Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

bbc.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 221 posts

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

#121

Post by rwmj »

scott_w wrote: post #24
MattBearman wrote: post #17

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 I…

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.

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.

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

#122

Post by sim0n »

alan_cx wrote: post #47

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.

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.

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

#123

Post by Locke1689 »

tptacek wrote: post #118
corin_ wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gav…

Oh, message board legal debates; how would we occupy our days without you? I love you most of all, "If I just did X, they couldn't charge me with Y" argument! 18 USC § 2 - PRINCIPALS (a) Whoever commits an offense against the United States or aids, abets, counsels, commands, induces or procures its commission, is punishable as a principal. (b) Whoever willfully causes an act to be done which if directly performed by…

Agreed. To be fair, though, the USC does not apply to civil claims.

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

#124

Post by pbhjpbhj »

tptacek wrote: post #118
corin_ wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gav…

Oh, message board legal debates; how would we occupy our days without you? I love you most of all, "If I just did X, they couldn't charge me with Y" argument! 18 USC § 2 - PRINCIPALS (a) Whoever commits an offense against the United States or aids, abets, counsels, commands, induces or procures its commission, is punishable as a principal. (b) Whoever willfully causes an act to be done which if directly performed by…

I know it's getting tricky to tell but, in theory at least, 18 USC shouldn't apply to the UK.

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

#125

Post by tptacek »

Locke1689 wrote: post #123
tptacek wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, message board legal debates; how would we occupy our days without you? I love you most of all, "If I just did X, they couldn't charge me with Y" argument! 18 USC § 2 - PRINCIPALS (a) Whoever commits an offense against the United States or aids, abets, counsels, commands, induces or procures its commission, is punishable as a principal. (b) Whoever willfully causes an act to be done which if directly performed by…

Agreed. To be fair, though, the USC does not apply to civil claims.

No, which is why both the UK and the US adopted "contributory infringement" torts. (It's fuzzier in the UK.)

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

#126

Post by horsehead »

debacle wrote: post #13
VMG wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably not, but it will make it more difficult for users that aren't tech-savy. (I know that was sarcasm btw)

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.

people still google 'britney spears torrent'?

in any case, the whole copyright infringement thing is really trivial. As soon as you disable one method (here's to you Napster), new ones are only going to pop up. If the authorities were serious about cracking down on IP infringements, they'd revamp copyright law to reflect current technology and culture. -.-

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

#127

Post by anigbrowl »

zanny wrote: post #97
kaolinite wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyright infringement should and must be illegal but it also must be put into perspective. Using copyright infringement to justify censorship, deportation of citizens, multi-million-dollar fines and lifetime prison sentences - that's a symptom of a broken judicial system and governments with bad priorities / corruption. Downloading films + music for personal use? Should get warnings and eventually a small fine if th…

Every argument against copyright infringement assumes there is some evil destitute world on the other side of having it in place. We have never in the modern age in any modern first world country ever had an extended time WITHOUT copyright to see what would happen. Everyone just assumes every artist, developer, and investor would disappear overnight and everyone would turn to stone as content is freely distributed. O…

Or maybe we would just go massive kickstarter style (with some kind of contract guarantees unlike the current system) where the funds people have pay people to make the stuff they want, which is then free for everyone to consume since it is free to reproduce.

The Kickstarter model works fantastically well for creative people that already have a following/track record.For someone trying to connect with an audience the first time, not so much.

At that, why don't they fail? Of all the industries, film has been subject to upheaval approximately never. For the last century the big 5 have been established and held their power base with an iron grip. Independent film is nothing compared to them, indie games vs publishers is not even close to as bad as that situation. The major movie studios have no competition to theaters besides outside media forces but never to competitive "startups" because they control the market.

Not so: the biggest jolt to the industry was antitrust regulation in the 1940s, as discussed here - though paradoxically, in a way that's vaguely supportive of censorship: http://mises.org/freemarket_detail.aspx?control=178

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

#128

Post by vibrunazo »

Tycho wrote: post #115
zanny wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every argument against copyright infringement assumes there is some evil destitute world on the other side of having it in place. We have never in the modern age in any modern first world country ever had an extended time WITHOUT copyright to see what would happen. Everyone just assumes every artist, developer, and investor would disappear overnight and everyone would turn to stone as content is freely distributed. O…

I doubt anybody expects artists would dissappear overnight. People just think it's fair to reward creators for the entertainment value they provided, and unfair to rip it off without paying a dime. And copyright is the best, simplest way to protect fairness in this regard. Not everything has to be 'for the greater good' or for the 'long term benefit of the new age economy' or whatever in order for people to support i…

> Not everything has to be 'for the greater good' or for the 'long term benefit of the new age economy' or whatever in order for people to support it.

Are you saying people who defend copyright. Conciously are only being fair to a small subset of the population. But unfair to the majority. And a net loss to humanity. And still they defend copyright?

I don't think so. It seems to me, those who defend copyright have the opinion that copyright is a net benefit to humanity. After all pros and cons are summed. Which I strongly disagree.

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

#129

Post by PotatoEngineer »

Tim-Boss wrote: post #14

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 k…

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.

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

#130

Post by jQueryIsAwesome »

debacle wrote: post #5

Clearly this will stop piracy.

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.

Post reply on HN