Today I read sad news.
Here in Finland our retarded court has ordered Finland's (I think most popular) ISP, Elisa, to block piratebay.org.
Even EU court has ruled that internet censorship is illegal, so hopefully this block is not going to last long.
Of course this block is completely useless because I can still acces piratebay.ee, or use proxy to acces .org, but anyway I find things like this sickening. It's a major insult against people's freedom, any kind of internet censorship can be considered, at least in my head, being against the freedom of speech.

I'm not going to the pirate morale debate here, because it's simply too complicated of an subject to be judged black and white. But everyone should have acces to any part of the internet he/she wishes for no matter how much of a gray area the part would be morally speaking.

Maybe other people have more to add. I just wanted to open topic about this on international forum.

You can try to avoid a flame war, but not a debate of morals because this is as much a moral issue as an economic one. IMO stealing someone else's product is stealing the work of thousands of people, not just the millionaires.

Your government could compile all of your internet usage and charge you a $200 citation for downloading torrents to reimburse the producers of that content. Would you prefer the government do that or make it somewhat harder to steal movies as you described?

The 'laws' regarding freedom of speech should not and do not overrule laws such as theft, copyright misuse etc etc.

In fact, I think the two terms "freedom of speech" and "human rights" are massively overused, usually to get out of doing something or paying for something that really ought to be done.

For the love of.. downloading torrents != stealing. Do NOT mix copyright infringement with theft. Stealing something means taking away the original copy.

This new court order is simply ridiculous and illegal, it won't hold for long.

Quote from flymike91 :

Your government could compile all of your internet usage and charge you a $200 citation for downloading torrents to reimburse the producers of that content. Would you prefer the government do that or make it somewhat harder to steal movies as you described?

Actually, we already have this wonderful thing called Teosto. They are our equivalent of RIAA of sorts. Thanks to them, the cost of empty media (CD's, DVD's, even external HDD's) in Finland is pretty much the highest in whole europe. Why? Well, they think if you buy an external HDD, you are planning on filling it with pirated music, so they want the resellers to pay them X amount of money from each external HDD sold. That in exchange raised the external HDD prices through the roof for consumers. That is just one example of how scumbag and greedy the copyright upholders and "artist" protection groups here are, and they are getting way more authority from the government than they should have.

meh, keep downloading folks... Support the indie folks ( goes without saying im sure ) but seriously, **** activision, Song BMG and the others who say what they like but do nothing.

Quote from Matrixi :

Stealing something means taking away the original copy.

so I can take away a brand new Audi R8? Its just a copy of the original Prototype :hide:

that said, I got 8gigs of mashups on my HDDs .. a gray area too

I was afraid this would happen.

Quote from flymike91 :

Your government could compile all of your internet usage and charge you a $200 citation for downloading torrents to reimburse the producers of that content. Would you prefer the government do that or make it somewhat harder to steal movies as you described?

In my mind goverment don't have the right to do either one. I am a paying customer for my ISP and the thing I am paying for is internet connection. Not some kind of a package of accessible URLs.
Internet is something we use for sharing information. The internet user is the one who decides what he want's to share and with whom.

Problem here is not the pirate war, but the censoring itself. I find it very conserning that this kind of censoring is even possible to happen in a country like Finland. I understand it happens in countries like North Korea, but Finland is supposed to be a modern democratic welfare country.
Question is that if this happens now what is next?
Maybe in few years the only accessible part of internet is the sites we pay (like television) and every site has to be approved by the goverment.
Of course this is far fecthing but maybe you get my point. Censorship is bad.

There are probably millions of sites on the internet what have much worse moral code than sites like piratebay.org, so should they all be censored also? Who decides what is good and bad?
Maybe even LFSforum should be censored because we have the possibility to talk about illegal things like driving over the speed limit etc. Some people even might have encouraged to break law here.

In my mind laws and moral code are two very different things and I live by my moral code, not by the law book.

Since when is something physical (takes money to manufacture, ship and resell) comparable to software (which doesn't cost anything to copy)?

Edit: Right, he deleted the post, nevermind then.

Edit #2: And I agree totally with you there BigPeBe. If this sticks (which I seriously doubt it will), the government has no trouble starting to censor other websites aswell. It's just a shame our nation is full of yes-men.

Quote from theirishnoob :

meh, keep downloading folks... Support the indie folks ( goes without saying im sure ) but seriously, **** activision, Song BMG and the others who say what they like but do nothing.

This is the attitude of pirates. Activision is not a person. It is thousands of people whose job and goal it is to make the newest and best video games FOR YOU to enjoy. You are telling all of those real people to f*** themselves while you enjoy the results of their labor. Nice.

Quote from Matrixi :

Actually, we already have this wonderful thing called Teosto. They are our equivalent of RIAA of sorts. Thanks to them, the cost of empty media (CD's, DVD's, even external HDD's) in Finland is pretty much the highest in whole europe. Why? Well, they think if you buy an external HDD, you are planning on filling it with pirated music, so they want the resellers to pay them X amount of money from each external HDD sold. That in exchange raised the external HDD prices through the roof for consumers. That is just one example of how scumbag and greedy the copyright upholders and "artist" protection groups here are, and they are getting way more authority from the government than they should have.

We actually got pretty much the same here in Switzerland, any electronic device that is capable of playing movies/songs you buy will also include a nominal fee, per Gigabyte of storage, to the Swiss equivalent of the RIAA. The only difference (I guess, I don't know Finnish law) is that we're allowed to download copyrighted goods as long as they are for private usage only.

Quote from troy :

We actually got pretty much the same here in Switzerland, any electronic device that is capable of playing movies/songs you buy will also include a nominal fee, per Gigabyte of storage, to the Swiss equivalent of the RIAA. The only difference (I guess, I don't know Finnish law) is that we're allowed to download copyrighted goods as long as they are for private usage only.

Same here in Latvia.

..and in Russia too, IIRC.
so it's not just Finland.

Quote from BigPeBe :

I am a paying customer for my ISP and the thing I am paying for is internet connection. Not some kind of a package of accessible URLs.

This.

And personally I could not care less about what happens to Piratebay but if the URL embargo holds, then we're on a really slippery slope and that is what worries me.

As a precursor, Finland isn't exactly setting the world on fire what comes to respecting human rights.

"Finland has received more judgments handed down by the European Court of Human Rights than the rest of the Nordic countries together over the past 15 years."

I'm not sure the two people who tried to justify any of this (and yes I am pointing fingers, you know who you are) fully appreciate the severity of this occurrence. One of the domains the court has decided to block is in fact in no way related to tpb. A site dedicated against child porn has been blocked for 4 years now despite numerous headlines and efforts to try and get it restored. How does this blatant stupidity help anyone?

Censorship has not ever been nor will it ever be an answer for anything. Even if it was it's ineffective at best.

While I appreciate the concern for artists who make the shit people download illegally, it would be wrong to say they don't benefit from it at all - Studies have shown pirates actually use quite a lot more money on actually buying stuff. Also it's quite hard to draw a line, if it's okay to record a song that's on the radio (which it is), why is it illegal to download it? The song will get copied somehow anyway, why the **** are my tax euros being used to fight over that in court?

Quote from troy :

The only difference (I guess, I don't know Finnish law) is that we're allowed to download copyrighted goods as long as they are for private usage only.

Because afaik your government decided not to bother fighting an already lost war. Smart move.

Yeah, just noticed www.piraattilahti.fi has been blocked for Elisa users today aswell. It's a site which tries to uphold citizen rights and stop internet censorhip, and is in no way related to pirate bay or piracy itself.

My god what this country has turned in to. I just wonder how much bribes have been exchanged between the record labels and the judges when this madness has been decided.

Quote from Matrixi :

Yeah, just noticed www.piraattilahti.fi has been blocked for Elisa users today aswell. It's a site which tries to uphold citizen rights and stop internet censorhip, and is in no way related to pirate bay or piracy itself.

My god what this country has turned in to. I just wonder how much bribes have been exchanged between the record labels and the judges when this madness has been decided.

I can access piraattilahti just fine? Maybe it was just a problem with site itself?

Quote from tristancliffe :

The 'laws' regarding freedom of speech should not and do not overrule laws such as theft, copyright misuse etc etc.

So the laws regarding theft (or more precisely copyright infringement in this case) should overrule those regarding freedom of speech? You can't have it both ways.

As much as I despise piracy I still think think we're much better off with billion dollar companies crying about their falling sales numbers than with the Internet controlled by the governments. People who advocate this blocking and banning policy are either stupid or know that it can't possibly work.

Moreover, the piracy itself is not a real problem. Have you ever heard of a company that had to shut down because piracy destroyed its revenue, did any of those companies that moan the most have sack some of their employees because they couldn't pay them? I don't think so. On the other hand, did any of these companies force people who legally bought their products to install poorly written backdoors on their PC's without informing them about it all or providing an uninstaller?

Fight against piracy is just an attempt to employ legal mechanisms that would allow for the governments to decide what can and cannot be on the Internet. Up until now, the Internet was the only place where you could share pretty much anything and one can guess why something "had to" be done about it. I don't want to sound like Racer X here, but just look how the DMCA works and how SOPA or PIPA is supposed to work in US.

Quote from BigPeBe :

I can access piraattilahti just fine? Maybe it was just a problem with site itself?

Must have been unblocked moments ago then (I'm on DNA which doesn't block anything (yet) so can't check myself), here's the full list of blocked Elisa sites:


Source

Quote from flymike91 :

You can try to avoid a flame war, but not a debate of morals because this is as much a moral issue as an economic one. IMO stealing someone else's product is stealing the work of thousands of people, not just the millionaires.

Your government could compile all of your internet usage and charge you a $200 citation for downloading torrents to reimburse the producers of that content. Would you prefer the government do that or make it somewhat harder to steal movies as you described?

First of all, "stealing" someone else's product is not stealing the work of thousands of people. Those people got paid to build the game, not to sell it. When you buy the game, no money goes to those who designed it, similarly when you pirate something, you're not taking anything away from them.

Secondly, it gets pretty hard to defend the companies behind those anti-piracy policies, because what they defend is not reasonable at all. If you lend your CD to a friend, you're breaking the law. If you play your CD on the car stereo for someone who hasn't acquired it yet, you are breaking the law. If you rip it so your friend who lives in the Himalayas can listen to a song/play a game, you are breaking the law.

Quote from Matrixi :

Must have been unblocked moments ago then (I'm on DNA which doesn't block anything (yet) so can't check myself), here's the full list of blocked Elisa sites:

thepiratebay.org, www.thepiratebay.org, depiraatbaai.be, www.depiraatbaai.be, piratebay.am, www.piratebay.am, piratebay.net, www.piratebay.net, www.piratebay.no, piratebay.no, piratebay.se, www.piratebay.se, suprnova.com, www.suprnova.com, themusicbay.com, www.themusicbay.com, themusicbay.net, www.themusicbay.net, themusicbay.org, www.themusicbay.org, thepiratebay.am,www.thepiratebay.am, www.thepiratebay.com, thepiratebay.com, thepiratebay.gl, www.thepiratebay.gl, thepiratebay.net, www.thepiratebay.net, www.thepiratebay.se, thepiratebay.se, www.piraattilahti.fi, piraattilahti.fi, thepiratepay.org.nyud.net

Source

Interesting. Didn't realise this before but even on the link I provided in the first post the site piraattilahti.fi was listed. I still haven't had any problems accessing it at any point.

Quote from flymike91 :

...whose job and goal it is to make the newest and best video games FOR YOU...

Balls. They want to make money making crappy ports and selling them like luxury items.
The solution is very easy: instead of selling 100,000 copies of a game for 60 bucks, sell 1,000,000 of them for just 10, that's the deal.
And my goverment can s*ck my c*ck.

Quote from BigPeBe :

Interesting. Didn't realise this before but even on the link I provided in the first post the site piraattilahti.fi was listed. I still haven't had any problems accessing it at any point.

Right, turns out piraattilahti was a proxy site to access pirate bay in case tpb will be blocked like it was today, and after piraattilahti were blocked themselves, they redirected their site to effi's homepage.

First point, not all torrents are pirated movies, music, movies etc. I do believe that the devs have used torrents for updates.

Music, as in album sales, have increased over the past year, if piracy is such a huge issue then the opposite should be the result. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/ ... -future-with-spotify.html

I think that the real interest is in controlling the net and access to information rather than stopping 'piracy'
And any blocks can be beaten without too much effort. A british govt report not only pointed this out but also gave ways to getting around blocks, admittedly accidentally ! http://torrentfreak.com/uk-rep ... s-anti-piracy-law-110808/

If companies adopted a more realistic buisiness model then the problem would largly disappear, but their stuck in the same old, same old, and refuse to adapt, a bit like every other extinct species. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/ ... ood/picture/business.html

The saddest thing is this censorship does not do anything good. It does not fix the original problem (warez, child pornography and other criminal content) but just tries to hide information. All it really does it just adds a roadblock between the information and the user.

The roadblock is just pure hell of bureaucracy, hypocrisy and just downright pure censorship of all things the controller of this kind of list sees fit for his purposes.

The bad stuff stays in the internets but the officials will take every step to misuse their positions and bureaucracy to reduce basic human rights lower and lower.

Sooner than later this same system will be used to silence the discussions about it instead of just hiding just "bad" few sites. The whole thing is nothing but using alternative means to take down something that can not be taken down legally directly.

I agree with the topic creator, cencorship is shit.
And I am not going to botter going into the pirate / not pirate discussion.

But for all those companies that makes retarded anti-pirate tools, the greedy music corporations or even the government that tries to "own" internett, please, by all means - go **** youself. Thanks.

Hi

http://yle.fi/uutiset/court_or ... d_dna_subscribers/6176176

Bye