High Court orders British ISPs to block "The Pirate Bay"

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by xg4bx

i always look at the endgame. ok so they block pirate sites.....what's next? once they get a foot in the door they never stop and before you know it you may as well live in china.

hey you know what, certain political sites are injurious. i mean we can all live without sites like stormfront, right? those people are making money off hate and we can't have that, can we? like i said, it never stops.

So if someone opens a website for contract killers and fencing stolen goods, that would be ok? After all, they just provide the platform. And once you start it never stops, so you can't close them down.

Not that I want to equate those acts with infringing copyrights, but we are talking about openly and brazenly supporting and profiting from illegal acts.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by xg4bx

i always look at the endgame. ok so they block pirate sites.....what's next? once they get a foot in the door they never stop and before you know it you may as well live in china.

Who are the "they" that you're referring to here? There is no general policy in force here; to block a site requires a court hearing at which the site has every opportunity to defend itself.

[tubemonkey]

If Pirate Bay can be blocked because of copyright infringement, then shouldn't MobileRead be blocked for the same reason? After all, MR allows downloads of ebooks that are still in copyright in the US.

[Giggleton]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

Not that I want to equate those acts with infringing copyrights, but we are talking about openly and brazenly supporting and profiting from illegal acts.

So if a site was to exist that did not profit from the distribution of texts under "copyright" we would be fine, morally, ethically, and legally?

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by Giggleton

So if a site was to exist that did not profit from the distribution of texts under "copyright" we would be fine, morally, ethically, and legally?

Well, at least you would spend less time in jail.

[Ninjalawyer]

Originally Posted by elcreative

Read full details... blocking NOTHING to do with government censorship... result of Court Order after due process of law - there is a difference...

I have in fact read the full details, and I don't think it's proper that record companies can sue ISPs to have a third-party website blocked from being accessed by the UK public. Just because a legitimate process was followed doesn't mean that censorship hasn't occurred.

How are laws that allow for blocking the public from accessing a website not censorship? Maybe you can explain the difference to me since I still can't seem to understand it from your glib response.

Here's a quote from Nick Pickles, the director of Big Brother Watch on the issue:

The broader consequences risk damaging legitimate businesses and undermining cyber-security while further perpetuating the myth that this is an easy technological solution to a complex problem.

Ultimately, the risk is that ISPs will be expected to monitor everything their customers do online to ensure they are not doing something they should not be. Indeed, it is almost inevitable certain groups will call for this when web blocking is exposed as the ineffective and easily-avoided instrument it is.

[Sil_liS]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

If Pirate Bay can be blocked because of copyright infringement, then shouldn't MobileRead be blocked for the same reason? After all, MR allows downloads of ebooks that are still in copyright in the US.

Don't forget about Youtube and Wikipedia. They are all evil and should be stopped. After a couple of generations people will think that censorship is the natural way of the world and won't be able to recognize it.

[elcreative]

Originally Posted by Ninjalawyer

I have in fact read the full details, and I don't think it's proper that record companies can sue ISPs to have a third-party website blocked from being accessed by the UK public. Just because a legitimate process was followed doesn't mean that censorship hasn't occurred.

How are laws that allow for blocking the public from accessing a website not censorship? Maybe you can explain the difference to me since I still can't seem to understand it from your glib response.

Here's a quote from Nick Pickles, the director of Big Brother Watch on the issue:

I am just going by YOUR own words... "but it certainly seems like an overreach for the government to start engaging in censorship."

YOU said GOVERNMENT censorship and I pointed out that it wasn't the government but the result of a judicial process... I DIDN'T say it wasn't censorship anywhere, I said it wasn't GOVERNMENT censorship... I don't know about your country (I did think that Canada was a democracy) but in the UK the Government and Judiciary are separate things and, in fact, can act as checks on the other's power... sorry you thought that my response was glib but I can only think that is because you didn't understand my point.

It is a major difference between government and judicial action especially in a democracy where these are separate arms of the overall body politic specifically designed to be able to act as controls on each others actions...

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by Ninjalawyer

I have in fact read the full details, and I don't think it's proper that record companies can sue ISPs to have a third-party website blocked from being accessed by the UK public.

The BPI also somehow got their own clause written into UK law. It looks to me like whoever has the most money gets whatever they want.

http://www.itpro.co.uk/621385/latest...byist-proposal

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by elcreative

but in the UK the Government and Judiciary are separate things and, in fact, can act as checks on the other's power... ..

People got 4 years in prison for expressing anti-government views on Facebook not so long ago. One of the magistrates actually said they were under oders from the government to give them harsh penalties, but then retracted that statement a few days later (reasons unknown ...)

[Giggleton]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

Well, at least you would spend less time in jail.

You might be being funny, but people have been being thrown in jail for reading unauthorized texts since the introduction of texts.

[teh603]

Originally Posted by Giggleton

So if a site was to exist that did not profit from the distribution of texts under "copyright" we would be fine, morally, ethically, and legally?

The doctrine of this seems to be based under the Theory of Lost Sales with the publisher trying to claim that every downloaded copy is lost money.

That doesn't take fair use into account, nor does it cover stuff like orphaned works, works still under copyright but no longer in print, or works given deliberately short print runs (possibly to allow manipulation of the secondary market). Or the publishing and recording industries' clinging to an outdated business model.

Either way, it isn't so much a case of works being forbidden because the head spud in a dic-tater-ship wants to impose fear and terror, as a few greedy hogs not wanting to let anyone else up to the trough.

[Ninjalawyer]

Originally Posted by elcreative

I am just going by YOUR own words... "but it certainly seems like an overreach for the government to start engaging in censorship."

YOU said GOVERNMENT censorship and I pointed out that it wasn't the government but the result of a judicial process... I DIDN'T say it wasn't censorship anywhere, I said it wasn't GOVERNMENT censorship... I don't know about your country (I did think that Canada was a democracy) but in the UK the Government and Judiciary are separate things and, in fact, can act as checks on the other's power... sorry you thought that my response was glib but I can only think that is because you didn't understand my point.

It is a major difference between government and judicial action especially in a democracy where these are separate arms of the overall body politic specifically designed to be able to act as controls on each others actions...

In Canada, the judiciary is one of three branches of government, although it is given independence from the other two branches by Canada's constitution. This is not different than the UK system for obvious historical reasons. If the interpretation by the judiciary of laws passed by the legislative branch of government results in censorship in-fact, I don't see how the distinction you're trying to make is relevant; the result is the same in any event.

Also, just for your own information (should it come up in trivia), Canada's form of government is actually a constitutional monarchy.

[jmaejr]

Originally Posted by petrucci

While I think that governments should act to stop piracy, I do not think that blocking/censoring TPB is justified. In many ways TPB can be compared to Google, which displays links to sites, some of which violate copyright.

Governments should be glad that sites such as TPB exist, as it makes it easier to find the pirates.

TPB is 'Google for torrents', they index other public sites.

Taking them down will do nothing, it will only stop or slow down the the casual 'pirate'.

There are at least 15 other indexing sites just like them. Heck there are even add-ons for Firefox that allow you to search torrents, are we going to block Firefox also?

EVEN one of the plugins for Calibre lets you search a well known torrent site....

Then you have the private sites that are not on even on the radar. Then there is IRC, Newsgroups, FTP sites, private servers, file encryption...on and on.

You will never eliminate piracy. It is a cat and mouse game and the mice are winning.

Blocking/censoring/whatever you call it is merely putting a bandage on arterial bleeding.

Imposing strict internet laws will only hurt the internet...and it's users.

[Andrew H.]

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

If it was illegal he would have been prosecuted here.

Not if the crime was committed in the another jurisdiction.

And of course prosecutors decline to prosecute crimes all the time - the fact that someone doesn't bring charges against a shoplifter because the shopkeeper doesn't want to press charges isn't evidence that shoplifting is illegal.

In any event, the court found that the crime satisfied the "dual liability" standard.

The only information that is illegal in the UK is all "terrorism" related, and I doubt old episodes of The Simpsons would fall into that category.

The crime was "aiding copyright infringement." It has about as much to do with "information" being "illegal" as selling stolen credit card numbers does.