New ruling in UK says ISPs must block PirateBay

[justin_credible]

Pirate Bay must be blocked, High Court tells ISPs
Broadband providers Sky, Everything Everywhere, TalkTalk, O2 and Virgin Media must block users from accessing filesharing website The Pirate Bay, the High Court has ruled.

The Pirate Bay must be blocked, the High Court has ruled
By Matt Warman, Consumer Technology Editor3:47PM BST 30 Apr 2012101 Comments
Mr Justice Arnold said that the process must begin in the next few weeks. It followed his ruling in February that both the operators and users of The Pirate Bay website infringe the copyright of music companies.

BT, who has also been named in the case, has requested more time to deal with the original complaint lodged by the record industry body, the BPI. The BPI has agreed, but sources expect The Pirate Bay to be inaccessible by BT customers in due course as well.
The Pirate Bay acts as a searchable index of links to allow users to download files from each other. All the most popular files are copyright films, music and software.

The website claims to be the largest website of its kind, with more than four million trackers, and according to record labels generated up to $3m in advertising in October last year. Some 3.7 million Britons are Pirate Bay users, according to ComScore, and Alexa consistently ranks it in the 100 most popular websites in the world.
Because it does not itself host copyright material, the Pirate Bay’s defenders have often argued that it works in a similar way to Google, but Mr Justice Arnold found its operators “actively encourage” copyright infringement.

The Pirate Bay faces UK ban after court ruling

BT has already been required to block access to Newzbin2, another filesharing website, by the same judge. He said he regarded the case againstThe Pirate Bay as even stronger.
The BPI originally asked The Pirate Bay to take down music that infringed its members’ copyright in July 2011; after no response was received it asked internet service providers to block access to the site voluntarily. After they refused the BPI went to court in December. Mr Justice Arnold’s subsequent judgement ruled that The Pirate Bay “actively encourage[s copyright infringement] it and treat any attempts to prevent it (judicial or otherwise) with contempt”.

BPI Chief Executive Geoff Taylor said, “The High Court has confirmed that The Pirate Bay infringes copyright on a massive scale. Its operators line their pockets by commercially exploiting music and other creative works without paying a penny to the people who created them. This is wrong - musicians, sound engineers and video editors deserve to be paid for their work just like everyone else.”

He claimed that sites such as The Pirate Bay “destroy jobs in the UK and undermine investment in new British artists”, and urged users to pay for music via legal sites.
John Smith, General Secretary of the Musicians’ Union, added that “The individuals responsible for operating The Pirate Bay have total disregard for the rights of musicians. It is right that the High Court has followed other European courts and has ruled that it should be blocked in the UK.”

Some campaigners, however, questioned whether the action would work. Jim Killock of the Open Rights Group, claimed “Blocking the Pirate Bay is pointless and dangerous. It will fuel calls for further, wider and even more drastic calls for Internet censorship of many kinds, from pornography to extremism. Internet censorship is growing in scope and becoming easier. Yet it never has the effect desired. It simply turns criminals into heroes."
A Virgin Media spokesman said that while the ISP would comply with the judgement, it “strongly believes that changing consumer behaviour to tackle copyright infringement also needs compelling legal alternatives, such as our agreement with Spotify, to give consumers access to great content at the right price."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technolog...ells-ISPs.html

lol, they never give up do they? These politicians and courts are furious that there's something out of their control (the internet) and they will stop at nothing. Power hungry mongrols. So now we're blocking search engines, I guess Google is next, I mean they allow you to search for porn and other evils like torrents just like TPB right?

For those of you that just hate PirateBay "because they put pirated material on the internet" you need to educate yourself. Their search engine are just trackers and they have no say or control over what torrents people share with each other. Not to mention they're based in a country Sweden where they don't have ridiculous copyright laws like U.S. and U.K. So what they're doing in their country is completely legal. And really what they're doing should be legal anywhere because they're just a search engine.

1. Yay block those evil people at PirateBay.
2. Yay block those evil people at Google.
3. Yay our internet is completely censored and we're told what we can and can't do on it (wait wtf how did that just happen?)

And before anyone says anything yes I'm in the U.S., doesn't matter these usually tend to start in U.K. and get copied by the U.S.

[KingOfSentinels]

If Google got blocked, it'd be like entering the Dark Ages all over again.

As for TPB being blocked, I don't really care, I don't use it apart to laugh at the legal threats page, and there'll always be ways around the block. It'll stop morons from using it but there'll always we ways to find a way around it, people forget how resourceful Interwebbers can be.

[justin_credible]

Originally Posted by KingOfSentinels

If Google got blocked, it'd be like entering the Dark Ages all over again.

As for TPB being blocked, I don't really care, I don't use it apart to laugh at the legal threats page, and there'll always be ways around the block. It'll stop morons from using it but there'll always we ways to find a way around it, people forget how resourceful Interwebbers can be.

Google (and even Youtube) are blocked in China. The Chinese Government has complete control over what the chinese citizens can and cannot do on the net. There are plenty of lawmakers in the U.S. and the U.K. that would love nothing more than to have that same power and control over people.

All this law will do is make more people get interested in proxy servers. But they'll just keep raising the bar until we have a completely filtered internet.

[Northeastmonk]

Chine's government wants to tell them what to do and how to do it. I got to watch a documentary about an American Women who brought Martin Luther King Jr.'s vision of nonviolent protesting to China in a form of play. It's very intersting. If you thought the internet was bad, Chinese people cannot voice their opinion about the government at all.


http://www.bringingkingtochina.com/

[spider-prime]

Well, so long internet! I'm outta here!

[Alucard]

Pretty shitty. But all you need to do is put a special series of magic numbers into your browser settings and you can go there easily.

[spider-prime]

But now it's illegal, get caught and you share a cell with Bubba!

[Alucard]

Originally Posted by spider-prime

But now it's illegal, get caught and you share a cell with Bubba!

As if they'd know! Proxy makes you invisible.

[justin_credible]

Oh the wanna be dictators of the U.S. Government are not done either. Some are calling this worse than SOPA.

CISPA is the new SOPA
By Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) - 04/23/12 12:12 PM ET

Earlier this year, strong public opposition led by several prominent websites forced Congressional leaders to cancel votes on two bills known in Washington as “SOPA” and “PIPA.” Both of these bills threatened search engines and websites with possible shutdowns if the Justice Department deemed them insufficiently cooperative with our phony “war on terror,” or if they were merely accused of copyright infringement. Fortunately the American public flooded Capitol Hill with phone calls and Congressional leaders dropped both bills.

But we should never underestimate the federal government’s insatiable desire to control the internet. Statists of all parties, persuasions, and nationalities hate the free, unbridled flow of information, ideas, and goods via the internet. They resent the notion that ordinary people can communicate and trade across the world without government filters or approvals. So they continually seek to impose controls, always under the guise of fighting terrorism or protecting “intellectual property” rights.

The latest assault on internet freedom is called the “Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act,” or “CISPA,” which may be considered by Congress this week. CISPA is essentially an internet monitoring bill that permits both the federal government and private companies to view your private online communications with no judicial oversight - provided, of course, that they do so in the name of “cybersecurity.” The bill is very broadly written, and allows the Department of Homeland Security to obtain large swaths of personal information contained in your emails or other online communication. It also allows emails and private information found online to be used for purposes far beyond any reasonable definition of fighting cyberterrorism.

CISPA represents an alarming form of corporatism, as it further intertwines government with companies like Google and Facebook. It permits them to hand over your private communications to government officials without a warrant, circumventing well-established federal laws like the Wiretap Act and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. It also grants them broad immunity from lawsuits for doing so, leaving you without recourse for invasions of privacy. Simply put, CISPA encourages some of our most successful internet companies to act as government spies, sowing distrust of social media and chilling communication in one segment of the world economy where America still leads.

Proponents of CISPA may be well-intentioned, but they unquestionably are leading us toward a national security state rather than a free constitutional republic. Imagine having government-approved employees embedded at Facebook, complete with federal security clearances, serving as conduits for secret information about their American customers. If you believe in privacy and free markets, you should be deeply concerned about the proposed marriage of government intelligence gathering with private, profit-seeking companies. CISPA is Big Brother writ large, putting the resources of private industry to work for the nefarious purpose of spying on the American people.We can only hope the public responds to CISPA as it did to SOPA back in January. I urge you to learn more about the bill by reading a synopsis provided by the Electronic Frontier Foundation on their website at eff.org. I also urge you to call your federal Senators and Representatives and urge them to oppose CISPA and similar bills that attack internet freedom.

Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas) is the Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Domestic Monetary Policy and Technology and also serves on the house Committee on Foreign Affairs.

http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-bl...s-the-new-sopa

[Reality]

Gaaaah when will it end? Nothing in the land of the free is truly that.

[spider-prime]

It was a ploy to get you into a cage where you work forever paying taxes only to the rich!

[spider-prime]

For now! They have satellites that can fire a pin sized beam into your pee hole out your butt hole and Apple owns them all! They're only letting you get away with it!

[Escaflowne2001]

No one on the internet is truely invisible though if your going to The Pirate Bay to download something chances are you don't care it's illegal. Never actually used the site personally but there are 100's of others out there for anyone that cares.

They wanna pass that CISPA crap in the UK aswell.

[darren]

anyone 'thinks' they are invisible on the internet they are idiots ... Autonomy /end/

[Alucard]

There is no way your isp is going to track you if you jump through proxies. They are not that hardcore. If people in china can do it and not be executed, pretty sure you can get by in the UK.