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Sunday, September 21st, 2014
| Time | Event |
| 5:02a | Anti-Piracy Police Begin Targeting eBook Pirates
PIPCU, as its more commonly known, has been involved in the closure of dozens of domains, the closure of several sites, and the arrests of individuals up and down the country. Until now PIPCU’s most visible partners, at least in terms of enforcement in the Internet space, have been the Federation Against Copyright Theft (movies and TV) and the BPI (music). However, there are now signs that sites offering pirated ebooks are part of PIPCU’s strategy. Like many movie, music, sports and proxy fans have in recent months, this week visitors to the ebook site OnRead.com were confronted with the ominous PIPCU “seized” notice. “You have tried to access a website that is under criminal investigation by the UK Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU). This site is being investigated for online copyright infringement,” the page reads. The signs suggest that OnRead knew something was coming. After regular and often daily tweets of new literature appearing on the site, on September 2 the account fell silent. TorrentFreak asked City of London Police for specifics on the site’s closure, including whether the domain seizure and shutdown had been carried out together with The Publishers Association, a known PIPCU partner. “As part of Operation Creative PIPCU is working closely with the Publishers Association, as well as FACT, IFPI and BPI to disrupt copyright infringing websites. Since the launch of the operation several illegal film, music and publishing sites have been suspended,” a PIPCU spokesperson said.
“All materials presented on this site are available for the distribution over the Internet in accordance with the license of the Russian Organization for multimedia and Digital Systems (ROMS) and intended for personal use only. Further distribution, resale or broadcasting is strictly prohibited,” the recent archive reads. ROMS was a Russian collective rights management organization that attracted public attention in 2006 when notorious music download site, AllofMP3, insisted it operated legally under ROMS’ remit to collect and distribute statutory royalty payments as allowed under Russian law. In 2007, AllofMP3 closed down for good. While the legal claims made by OnRead are fuzzy and by now years out of date, additional notes do warn users that they have “no right to download any files from the site if this violates the law of his country.” It’s clear that PIPCU and quite probably The Publishers Association felt that OnRead was not in compliance with UK law. As a result the site’s domain, registered with InternetBS, is now in police hands. In 2007, ZML.com, a site that offered movies to US customers, also tried to claim ROMS protection. That domain is now under the control of ICE and Homeland Security after being seized in the very first wave of Operation in Our Sites. Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services. |
| 12:18p | The Pirate Bay Runs on 21 “Raid-Proof” Virtual Machines
Instead of buying their own hardware The Pirate Bay decided to serve its users from several cloud hosting providers scattered around the world. This saved costs, guaranteed better uptime, and made the site more portable and thus harder to take down. The operational change also had a downside. Before the move the notorious torrent site had a dedicated page displaying its hardware and server setup, which was something true geeks kept a close eye on. Today the site no longer owns any crucial pieces of hardware. However, it’s worth taking a look at the virtual setup the site is running on now. TorrentFreak asked the Pirate Bay team for an update and they were happy to oblige. At the time of writing the site uses 21 “virtual machines” (VMs) hosted at different providers. This is up four machines from two years ago, in part due to the steady increase in traffic. Most of the VMs, eight in total, are used for serving the web pages. The searches take up another six machines, and the site’s database currently runs on two VMs. The remaining five virtual machines are used for load balancing, statistics, the proxy site on port 80, torrent storage and for the controller. In total the VMs use 182 GB of RAM and 94 CPU cores. The total storage capacity is 620 GB, but that’s not all used. Needless to say, that is relatively modest considering the size of the site. - 8 web All virtual machines are hosted with commercial cloud hosting providers, who have no clue that The Pirate Bay is among their customers. All traffic goes through the load balancer, which masks what the other VMs are doing. This also means that none of the IP-addresses of the cloud hosting providers are publicly linked to TPB. According to the Pirate Bay team the current setup works pretty well. Although small issues pop up every now and then, the site has had no major downtime recently. If the police come knocking in the future the cloud servers can of course be disconnected. However, with the site’s current setup it would be fairly easy to continue operating from another provider in a relatively short time. For now, the most vulnerable spot appears to be the site’s domain. Just last year the site burnt through five separate domain names due to takedown threats from registrars. But then again, this doesn’t appear to be much of a concern for TPB as the operators have dozens of alternative domain names standing by. Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services. |
| 8:30p | “The Letter” Is Still The Best Story To Explain Why Copyright Monopoly Must Be Reduced
“How will the artists make money” is basically just a distraction from the real and important issues at hand, and this story helps bring them there. The story of “the letter” deals with just how big and vital civil liberties have been sacrificed in the transition from analog to digital at the tenacious insistence of the copyright industry for the sake of their bottom line. The analog letter was the message sent the way our parents sent them: written onto a physical piece of paper, put into an envelope, postaged with an old-fashioned stamp and put into a mailbox for physical delivery to the intended recipient. That letter had four important characteristics that each embodied vital civil liberties. That letter, first of all, was anonymous. Everybody had the right to send an anonymous message to somebody. You could identify yourself on the inside of the message, for only the recipient to know, on the envelope, for the postal services to know, or not at all. Or you could write a totally bogus name, organization, and address as the sender of your message, and that was okay, too. Not just okay, it was even fairly common. Second, it was secret in transit. When we talk of letters being opened and inspected routinely, the thoughts go to scenes of the East German Stasi – the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, the East German National Security Agency (yes, that’s how Stasi’s name translates). Letters being opened and inspected? Seriously? You had to be the primary suspect of an extremely grave crime for that to take place. Third, the mailman was never ever held responsible for the contents of the letters being carried. The thought was ridiculous. They were not allowed to look at the messages in the first place, so it was unthinkable that they’d be held accountable for what they dutifully delivered. Fourth, the letter was untracked. Nobody had the means – nor indeed the capability – to map who was communicating with whom. All of these characteristics, which all embed vital civil liberties, have been lost in the transition to digital at the insistence of the copyright industry – so that they, as a third-party, can prevent people from sending letters with a content they just don’t like to see sent, for business reasons of theirs. The question of “how will somebody make money” is entirely irrelevant. The job of any entrepreneur is to make money given the current constraints of society and technology. No industry gets to dismantle civil liberties with the poor excuse that they can’t make money otherwise. They have the simple choice of doing something else or go out of business. And yet, that’s exactly what we have allowed the copyright industry to do: dismantle vital civil liberties. Dismantle the very concept of the private letter. And they’re continuing to do so under pretty but deceptive words. When I explain the situation like this, the penny drops for an astounding amount of people and they stop asking the learned, but silly, question about how somebody is to get paid if we have the rights we’ve always had – to send anything to anybody anonymously. That’s the Analog Equivalent Right. To be able send anything to anybody anonymously. And that’s what we need to bring to the digital environment, even if an obsolete industry doesn’t like it because it may or may not hurt the bottom line. That’s completely irrelevant. Try telling this story and watch the penny drop, almost every single time. It’s remarkable.  About The Author Rick Falkvinge is a regular columnist on TorrentFreak, sharing his thoughts every other week. He is the founder of the Swedish and first Pirate Party, a whisky aficionado, and a low-altitude motorcycle pilot. His blog at falkvinge.net focuses on information policy. Book Falkvinge as speaker? Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services. |
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