ThePirateBay // Current TV

WikiLeaks' Brilliant MasterCard Commercial Parody

lordsbassman
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10 months ago
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13 comments

Do you share? Then go...to jail.

Piratebay.org trial will set a precedent and many file-sharing sites will be shut... more

Anyother
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3 years ago
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Pirate Bay verdict appealed, party mobilized

As BitTorrent tracking site The Pirate Bay continues legal battles, the Pirate Party... more

Sons_Of_Liberty
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3 years ago
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Pirate Bay VPN Service Has 113,000 Users and Counting

Tens of thousands sign up for IPREDator, which is due to go live sometime this week.... more

Sons_Of_Liberty
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3 years ago
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2 comments

Facebook Blocks Pirate Bay BitTorrent Links

BitTorrent tracker site’s “Share on Facebook” button links now... more

Sons_Of_Liberty
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3 years ago
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Trial Making ThePirateBay More Popular

The goal of the trial, for those who asked for it, is to punish the creators of The... more

Sons_Of_Liberty
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3 years ago
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Court Tweets, Pirate Flags and Free Candy (ThePirateBay Trial Opens)

As The Pirate Bay trial got underway, dozens of supporters gathered around the Court waving skull-and-crossbone flags as the parties entered the court house. Pro-piracy forces in Sweden had vowed to play along in the theater of the trial. The opening act was a spectacle; in court, on the streets and online.

As reported earlier today, during today’s court session, social media came alive as prosecutor Håkan Roswall did a tedious presentation of the history of the tracker, various companies, revenue streams, ad sales and how he will “prove” it is all connected.

It was remarkable to see how thousands of people were following and contributing to an ongoing stream of information on the Internet. Through live blogs (in Swedish and translated), Twitter, live audio from inside the court and live video from outside, the coverage was massive.

The hash tag #spectrial was the most searched term on Twitter, The Pirate Party’s servers went down and it was nearly impossible to get access to trial.thepiratebay.org, which collects the various streams of information.

One of the defendants even contributed, as Peter Sunde (aka brokep) wrote on Twitter: “Might this be the first twitter from within a court case? It must be a #spectrial.” This might indeed be one of the first tweets from a defendant in court.

As the court went in recess for lunch, the gathering outside grew, in spite of the cold February day in Stockholm. Pirate Party flags marked the street corner, a band played and candy was handed to passers-by while being told that “sharing is caring”.

In the crowd we found Christian Engström, Vice Chairman of the Swedish Pirate Party who are currently heading towards getting seats in the European Parliament in June’s elections.

“This is a political trial,” he told TorrentFreak. “Firstly, the trial itself is political because the prosecutor wrote a memo in 2005 and said that it wasn’t possible to prosecute from the evidence. This trial only occurs because of political pressure from the United States on the then Minister of Justice.”

The trial, as Engström explains, is more than just a prosecution of The Pirate Bay. It is a question of the future of communication.

“Should the Internet be a place where everyone can communicate or should it not? That’s the question of this trial, and no court can answer that question. Even if The Pirate Bay would be freed all the way through the court system, the problem isn’t solved. The Copyright Lobby will demand more restrictions and tougher laws and the only way to protect social media culture in the long run is to work politically.”

When asked if the trial had any significance at all, Engström told TorrenFreak that he finds it incredibly fun as a spectacle.

“Hollywood knows how to stage a show, I’ve got to hand them the credit for that. And I think that’s very positive because it means that for the following weeks, there will be lots of media focus on these important issues.”

After the lunch break, the proceedings continued as well as the coverage online. On Twitter Sofia did an outstanding job translating the audio feed into English, but she was just one of many. It is truly remarkable how many people committed themselves to covering the trial. For now we still live in a society where information is open and free.As The Pirate Bay trial got underway, dozens of supporters gathered around the Court... more

Sons_Of_Liberty
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3 years ago
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The Pirate Bay Press Conference

The Pirate Bay said that they feel that their overall case would not end quickly,... more

Sons_Of_Liberty
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3 years ago
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4 comments

Yo Ho Ho!!! New Windows 7 on pirating websites

An updated version of the official beta Microsoft stopped distributing this week is... more

Bad_Melon
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3 years ago
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0 comments

The Pirate Bay Trial Audio Will Be Streamed Online

Following calls from the crew of The Pirate Bay earlier this week, it has been... more

Sons_Of_Liberty
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3 years ago
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ThePirateBay used as Wikileaks backup "server" after $1B Report

Wikileaks is overloaded by readers Wikileaks servers are currently overloaded by... more

Sons_Of_Liberty
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3 years ago
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Pirate Bay’s Tour Bus to Become Court Case Press Center

Last year The Pirate Bay and the Bureau of Piracy bought themselves a bus, painted it up in suitable pirate-style livery and embarked on a European tour. Now, with the trial of The Pirate Bay just a few weeks away, the bus will be coming home to Sweden to serve as the official court case press center.

The Pirate Bay’s summer tour started off in Sweden, where the bus was prepared. On July 10th, the bus was in Malmo where the ‘Bay and Piratbyrån (Bureau of Piracy) announced their ‘mixtape amnesty‘.

The bus, originally codenamed ‘S23M’, then headed off to Berlin to continue its European tour, with Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde declaring, “It kinda shows that we’re more than just a site, that we’re an idea, and that we’re art in ourselves. As I’ve said many times before, we see The Pirate Bay as some sort of ongoing art project/performance.”

Somehow, over six months later, the bus is currently sitting in a parking lot in Belgrade, many miles away from home. In the fall of 2008, Piratbyrån renamed the bus S23X, and now want to bring S23K, as it’s now known (I hope you’re keeping up!) back home to Stockholm, Sweden. Here, it will serve as a press center for the upcoming Pirate Bay trial.

“During February and March 2009 there is a state-funded spectacle arranged, unprecedented in the capital. The Trial of The Pirate Bay - one of the longest in Sweden’s history - will be held in the Stockholm District Court on Kungsholmen,” note Piratbyrån.

The bus, they say, will have a very special function. “Once in place it will be used in direct connection to the trial in order to intensify the spectacle, including serving as the press center for Piracy Office and The Pirate Bay, and a natural meeting point for supporters and the curious.”

In order to fund the journey from Belgrade to Sweden, supporters are being invited to make donations via the Piratbyrån website. In return, donors will be invited to be a VIP guest at a party celebrating the bus’ homecoming.

More photos, videos and history behind the bus can be found at this URL: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=sv&u=http://www.piratbyran.org/s23k/&sa=X&oi=translate&resnum=1&ct=result&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dhttp://www.piratbyran.org/s23k/%26hl%3Den%26safe%3Doff%26sa%3DGLast year The Pirate Bay and the Bureau of Piracy bought themselves a bus, painted it... more

Sons_Of_Liberty
added this
3 years ago
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0 comments

The aXXo files - The Modern Day Robin Hood

To Hollywood executives, he's public enemy number one. To film fans around the world, he's a modern-day Robin Hood. As the internet's most prolific pirate makes his 1,000th illegal film download available to the masses, Tim Walker investigates the mysterious figure known only as aXXo...

At 8.40am on Monday 15 December, a new post appeared on an internet forum called the Darkside Release Group. "Darkside_RG" is a clearing house for internet pirates, a site dedicated to the online redistribution of movies, music and videogames. Its members happily spend their days sharing and discussing their ill-begotten booty on the site's many message boards.

This aXXo may be anonymous, but he (or she, or they) is a global brand. His most popular uploads are downloaded illegally by up to a million internet users per week. His files regularly make up more than one-third of all the films trafficked on BitTorrent. Most of them are mainstream multiplex fare – aXXo's recent posts include Mamma Mia!; the Ricky Gervais black comedy Ghost Town; and Bangkok Dangerous and Eagle Eye, thriller vehicles for Nicolas Cage and Shia LaBeouf.

The list of the Top 100 movie downloads at The Pirate Bay – one of the largest "torrent portal" sites, which aggregate torrent links from around the web – is littered with his work, easily recognisable by the suffix "DVDrip-aXXo" left like a graffiti tag at the end of each filename. Over at The Pirate Bay's most popular competitor, Mininova.org, aXXo's fame is evident in the "search cloud", a page of the most searched terms on the site, their relative popularity denoted by the size of the font in which their names are displayed.

"Today, the largest search terms might be aXXo and Prison Break, if Prison Break aired on US television last night," explains David Price, head of piracy intelligence at the internet consultancy Envisional. "But tomorrow Prison Break will be a lot smaller, whereas aXXo will always be that size. Over the last two years, he's been one of the top five searched terms on Mininova every day."

Whenever aXXo posts a new film (which can be as often as three times a day) his followers fill the comments boards with praise. He is the lowly film-fan's Robin Hood. Last year, one aXXo fan, codenamed the_dwarfer, composed a version of the Lord's Prayer for his idol, which began: "Our ripper, who art on Mininova, aXXo be thy name..."

The name aXXo first appeared in November 2005, when he began to post pirated movies to the message board at Darkside_RG. He quickly acquired a reputation for both quality and convenience. All of his films were copied to DVD quality (or near enough for the amateur eye); in a simple format that would play instantly on almost any computer as soon as the download was complete; and handily compressed to emerge at 700Mb, just the right size to fit on a single writeable CD.

Hence aXXo's popularity: as a trusted brand name, users rush to acquire his releases as soon as they appear online. His small "torrent" file takes a matter of seconds to download from a torrent portal site like Mininova, after which the user add it to their computer's BitTorrent queue, sit back and watch the data flood in. With so many people downloading the same files at once, an entire aXXo film can be complete and on a user's desktop in a few hours at most.

"He tried to go away," says Price. "But he came back. The pull of it is quite attractive to him. When you have millions of people downloading your content online and they know who you are, that's quite an incentive. Even if he's not getting any money, he is getting name recognition and status." To commemorate his return, aXXo chose as his first post the symbolic – and hubristic – film title, I Am Legend.To Hollywood executives, he's public enemy number one. To film fans around the... more

Sons_Of_Liberty
added this
3 years ago
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3 comments

The PirateBay.org launches their Blog host Baywords.com

Bayworlds.com is a free blog hosting service by the creators of PirateBay to uphold... more

rippelhans
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4 years ago
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0 comments

Virgin Media to target BitTorrent users

The UK's second largest ISP, Virgin Media, will next year begin network... more

Beta_Boy
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3 years ago
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19 comments

The Pirate Bay Clashes with Book Publishers

The Swedish book publishers organization recently issued a report in which they... more

NoGodsNoMasters
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3 years ago
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0 comments

Pirate Bay Wins Court Case, Italian Block Lifted

The Pirate Bay has successfully appealed the decision of an Italian judge who had ordered ISPs to block access to the popular BitTorrent tracker last month. The Court of Bergamo decided that this block was unlawful, and that Italian users should regain access to the site.

This August, out of nowhere, The Pirate Bay was “censored” in Italy following a decree from a public prosecutor. The block didn’t prove to be particularly effective, as traffic from Italy only increased. Nevertheless, The Pirate Bay was determined to reverse the decision, and in that mission they have succeeded.

The Court of Bergamo has now lifted the block, and ISPs are again allowed to grant their users access to the most frequently used BitTorrent tracker on the Internet. More details on the decision, and the reason why the block was reversed, will be made public later.

In a previous interview, Pirate Bay’s lawyers Giovanni Battista Gallus and Francesco Micozzi described the order as “‘original’ or ‘creative’ at best,” and said it should not have been ordered in the first place because of the lack of jurisdiction. In addition, they argued that The Pirate Bay is not breaking any laws since it’s not distributing copyright infringing material.

The court’s decision might set an important precedent for BitTorrent sites in Italy, especially for Colombo-BT, the largest Italian torrent site, which was shut down by the same prosecutor responsible for the Pirate Bay block. The action against Colombo-BT was orchestrated by the anti-piracy outlet IFPI, which also hijacked all Italian Pirate Bay visitors following the block.

Visitors who were blocked from The Pirate Bay were redirected to an IFPI server, instead of a server operated by the Italian government. This is again an example of how lobby groups such as the IFPI, MPAA and RIAA are treated as government institutions. Since many Pirate Bay visitors claimed their privacy was violated, the Italian Pirate Party and Altroconsumo filed a complaint with the ombudsman earlier this week.
The Pirate Bay has successfully appealed the decision of an Italian judge who had... more

Sons_Of_Liberty
added this
3 years ago
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0 comments

Timbuktu, one of Swedens most famous artists, releases via ThePirateBay, legally.

Timbuktu is one of Swedens most famous artists - and we'd also like to say one of... more

Sons_Of_Liberty
added this
3 years ago
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0 comments

Slacker Uprising’s Torrent Available Worldwide, by Accident (Michael Moore's New Film)

Michael Moore’s new film about the run up to the 2004 US election was released online today, only for US and Canada residents. In order to maximize capacity, they’ve even embraced BitTorrent, and the official download is using the Pirate Bay tracker. To the dismay of their lawyers, however, this also lifts the geographical restrictions.

The film, intended by Moore “to bring out millions of young and new voters on November 4th.”, covers his tour just prior to the 2004 US Presidential election, rallying to protest against President Bush. It covers a 42 day tour, over 60+ cities, and the obstacles put in place by Republicans.

To some this might not seem like a worthy event for TorrentFreak to cover, after all, films come out every week. However, this film markets itself as “…the first time ever that a major feature-length film is debuting as a free download on the Internet – legally.” - a title that could arguably fall to Steal This Film. Yet, its the interaction between the legal and technical aspects that are the biggest story here.

First and foremost, the film’s website states that downloads are available in the US and Canada only. It states this not just once, but twice AND uses an IP lookup system to check. If you fail the IP check, you are told that the lawyers have said the film can only be offered to people in those countries.

It’s such a ’shame’ then, that they have used BitTorrent. Worse, they’ve used a set of public trackers (including The Pirate Bay), and allowed the use of both Peer Exchange and DHT. Clearly, all it needs is for someone to offer the .torrent to other people, and they can download the film, as the torrent protocol has no methods for limiting by geographical location. Indeed, as you can see on this screenshot, there are plenty of people on the torrent from outside North America.

Is this deliberate, or accidental? Moore is known for his disregard of rules (and laws) in making films (such as his Cuba trip for Sicko), and this could be the latest example. Alternatively, it could be a lack of understanding on the part of those that are providing the technical backend.

However, with a budget of $2 million for distribution, Brave New Films could have done better, and have set up their own tracker, enforcing a US and Canada only download. Not that this would have helped much. It’s the Internet, and once it’s downloaded, it can be retorrented. In that they might be foresighted enough to try and keep the downloads together, strengthening the swarm.

Check out 'ThePirateBay' if you would like the movie :)Michael Moore’s new film about the run up to the 2004 US election was released... more

Sons_Of_Liberty
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3 years ago
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