On December 9, 2014 the forces of bureaucratic evil (i.e. governments) have finally managed to censor The Pirate Bay (TPB). The Swedish police raided and seized servers, computers and other equipment presumably from the ISP where TPB was operating from (you can read it from Torrentfreak searching for "Swedish Police Raid The Pirate Bay, Site Offline). The Swedish propaganda machine was out in force and it included statements from Paul Pinter (police national coordinator for IP enforcement) as well as Fredrik Ingblad (arguably "expert" file-share case prosecutor). This is not good.
Many of you, dear readers, probably have no idea what TPB is all about. It is simply a website where links to "copyrighted" resources available for download from Peer-to-Peer applications are catalogued. Basically, it is (or was) a website where you could go to get links for movies, TV series, books, music and so on.
Technology
Let's be clear. No copyrighted material of any kind is (was) actually stored in TPB's servers. All they contained were descriptions of the available materials. If you wanted to get those materials, you had to get them yourself. But in the eyes of the "law", TPB was "facilitating" the breach of copyright. Nevermind that everything in TPB's servers was actually copyrighted by TPB or the people uploading those descriptions!!!
In a sense TPB was delivering free maps to copyrighted materials, but the maps themselves belonged to the people uploading them to TPB!!!
Intellectual Property is garbage
We have devoted a fair amount of virtual ink to this topic. You may find or Intellectual Property Compilation page quite enlightening.
Political Correctness
Furthermore and before this manure storm, VAP (a Hollywood-affiliated anti-piracy group) achieved a "ruling" from the Austrian Commercial Court of Vienna ordering three ISPs to censor "block" the Movie4K and Kinox sites. This is, any Austrian unlucky enough to be connected to the Internet through any of those ISP's won't be able to access them any longer. What will ISPs do is still to be determined, but smart money is betting that they won't be able to do much. This is a game changer in EU. Once this point is passes, any commercial oligopolic organization will be able to demand with the full force of the law, that any ISP block any site for "copyright" reasons. And you though that government "domain seasures" and wholesale spying wasn’t enough (see They Want Everything). Now we have private "blocking" on anything and everything corporate interests may want. And how are these corporate interests achieving this? Through regulations. Laws are actually the enablers of this tyranny and we will have a lot to say about them in a -lengthy- article. But for now it suffices to say that any and all information that it is so-called "copyrighted" will be under attack. And you thought that the Internet will be free forever. Silly you.
But that's OK
Obviously. Because TPB were just that, pirates. They got what they deserved. Nevermind that the laws make no sense whatsoever. Nevermind that it is being done in your name. Nevermind that it is costing taxpayers a fortune for what should be a purely commercial issue, if any.
But that's OK.
This is so because you are not TPB. You don't care… You have nothing to hide. You are a "law abiding citizen", right?
Laws are simply political opinions of politicians with the brute force to enforce them… and you are next. You have always been next. Get used to it!
Note: please see the Glossary if you are unfamiliar with certain words.
