• 14 years ago

The UK has also censored Wikipedia in the past.

dabeeeenster• 14 years ago

Really? Link?

anoother• 14 years ago

[citation needed]

nagrom• 14 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Watch_Foundation_and_W...

That's the wikipedia link to the time that the unelected committee called the internet Watch Foundation managed to cut off access to Wikipedia after they judged that legally-available album art on one band's entry constituted child pornography and summarily blocked wikipedia.

m0nty• 14 years ago

Censorship is a bit like taxation: knowledgeable people will tend to find ways around it, but they are not the majority. As long as the majority complies, the politicians won't be too bothered. Similar with the BPI (and vested interests in the US). All they want to do is weaken file-sharing networks by stopping PCs becoming nodes on them, to remove their critical mass.

fromhet6• 14 years ago

Would it be ok to stop a newspaper printing and qr-links to copyrighted material illegally?

Is it all right to cencor child pornography on the internet? If it's ok to cencor one illegal thing, why not another?

jacquesm• 14 years ago

Posession of child pornography is illegal, possession of music and movies is not.

debacle2• 14 years ago

Clearly this will stop piracy.

monsterix• 14 years ago

Well what do we have here? A <sarcasm> tag. :)

VMG6• 14 years ago

Probably not, but it will make it more difficult for users that aren't tech-savy.

(I know that was sarcasm btw)

debacle2• 14 years ago

I don't believe so. Most people I know use Google for their torrent searches.

Googling "britney spears torrent" is just going to bring up a different torrent site than tpb.

The clear solution is for UK ISPs to ban Google.

zoul• 14 years ago

It will create a market opportunity for people who will make the torrents available even to the users that aren’t tech-savy.

fredley4• 14 years ago

And there will be plenty of tech-savvy people ready to make it easy again, in exchange for ads/money/malware.

jQueryIsAwesome• 14 years ago

Hundreds of clones will appear, just a bunch of static HTML versions that only get updated once a day or so.

Also, a lot of developers will come out with solutions for the average person: Browser extensions, free/paid proxies among others.

maz29• 14 years ago

I see a google trend coming in the form of 'How to access piratebay in the UK?'

TomGullen3• 14 years ago

It doesn't particularly concern me that this particular website is being blocked, as it's purpose is pretty obvious. Blocking it is laughably futile but it does send a clear message out.

What does concern me though is that this is a foot in the door for the government to block other websites they object to in the future.

k-mcgrady• 14 years ago

"it's purpose is pretty obvious".

I don't think that's true. Clearly a lot of copyrighted material is downloaded from the site but there is a also a lot of material linked to legally. For example they now promote independent artists on their homepage who have content available on the pirate bay. Nine Inch Nails have a huge collection of unedited concert footage available. Open source software and Linux distros are available.

I think the 'linking to content is illegal' thing really needs to be seriously examined. Are they going to block Google next? Where is the line?

(And I'm saying this as someone who pays for content and really only does download legal content from TPB).

TomGullen3• 14 years ago

There is legal content on TPB yes, but it's a pretty indisputable fact that TPB's primary motive is piracy. I think no matter what metric you use to gauge legitimate use vs piracy on TPB, legitimate use will fade into obscurity. I think it's a pretty weak defence in all honesty.

To me it sounds like a cruise liner calling itself a rowing boat because it has a couple off the back in case of emergencies.

anigbrowl4• 14 years ago

That's a bit like saying your historical pirate ship (the kind with sails, cannons and so on) has a cook on board to feed the crew, so it should really be considered as a floating restaurant and the plundering and sinking of other vessels is incidental to that.

Tim-Boss• 14 years ago

Within minutes of any major ISP implementing a "block" a few thousand people will post on facebook/twitter/blogs and websites links to the plethora of proxies/TOR tunnels/Open DNS settings and VPN's that will instantly negate any ISP level "block" (sarcastic quotes intentional).

This will cost british ISP's hundreds of thousands or millions of pounds to implement and manage, and will at best only delay any would-be knock-off-nigel 30 seconds or so while he learns about proxies et. al. and configures a browser.

Security theatre at its worst...THE EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES!

btian• 14 years ago

Tor is getting more and more useful. It doesn't take much to mirror TPB with magnetic links tbh

fromhet6• 14 years ago

Also: any of the hundreds of other torrent sites.

Or secure file sharing protocols as oneswarm and such.

PotatoEngineer• 14 years ago

Yes, there are plenty of ways to circumvent the block, but some of them take more technical know-how (or social links to people with that knowledge) than others. A block will definitely cut down the traffic to TPB.

sagarun• 14 years ago

One can argue that The Pirate Bay just facilitates copyright violation, It never violates any one's copyright. In fact lot of artist's are publishing content through The Pirate Bay.

alan_cx3• 14 years ago

Where does that argument stop? Computers facilitate copyright violation, there for PCWorld and Dell do too. Roads facilitate burglary, etc, etc.

They have legitimate uses, I here the idiots cry. Yeah, so do torrents and TPB.

This whole thing reminds me of the prohibition of things like cannabis. Banned on a false economic and scaremongering premiss, yet the laws remain for emotional nonsensical reasons. Logic and reason get left far behind.

I really dont know what to make of governance any more. Politics is insane. Business seems equally insane. I dont know how I fit in to this any more.

RobAtticus2• 14 years ago

ThePirateBay doesn't pretend to NOT be a tracker for piracy. It makes no effort to ensure that the content it tracks is legitimate and has far more illegitimate content than legitimate content. It's not terribly difficult to see why TPB is different than say a computer or a road.

MattBearman• 14 years ago

The ruling is mostly full of shit:

  Sites like The Pirate Bay destroy jobs in the UK and undermine investment in new British artists

I'd like to see evidence to back this up, innocent until proven guilty and all.

  The Pirate Bay infringes copyright on a massive scale

No, it doesn't. TPB doesn't provide any content at all. Not only that, but it also provides links to non-copyright infringing material. Eg: Some of Nine Inch Nails recent releases have been legally made available over bittorrent in 24/96 high quality.

  Its operators line their pockets by commercially exploiting music and other creative works

According to wikipedia, TPB earnings in 2006 were $102,035.05 US, and expenses in 2009 were $112,590.40 US (couldn't find data for the same year) but they can't be making a huge amount of profit on those margins.

But the thing that really gets me is our government giving itself power to censor the internet.

scott_w• 14 years ago

That was the BPI spokesman (the UK equivalent of the RIAA).

Those quotes were not part of the judgement. The judge merely applied the Digital Britain Act, an act rushed through at the end of the last Parliament (in 2010) in the run-up to the general election. It got a lot less scrutiny than bills of this nature usually get.

rwmj• 14 years ago

I've actually met the head of the BPI, and he's as mad in person as he appears in print. For once I completely believe these quotes were not made up by the journalist interviewing him.

alexchamberlain• 14 years ago

The government and the judiciary are independent.

drucken6• 14 years ago

Only in the sense of execution/implementation.

In the UK system, without a written/arms-length constitution, the judiciary is manipulated or beholden to any newly created laws of the land, especially in civil matters.

If there are no protections in law, especially rushed laws, there is little the judiciary can do to defend or even argue one interest versus another.

This is surprisingly common, particularly in matters of sovereignty, security or trade (new trade of course being in "intellectual property"). Recent examples include the slew of UK-US extraditions on non-actionable behaviour in the UK.

anamax• 14 years ago

> The government and the judiciary are independent.

In many ways and at many times, yes, but ....

VMG6• 14 years ago

> Not only that, but it also provides links to non-copyright infringing material. Eg: Some of Nine Inch Nails recent releases have been legally made available over bittorrent in 24/96 high quality.

I don't understand that argument - who ever claimed that TPB only has infringing material?

> According to wikipedia, TPB earnings in 2006 were $102,035.05 US, and expenses in 2009 were $112,590.40 US (couldn't find data for the same year) but they can't be making a huge amount of profit on those margins.

Weird that they don't publish the numbers themselves. I wonder what the reason might be...

driverdan• 14 years ago

> Weird that they don't publish the numbers themselves. I wonder what the reason might be...

They're a private company. They're under no obligation to provide the public with their financial data.

citricsquid2• 14 years ago

> No, it doesn't. TPB doesn't provide any content at all. Not only that, but it also provides links to non-copyright infringing material. Eg: Some of Nine Inch Nails recent releases have been legally made available over bittorrent in 24/96 high quality.

And my drug dealer gave $50 to a pregnant woman so that she could get a taxi to the hospital.

If you want to argue why this ruling is wrong you should address the issues of censorship, arguing that The Pirate Bay isn't a site built around copyright infringement (which it is and the founders openly admit this) just does a dis-service to the real problem here (censorship). TPB is a for-profit copyright infringement enabling enterprise, that's why it exists, arguing otherwise is not worth your energy (because ultimately, what does it matter if it enables copyright infringement or not? So do most websites that don't intend on doing that) instead argue that any government should not be disabling access to a website.

corin_3• 14 years ago

The issue is not with censorship, it's with what they are censoring. Very few people here would take issue with this court order if it was about a site that exclusively hosted child porn. Therefore yes, the context of "is what TBP does illegal?"

To extend your (frankly poor) metaphor, he wouldn't be a drug dealer if all he did was hold up a sign pointing you towards your nearest drug dealers and he never actually gave you any drugs.

moron• 14 years ago

Yeah, come on. Let's not pretend this site is something other than what it so clearly is.

pippy• 14 years ago

Technically TPB enables copyright infringement, it doesn't engage in it. It's the users who upload torrent files (now magnet links), and the users who download material.

Giving someone a loaded gun doesn't make the gun maker a killer. It's the sites users who do the illegal horse work.

Ignoring the fact cutting access to the TPB is censorship, and law makers are bending to the will of companies, and the fact studies have shown that pirated material promotes and increases profits, people will always find a way. Bringing a hard drive to a friends house will allow me to pirate far more than downloading ever could.

andyakb• 14 years ago

Their earnings have likely increased recently, but with their switch to magnet links, they have to have saved an obscene amount of money in terms of bandwidth costs, so their costs have likely gone down significantly. However, the point still stands that, yea, nobody is getting rich off of this, but there is likely a decent amount of profit being made.

anigbrowl4• 14 years ago

The ruling is mostly full of shit: Sites like The Pirate Bay destroy jobs in the UK and undermine investment in new British artists I'd like to see evidence to back this up, innocent until proven guilty and all.

FTA: "Sites like The Pirate Bay destroy jobs in the UK and undermine investment in new British artists," the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) said.

That's the BPI's comment on the ruling, not the ruling itself.

This [1] is the original opinion in the case, to which this ruling refers, and which will take some time to read. It shouldn't be necessary to remind folks that the UK doesn't have a constitutional guarantee of free speech like the US constitution odes, and commercial speech is thus subject to regulation. Kudos to ZDnet [2][3] for including a link to the court's opinion in their story; any media site that reports on a court case without linking to or identifying it by name is likely not worth your time.

1. http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Ch/2012/268.html

2. http://www.zdnet.co.uk/blogs/tech-tech-boom-10017860/uk-isps...

3. http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/intellectual-property/2012/02/21...

huhtenberg• 14 years ago

> The ruling is mostly full of shit:

It's obvious that the ruling is full of shit just from the verdict.

arethuza• 14 years ago

Presumably this is the English & Welsh High Court - not sure if this would apply in Scotland and Northern Ireland?

ajross• 14 years ago

Not a brit nor a lawyer. But I thought it was simply called the "High Court of England and Wales" and that the judgments were binding throughout the UK.

Andrew_Quentin• 14 years ago

It is called the High court of England and Wales because Scotland has a different judicial system. I doubt any Scottish judge would not consider it as highly persuasive however.

rmc8• 14 years ago

Nope. The UK is funny. Unlike several 'federated' countries in which each 'bit' has equal power over it's area as each other, the UK has a mismatch. England and Wales are treated together as one country lots of things (law, health system, same notes), but Scotland has a separate legal system, Northern Ireland would have separate laws aswell, but that's a special case cause it has a ahem unique parliamently system.

Wait till you look at other oddities, like the Isle of Mann, which isn't in the UK, or one of the channel islands, which only abolished their feudal voting system a few years ago.

drucken6• 14 years ago

Next up: ban Google (including its torrentable Custom Search Engine), Bing and all other search engines listing torrents? Or just ban all search engines except those sanctioned by BPI/MPAA etc.?

The irony is that at this point The Pirate Bay is just a collection of merely 90MB of magnet links which can be downloaded anywhere on the Internet in the blink of an eye.

rmc8• 14 years ago

The Pirate Bay is just a collection of merely 90MB of magnet links which can be downloaded anywhere on the Internet in the blink of an eye.

Someone made a torrent of the torrents on the Pirate Bay (at one point).

Here's the magnet link:

  magnet:?xt=urn:btih:938802790a385c49307f34cca4c30f80b03df59c&dn=The+whole+Pirate+Bay+magnet+archive&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A80&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.publicbt.com%3A80&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.ccc.de%3A80

jsnell• 14 years ago

Could you edit your comment to break that long line into smaller chunks? It's breaking the page layout.

glogla2• 14 years ago

That's interesting. Is there way to get actual version of this?

dafunnie• 14 years ago

Didn't they try to block porn sites last year? David Cameron ostensibly proclaimed that 'porn sites corrupt the British nation' or something in that vein. The UK is beginning to get a tad too draconian for the 21st century.

drucken6• 14 years ago

I think they are still trying.

There is an on-going tabloid newspaper campaign where they are trying to force the ISPs and politicians (especially the opposition) to adopt or commit to an "opt-in" for porn on Internet connections. That is, the default would be required that ISPs take on the cost and legal culpability to block porn.

fredley4• 14 years ago

Ironically, most of these tabloid newspapers publish pornography themselves, and staunchly defend their right to do so.

viraptor2• 14 years ago

If it's the same as what Vodafone does with their content control, then let me assure you it's completely broken. With the filter turned on, I can access any porn site I tried, but some articles - I couldn't.

Monotoko2• 14 years ago

It's the same as what my mobile network (O2) do as well, I tried to read a news article to do with poker, and I got a "This content is rated as over-18. Please call us to have it unblocked" (paraphrased - as I can't remember precisely what it said)

smiler• 14 years ago

He of course didn't mind the support of Murdoch's media empire, including the UKs most popular newspaper (The Sun) which carries naked women on page 3 everyday

alan_cx3• 14 years ago

Does any body really still use TPB as a first stop site? It is usually my site of last resort. To me this is a bit like some weirdo government still freaking out about Rock 'n Roll and Punk Rockers.

sim0n• 14 years ago

It's probably more about preventing new users. If a non-technical friend asks me where to find torrents/download tv shows/etc I'll tell them TPB over a private tracker.

bricestacey• 14 years ago

TPB is my first stop. I've always used private music trackers, but never found much need for it with video (quality is less important and I don't want to deal with seed requirements).

PiracyApologist• 14 years ago

From the guidelines:

  "What to Submit
  On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting.
  That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to
  reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that
  gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

Clearly the community has spoken in submitting and then voting this up to be the #1 story on HN. However, I'm having a hard time finding what is intellectually gratifying about these kinds of articles other than in a Slashdot YRO-style basis where different people chime in on censorship, arguments over linking vs hosting, morality of piracy, etc.

Maybe having been a long-time Slashdot reader I've seen these arguments played out ad nauseum. When I started regularly participating in HN over a year ago I found HN to be refreshing in that these kinds of stories didn't make it to the front page. If anything, I'd expect a good hacker would find a blog post detailing lesser-known aspects of the bittorrent protocol interesting. Or a blog post discussing technical workarounds were such a block to be implemented. As I've been around long enough, I'm officially qualified to say that I'm saddened to see HN turning into Slashdot/Reddit.

fromhet6• 14 years ago

What can be done about it? It's so easy to upvote and comment "this won't stop piracy". The only way I can think is to have an enormous human capcha that is having to repeat the guidelines before being allowed to vote, but that would of course be ridiculous.

known• 14 years ago

Sharing is not illegal. Selling is illegal.

josscrowcroft• 14 years ago

This has to be a classic example of closing the stable doors after the horse has bolted.

They're scrabbling around, trying desperately and litigiously to cling on to whatever semblance of the pre-internet golden years they can, but it's too late. We've got a taste for free shit.

For better or worse - it's not going anywhere. They'd have to cut off our hands to stop us from getting what we want.

The worst part? The harder they make it, the less likely I am to feel good about paying for content.

DanI-S• 14 years ago

At the risk of hyperbole: Lobbying is a catalyst for the destruction of democracy, and should be cut and cauterised from our civilization like the cancer that it is.

Anybody running on the platform of diminishing the corporate voice to its legitimate, proportional volume would certainly have my vote.

Whether or not piracy is morally excusable, I am certain this form of legislation is not what the British public wants.

pbhjpbhj6• 14 years ago

>Lobbying is a catalyst for the destruction of democracy //

As anyone is allowed to lobby I don't think this is true. In our representative "democracy" though it doesn't seem that MPs are required to act in a representative way. That, IMO, is what destroys the idea of democracy.

If a company lobbies an MP it shouldn't make any difference. It should be the people of the MP's constituency that the company needs to lobby so that they can alter the opinions of the people that the MP is supposed to be representing.

cnbeuiwx• 14 years ago

The dark forces behind these organisations couldnt care less about music being pirated. What they really want is a censored, controlled internet where free speach is not anonymous.

You have to understand that the Internet is the only medium not built as a pyramid, where you can control the entire pyramid by controlling the leader. Nobody controls the entire Internet today, so its quite scary for the dark ones. Despite all their power and money, they cant stop the free flow of information on the Internet.

gouranga2• 14 years ago

It's getting like a nightmare vision of capitalism in the 1980s. You know like Robocop or Gremlins 2 where the city sold out to corporations. Corporate interest over common sense.

We'll just have to mail DivXs to each other like we did in the late 90s when bandwith was low...

luriel2• 14 years ago

gouranga2• 14 years ago

Rubbish.

When the successful capitalists lobby politicians and pay them off regularly, it's a closed loop between government and corporations.

Us peons don't get a look in.

RobertKohr• 14 years ago

Yippy, the more the goverment tries to control the internet, the more it will go underground, and the more tor will gain in strength.

andr3w321• 14 years ago

I hate the whole ethical argument when it comes to copyright infringement. The fact is an unenforceable law is pointless and should not be law. I don't know what the solution is -- and I wish people would spend more time debating and talking about a workable solution rather than complaining, but blocking sites that link or illegally host copyrighted content will not solve a thing. Remember when illegal music downloads stopped after napster got shutdown? Oh wait, a hundred more files sharing clients just took it's place.

dkersten2• 14 years ago

The workable solution is for content producers to take a long hard look at their business models to see if maybe they can profit without criminalizing a large percentage of the population.

NLips2• 14 years ago

Do you remember when Napster came back as a legally-operating site, creating better competition in the music-download market and increasing the number of people who download music legally?

horsehead2• 14 years ago

What the hell? Aren't there more important things out there to tackle than copyright infringement? Sure it's illegal. But there is a massive campaign against pirates, but seriously -- surely there are bigger problems than this to tackle ....

edit: also, i love this quote "We should keep blocking them - they are stealing music illegally."

it's clearly ok to steal music legally. Just as long as you're not stealing it in ways the authorities deem appropriate. </tongue-in-cheek>

tomp2• 14 years ago

> "The biggest culprits of this, really, are the younger demographic who just haven't been convinced that doing this is somehow morally uncomfortable.

This.

Good luck with that. More probably, when the "younger demographics" grow older and get more voting power, they will likely vote /against/ such corporate tyranny. This means that the music industry has some 20 or so more years of prosperity, at most.

pbhjpbhj6• 14 years ago

I can't stand it.

How can the BBC claim to be impartially reporting copyright infringement when they call it "piracy"?

It's illegal, it's often immoral, it's not shooting people and stealing their stuff though and sufficiently different, in a moral sense, to make such a claim preposterously immoral in itself.

NLips2• 14 years ago

'Piracy' is as valid a term as 'copyright infringement': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement#.22Pirac...

pbhjpbhj6• 14 years ago

Your link shows historic use of piracy as a term referring to unauthorised manufacture and sale (ie for profit). It gives no support for using the term for giving away content, nor for simple consumption, against the rights holders wishes - both of these are properly, legally and dispassionately described as IPR infringement.

Even if booksellers in the past had tried to make an emotional attachment between book copiers and pirates I would still find its use in a supposedly unbiased report to be objectionable.

sebkomianos• 14 years ago

I wonder what would happen if TPB started operating as a general search engine. Like, Google, let's say.

lifeisstillgood• 14 years ago

That's It.

I finally broke. I have been reading for going on two years about SOPA, PIPA, GCHQ snaffling everything in sight. And this is the straw that broke the camel's back.

I have just ... written to my MP.

Dammit. It will achieve nothing, but I am going to keep pushing. I know why they are doing this, but ... please please please, stop choking off industries that might just help us compete against the global behemoths down the road.

Joakal• 14 years ago

Try them: http://www.pirateparty.org.uk/ They also believe in other saner intellectual property laws.

andrewfelix• 14 years ago

I don't agree with shutting down TPB, but I kinda sympathise with the porn industry. They have solid streaming credentials and go out of their way to make content accessible as opposed to companies like HBO. Is their a legitimate excuse to pirating porn?

High Court: The Pirate Bay must be blocked by UK ISPs

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