The Pirate Bay is suffering some temporary downtime as their bandwidth provider has stopped passing through traffic. A week ago, Hollywood got an injunction to effectively shut down the Pirate Bay by threatening its provider with huge fines. The Pirate Bay team is currently working on a solution.
Funny thing is I would actually prefer downloading from official (maybe more legal) sources if I would find way to do that in my country, with my favorite OS, without stupid DRM restrictions and warnings and maybe for sane prices. But living in Germany and using Linux - such a movie-download service does to my knowledge in 2010 still not exist and is also not in sight.
Something like eDonkey but at the cost of lets say 1€ per GB and I would be happy. Then a DVD would be same price like cheap DVD's in a shop and I can decide to go with lower-quality if I don't want to spend as much.
I don't even know why producers don't just do that. Or maybe they do in other countries?
Oh wow. You proposed a great business model I hadn't even thought of. Guess it goes to show that there is plenty of room for innovation in the digital download market. Companies like movie studios and record labels just need to get a bit more creative and just come to the realization that the old business model isn't going to cut it these days.
Serves as a deterrent effect. If there were no enforcement ever, lots of people from sites like HN would be thinking of fun, clever new ways to post/share stuff. Since there is, only a smaller segment of the hacker population is willing to put up with the legal hassle.
Thing is, there's nothing wrong with thinking of fun, clever ways to post/share stuff. If nothing else, you can do it to anticipate what the bad guys might do, on the same principle as any other kind of attack research.
Good strategy. People aren't going to care about the politics of file sharing until they can't get what they want for free anymore. Taking the Pirate Bay down is the first step towards organized dissent that removes the laws that the media companies are relying on in the first place.
Also, an injunction without oral arguments? That will last, oh, maybe a few hours...
It wouldn't work because the first site would still be facilitating copyright infringement, and thus still subject to legal pressure. Calling it by a code-name doesn't remove its copyright, nor does hiding it amongst legally redistributable torrents.
Simply put, you'd sue everyone involved in the creation of that infrastructure. The second site and the guy who wrote the browser plugin may be able to escape unscathed, but the first site would be in exactly the same predicament as The Pirate Bay, Mininova, etc., except with the added bonus of trying to hide what they were doing. That wouldn't go over well in court.
There are many torrent spiders/indexers that host torrents from many websites. e.g. http://www.torrentz.com/ and nearly all torrents use DHT and multiple trackers. Taking 1 site down temporarily doesn't affect anything.
If I remember correctly the original TPB guys claimed that servers are out of their control now, which is why they can't take it down. But now I read there's "Managing Director Sven Olaf Kamphuis". Is there some official ownership of TPB again?
The TPB guys really just spew out rhetoric for the masses.
"the Pirate Bay crew claims that they themselves have no idea where the servers are located. After the raid on their servers in 2006, they decided that it was better not to know where they are. One thing is sure though, they are not hosted in just one country."
They need to switch to a complete distributed architecture.
Where the site, the tracker, everything is hosted by users. This way, no corporate tools can target them.
