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

[nogle]

Originally Posted by HarryT

You are of course perfectly entitled to your opinion, but I suspect you'd struggle to convince anyone that the primary purpose of MR is to facilitate copyright infringement, which is unquestionably the case with these sites that have been blocked. The test that courts have applied for many years in cases of this nature is "does the site" (or whatever) "have any significant non-infringing use". It probably wouldn't be too tough to convince someone that MR does have non-infringing uses, but you'd struggle to show that any of the sites that have been blocked do.

I must now admit to a certain amount of curiosity...

Harry T, you do have a license to use that picture of a Dalek as your avatar. Right?????

[BaenSidhe]

Originally Posted by nogle

I must now admit to a certain amount of curiosity...

Harry T, you do have a license to use that picture of a Dalek as your avatar. Right?????

He's answered that question before. IIRC, he owns that Dalek and he was the one who took the picture, so he doesn't need a license. He might have also asked permission, but not sure.

[Sil_liS]

Originally Posted by murraypaul

So that would be just under $2.5 million dollars to remove all the links to infringing music (just music, nothing else) on H33T.
Does that sound like a scheme they genuinely expect content holders to take part in?
Google process something like 4 million DMCA takedowns a week.
At the same rate of charging, that would be $10 billion dollars a year.

The analyst said that "97.1% of the torrent files related to content which is commercially available", which doesn't imply that all of them infringe copyright (parodies would fall under this category), and commercially available doesn't necessarily mean that it is protected by copyright because public domain works are commercially available. The lawsuit is based on false statements, but the websites are not allowed to defend themselves because the court decided to circumvent them.

Originally Posted by murraypaul

What you have linked to is nothing to do with filing an infringement case, it is a one-off fee for an OSP to designate who should be notified when a case is filed against them.
http://www.copyright.gov/onlinesp/

OK, the Copyright Office charges $135 to do nothing.

How much should a website charge to check a copyright infringement claim?

Originally Posted by BaenSidhe

He's answered that question before. IIRC, he owns that Dalek and he was the one who took the picture, so he doesn't need a license. He might have also asked permission, but not sure.

Yes, it has been discussed before. Legally he still needs permission to distribute the picture the way he does (because the picture is a 2D copy of a 3D object that is under copyright) but doesn't want to ask for it.

[SteveEisenberg]

Originally Posted by TGS

Merriam-Webster says that due process is:

Isn't that a US dictionary?

According to the Oxford Dictionary of English on my Kindle, the full definition is:

fair treatment through the normal judicial system, especially a citizen's entitlement to notice of a charge and a hearing before an impartial judge

AFAIK, the Pirate Bay people are not British citizens. I never heard of due process for non-citizens, especially ones who aren't resident in the country. They get procedural due process only.

As for whether blocking the Pirate Bay is a good idea, really, I don't care much, one way or the other, about blocking the pop music features, but I'd block it for books.

Originally Posted by usuallee

I don't agree with unauthorized downloading, but I don't want to live in a police state . . .

I've been in Britain repeatedly, and never found it to be one.

Based on Wikipedia numbers, the incarceration rate in the US, which is the world's highest, is 4.6 times more than that of the UK. This seems to me a far better measure of whether a country is a police state than whether you have access to a self-proclaimed pirate web site. Glancing at the site, I don't see a whole lot of speech. It's almost wholly an index.

P.S. I didn't mean to imply that the US is a police state. I just thought it was out of proportion to say that disallowing the Pirate Bay makes you a police state.

[afv011]

Maybe we should shut down the internet, it would teach those damn pirates! Arrrr!

[frahse]

Originally Posted by afv011

Indeed, it's a cat and mouse game, and the ISPs are facing a lost battle from the beginning.

The ISPs are just going through the motions so as to avoid trouble for themselves.

My own belief is everyone involved in the computer world, hardware, software, etc. except content owners is making money off pirating, and they know it though they will never admit it and certainly won't defend it in public. Content and the acquirement of content drive the majority of the business.

They will of course defend their "innocent until hung" customers from all comers.

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg

Based on Wikipedia numbers, the incarceration rate in the US, which is the world's highest, is 4.6 times more than that of the UK. This seems to me a far better measure of whether a country is a police state ...

Well, America runs its prisons for profit and prison owners pay for adverts on TV lobbying for 3-strikes type legislation to increase their free staff quota.

America is also about 50 times bigger than the UK.

[WT Sharpe]

Because we have had some rude behavior in this thread:

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[Sil_liS]

The way I see it, the court's problem is that torrent sites are not doing anything illegal. It would be illegal if they were based in the UK, but they are not.

The problem with the way in which they choose to handle the situation is that it's wide open for abuse. The websites aren't charged with anything so they can't fight back accusations.

The court apparently sees no difference between a site like TPB who refuses to remove any URLs, and a site like Fenopy who removed 75% of the URLs reported as infringing on someone's copyright.

[afv011]

Originally Posted by Sil_liS

The way I see it, the court's problem is that torrent sites are not doing anything illegal. It would be illegal if they were based in the UK, but they are not.

The problem with the way in which they choose to handle the situation is that it's wide open for abuse. The websites aren't charged with anything so they can't fight back accusations.

The court apparently sees no difference between a site like TPB who refuses to remove any URLs, and a site like Fenopy who removed 75% of the URLs reported as infringing on someone's copyright.

Indeed. And then there's the classic case of search engines - you could argue that they allow piracy as well, you can find torrents there for illegal material.

[Sil_liS]

Originally Posted by afv011

Indeed. And then there's the classic case of search engines - you could argue that they allow piracy as well, you can find torrents there for illegal material.

I think that this is the basis for taking the ISPs to court.

[Turtle91]

Originally Posted by Sil_liS

I think that this is the basis for taking the ISPs to court.

ISP stands for Internet SERVICE provider, not Internet SEARCH provider

So why would they take internet service providers to court. They don't have any control over someone who uses the internet illegally. That would be like suing the guys who build and maintain our road network because someone had their evil lair connected to a road somewhere in the world and people could use roads to get to those evil lairs.

They go after the wrong people...and they do it because those people happen to be within their control, not because of any wrongdoing.

That, my friends, is a VERY slippery slope.

[HarryT]

The ISP's were not "taken to court" in the sense of being accused of having done anything wrong. What's happened here is a legal process that's been established to allow a rights holder to request that a specific web site be blocked, in cases where the site itself is outside the jurisdiction of the court, and the site has a proven record of infringing the right holder's intellectual property rights. A separate legal application is required for each site for which a blocking order is requested - this isn't any kind of a blanket process.

[Sil_liS]

Originally Posted by Turtle91

ISP stands for Internet SERVICE provider, not Internet SEARCH provider

So why would they take internet service providers to court. They don't have any control over someone who uses the internet illegally. That would be like suing the guys who build and maintain our road network because someone had their evil lair connected to a road somewhere in the world and people could use roads to get to those evil lairs.

If you go with this analogy, the court requests that the road to the evil lair should be blocked.

Originally Posted by HarryT

The ISP's were not "taken to court" in the sense of being accused of having done anything wrong. What's happened here is a legal process that's been established to allow a rights holder to request that a specific web site be blocked, in cases where the site itself is outside the jurisdiction of the court, and the site has a proven record of infringing the right holder's intellectual property rights. A separate legal application is required for each site for which a blocking order is requested - this isn't any kind of a blanket process.

But normally you would have to prove the infringement by taking them to court, and this process bypasses the possibility of the websites to defend themselves. And just because a separate legal application is required for each site now, doesn't mean that this will always be a requirement.

[Geralt]

Well whatever they do they cant stop the internetz
One day they might understand this.