P2P badboy The Pirate Bay sets sail for the Caribbean

The Pirate Bay has fled to the Caribbean after Swedish authorities launched yet another attempt to seize its domain name. Swedish prosecutor Fredrik Ingblad filed a motion at the District Court of Stockholm yesterday calling for the seizure of TPB’s Swedish addresses - thepiratebay.se and piratebay.se - as well as its …

[Khaptain]

How much is it worth

Just out of interest, does anyone have any idea just how much TPB is worth. Is it a multi million dollar project ?

[Chad H.]

Re: How much is it worth

It depends on who you ask.

The Film TPBAFK sums up the different sides. The "prosecution"s point of view that they earn allegedly millions from banner ads, whereas the guys who run it have no money.

[JDX]

A joke

It's as much a farce as the extradition of Abu Hamza

[Khaptain]

Re: A joke

Apparently Obama is going to make a second attempt at vacating Gitmo, maybe the TPB could get a good deal.

[Anonymous Coward]

Will not be long until Assange voices his opinion on this. We have not heard from him in some time, and that must rankle him.

[Anonymous Coward]

Whack a mole

The authorities are either blindingly stupid or just kidding themselves if they think the people running TPB haven't made preparations for this and similar legal moves.

I doubt the lawyers even care, they just go through the motions and submit their bill.

[BornToWin]

Eventually...

...these scumbags will go to prison and no country will host their efforts to promote piracy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Eventually...

OK I'll feed the Troll

1. I thought they were in Prison (which doesn't appear to have stopped the site)

2. This is nothing to do with hosting - it is to do with domain name registrations - the actual hosting location is not moving.

3. Even if all domain names options were removed the site would be accessible via its IP address or by using its onion address.

4. Spending this much time and effort to try chase 1 site all over the internet is pointless - it is 1 site, of many similar ones. The whole content of the site is a few MB and can be brought up using an newly registered name anywhere - which is hard to stop. They are better off spending the money on trying to reduce the cause/reasons for the sites popularity in the first place (major ones being geolocation for media services, excessive advertising, mandatory FBI notices/adverts on DVD/BR, DRM/time-bombed media, inability to transfer media to other devices (legally), etc). IMO

[Chad H.]

Re: Eventually...

No, they're in rural Thailand, sitting out the statute of limitations. To the OP, good luck with getting them.

[ManxPower]

Re: Eventually...

Regardless of what you think of The Pirate Bay, playing whack-a-mole with their domain names doesn't prevent people from using their service or using other torrent services, gives Pirate Bay more publicity, and wastes money. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whac-A-Mole in case the term is an Americanism.

[auburnman]

That's an interesting point - if he genuinely believes that the US is out to get him, what better opportunity would they have to snatch him than when he is in self-imposed hiding? If the Yanks really wanted to rendition him they could cut a deal with (Ecuador?) Smuggle him out of the Embassy somehow and fly him out on a military plane from one of the bases they rent. The Embassy staff pretend for as long as they can that JA is still with them, until years later when they claim he left in the middle of the night trying to flee the country.

He could be in gitmo now!

No tinfoil hat icon?

[auburnman]

Misclick FAIL

That was meant to be a comment for the AC who mentioned Assange.

[Anonymous Coward]

Waste of time and money

Honestly it is, there are som many studies showing how X% of pirates would never buy a game or movie they pirated. And many more studies showing people used pircacy as a 'try it and see' before buying films / music / games.

Lets face it, they got rid of TPB in the uk (for the most part) and how much were sales affected by the blanket ban? What's that? None? But what about the projected profit loss the movie industry was posting thanks to pirates... What's that you say? Bullshit?

Honestly if they gave people a relatively fair deal at getting some of this media I would imagine a lot of hte 'pirates' would actually go legit. If you price yourself out of the market you should expect those unwilling to pay to steal.

I used to download many moons ago, but that stopped with the advent of lovefilm and netflix. No longer needed to download games since I could rent what I wanted for a relatively fair price. Likewise I could watch any TV I wanted or movies for a fair price when compared to before. But even then I feel ripped off by the fact that netflix UK we pay the same as US and get half the content.

I've recently found services that circumvent this for a small cost, but then it starts heading back to the same territory that made me pirate. It gets too expensive.

Game rentals £5, movies £5, internet £20, DNS circumvention £5. If only netflix did game rentals like lovefilm in the UK. On that note if anyone knows a cheaper alternative to the DNS circumvention things please let me know. Don't see why I should pay the same for half the shit.... I'd rather pay the same and some to somebody else for the full library

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Waste of time and money

The irony here, is that once you decide to pay for a VPN to get the 'real' service you then think "what the hell, I may as well use the VPN to download this stuff anyway" - well some will.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Waste of time and money

IF you use Chrome or Firefox you can download an addon that lets you access the American Netflix on your PC

[Alan Brown]

Re: Waste of time and money

On your WINDOWS pc.

Those of us who run Linux are shit out of luck thanks to the windows-only DRM currently being used

[wikkity]

Re: On your WINDOWS pc.

For apt based distros there is a netflix package that gives you a modified version of wine, silverlight and firefox that lets you run netflix on linux. You can even use the aforementioned plugin to access US based content from elsewhere. Sorry, can't remember where the repo is but I'm sure google will find it.

[MuddyBoots]

Re: Waste of time and money

Presumably people are pirating the movies because they are not prepared to pay for them.

If they can't get the pirated version, they still won't be prepared to pay for them and will instead wait for them to be in Morrisons/Asda in the bargain bin - show me a DVD I can't get for £2 at Morrisons EVENTUALLY...

I'm not sure wether these people buy other movies legitimately or not - I guess that depends on the quality and availability of free stuff.

I don't quite understand the copyright people saying that the movie industry is losing £X millions/billions in income because that money was never there in the first place!!!

[Tom 35]

because they are not prepared to pay for them

There is quite a bit of stuff that you can't pay for. If you don't live in the US there is lots of stuff you can't buy (same to a lessor extent for other countries).

[Chad H.]

Re: Waste of time and money

They didn't "get rid" of TBP in the uk, they just encouraged a million and one proxy sites to setup.

[Anonymous Coward]

What I don't get...

is the fact that Sweden believes it has the jurisdiction to pull an Icelandic registered domain name. I read that it was because the regitrants were Swedish - but the site has not been banned in Iceland and no Icelandic law is being broken. Are Sweden saying that because you are Swedish we want you to abide by Swedish law, even in other countries? Are Sweden trying to be the new US 'world' police, as it would appear that the location of a 'crime' (and whether the it is even a crime in that location) is no longer as relevant as the nationality of the culprit, and whether their actions would be deemed 'illegal' back home.

I look forward to the day when this logic is extended and the US government can press charges against (or ban) any US citizen from driving on the left-hand side of the road in the UK ("We don't care that it is legal in the UK, what matters is that it is banned in the US and you are a US citizen"). :-)

[Steven Roper]

Re: What I don't get...

"Are Sweden saying that because you are Swedish we want you to abide by Swedish law, even in other countries?"

Depending on your country of origin, you may find certain of your country's laws do apply to you even if you are out of the country.

A well-known example is Australia's underage-sex laws, which apply to Australian citizens overseas. In Australia, the age of consent is 16 (except in Queensland where it's 18 and South Australia where it's 17). If an Australian citizen enters another country where the age of consent is lower (for example Estonia where the age is 14) and has sex with someone who under Australian law is underage, even if doing so is legal in the country in which the sexual encounter occurs, the person will be arrested and charged with molesting a minor upon their return to Australia. This was introduced to combat "child-sex tourism" where dirty old buggers would go to places like the Philippines for the express purpose of having sex with kids.

Similar overseas-enforced laws apply to money laundering and bribing officials - so if you're visiting some third-world country where bribing the police to facilitate passing checkpoints is de rigeur, if detected you will be arrested and charged with bribing a government official upon your return to Australia, regardless of whether doing so is legal or even expected in the country concerned. More than one unsuspecting Australian tourist travelling in African or South American countries has come a cropper because of this.

I think you'll find similar laws apply to US and UK citizens as well, although I'm not sure about Sweden.

[Anonymous Coward 15]

registered in the Caribbean island of Sint Maarten

Which is part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, so probably less safe for them than Iceland.

[Velv]

there must be money to be made registering thepiratebay.??? then flogging it on to them when they work there was round all the jurisdictions :)

[dazzer_bow]

Way hey, me hearties!

Well done. Keep up the sterling work, PB.

[garalus]

caribeean

Of course, the best place to find a pirate bay is in the caribbean surely

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: caribeean

A place called Tortula or some such isn't it?

Maybe that might be an alternative domain?

[jonfr]

The MPAA/RIAA connection

I think a criminal investigation needs to be done into actions of Fredrik Ingblad. It it has been proven that somethings are not correct into this "anti-piracy" searches.

I also want to know what gives a private organizations the right to collect private data (IP addresses, data transfer information) and hand such information over the police. This has been taking place now for a long time and has never been challenged so far that I know of. It is not right and in my view, it is illegal and should not be tolerated.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: The MPAA/RIAA connection

IP addresses are not private data any more than the MAC address of a Bluetooth device.

An IP address is usually the property of the ISP or registered netblock owner, not the end consumer.

[Syx]

Set sail for open water!

Maybe it's just me, but whenever I see an article on TPB these days I imagine a pirate ship stuffed with racks in the lower decks sailing around from port to port looking for somewhere to plug in an ethernet cable...

Makes *me* smile, at least!

[A Man From Bras]

Court order?

Trying to access thepiratebay.sx from the UK throws up the usual error:

"...The page you're looking for has been blocked.

We're complying with a court order that means access to this website has to be blocked to protect against copyright infringement..."

Now, did the infamous court order require ISPs to block thepiratebay.<any TLD>, or are the ISPs self-censoring? If the former, how can that be legal? If the latter, then it's a sad indictment of the spinelessness of the ISPs in question