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Authorities Raid Large Torrent Site Again…aaand it’s Back Online

Posted: 24 Feb 2014 03:25 AM PST

There was a time when raiding a torrent site meant that it stayed down for good, but with 2014 just a couple of months old it’s clear that things have changed.

The latest signs relate to Tankafetast, Sweden’s #2 torrent site and the 95th most popular site in the country according to Alexa. The site, second only to The Pirate Bay, specializes in movies and TV shows and has been an anti-piracy target for some time. With a motto of “We shall never surrender!” one gets a flavor of how that’s gone so far.

On October 1, 2012, PRQ, a webhost previously owned by Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm, disappeared offline after Swedish police raided the facility. Many file-sharing sites went offline and it was later confirmed that Tankafetast was the prime target.

Just three weeks later it was back online, taunting the authorities and nemesis Henrik Pontén at copyright protection outfit Antipiratbyrån (Rights Alliance).

In April 2013 yet more action was taken against the site, with the arrest of one of the site’s admins. Yet again the site remained intact and online.

And now, according to the site’s operators, Rights Alliance and local authorities have had another go at shutting Tankafetast down.

“Once again, we fell victim to a Rights Alliance (Anti-Piracy Office) ploy to shut down TankaFetast! Our data centers have been raided,” the site’s operators report.

It appears that a continuing investigation led authorities to a location from where they believed Tankafetast was operating. While the raid last week may have unearthed something, the site was fully prepared for the event.

“Instead of sitting and waiting to see what the authorities want us to do we can move just anywhere to our other servers located abroad. Once again we will rise up again!” the site’s operators said.

And, a few initial problems aside, Tankafetast returned online this weekend.

“We’re going nowhere Rights Alliance, believe it!” the site declared.

Interestingly there was no announcement of action against Tankafetast last week from Rights Alliance or the police. Both are usually fairly quick to inform the press of their achievements but there are no reports from either. TorrentFreak contacted lawyer Henrik Pontén for comment but we have received no response.

It is certainly possible that the raid on the Tankafetast datacenter was expected to fail. Last Thursday a site operator revealed that the 2012 raid on PRQ didn’t net the site, just a gateway.

“We had some old empty dusty boxes with PRQ a few years ago but that was merely a proxy. When police got them there was nothing left in them anyway, since the memory was cleared for the least outside risk,” he revealed.

While in the ‘old days’ torrent site admins simply crossed their fingers and perhaps wore garlic to fend off attacks, it’s becoming clear that these days site setups are being hardened in preparation for what many believe to be an increasingly likely event. But these systems cost money and that has to be made somehow. Intrusive advertising is one way, according to Tankafetast.

“It is precisely because of pop-under advertising that we have been able to have servers around the world. Here you get a really good example. When one goes down we just move to another. The advertising that many find annoying saves us in situations like this,” they conclude.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and VPN services.

Why Is The Copyright Monopoly Necessary, Anyway?

Posted: 23 Feb 2014 01:26 PM PST

copyright-branded I sometimes try to hold the copyright monopoly to the same legislative quality standards as other laws.

It fails laughably at the “necessary, effective, and proportionate” test, where a law must be necessary (meet an identified legislative need), effective (solve that problem effectively), and proportionate (not cause worse damage in the process).

Most of the time, the copyright monopoly fails all three tests, and when legislators have this pointed out to them, they shift uncomfortably in their chairs and change the subject.

I don’t know any profession except legislation that gets away with such abysmal quality assurance.

Most of the time, the discussion focuses on the “effective” and “proportional” parts of copyright legislation, illustrating how it is absolutely toothless in the absence of draconian privacy invasions, which is exactly what the copyright industry is tenaciously pushing for – which brings us to the “proportional” part right in the next sentence.

For once, though, “necessary” is up for debate. Is the copyright monopoly even necessary to solve a real problem? If so, what specific problem is it trying to solve? This passage is notably absent from most copyright monopoly legislations: “The purpose of this law is X”. If you were arguing for the introduction of such a monopoly today, how would you justify it? Could you conceivably do so?

To that effect, a new book, Without Copyright, was published recently. It reminds us of a sobering fact – even though the copyright monopoly was created in 1554 in England by “Bloody” Mary I in order to persecute political dissenters, it didn’t have much of an international effect until the 1900s. The copyright monopolies only protected authors of books in their own countries; outside the author’s own country, it was generally a free-for-all, and nowhere moreso than in the United States.

The international convention that turns copyright monopolies international is known as the Berne Convention, and it is overseen by the UN organization WIPO (the only UN organization to be funded by outside private interests). The United States ratified the Berne Convention only when it became geopolitically important to aggressively push its monopolies onto other countries, as described in The History of Copyright. More specifically, the United States ratified international copyright monopolies on March 1, 1989.

That’s very recent. To put it in perspective, that’s a newer event than Mario Bros, Die Hard, The Princess Bride, and The Legend of Zelda. It’s over fifteen years after the introduction of TCP/IP, the communications protocol of the modern Internet.

The U.S. had recognized some international monopolies to a very limited degree before that point. But before 1891, only citizens and residents of the United States could qualify for copyright monopolies at all. In today’s words of the United States: America was a rogue piracy state, plain and simple. That begs the obvious question – if there was no copyright monopoly, how did the writers make money, and since we have been told this always depends on the copyright monopoly, why were any books written at all in this time period?

But books were written before 1891. Tons of them. And there’s nothing to indicate more books were written after the United States accepted international monopolies, neither in the 1891 change nor in the 1989 change.

The answer, it turns out, was very simple. There wasn’t really any need for the copyright monopoly. There was a whole slew of tools available for publishers and authors to enforce business terms and make their agreed money, where – notably – not a single one of them involved lawyers. And this was considered modern times.

So that lets us return to the question:

How necessary is the copyright monopoly, anyway?

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.

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Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and VPN services.