The Pirate Bay ‘kiddie porn’ charge
p2pnet news | p2p:- Hollywood is using its frightening political clout to once again coerce Sweden’s elected and appointed authorities into a step ultimately aimed at closing down its nemesis, The Pirate Bay.
And this time it’s using child pornography as its weapon.
The major studios have done everything they can to kill the site, up to and including making outrageous claims, using Swedish police in raids, and seizing computer equipment.
Now Time Warner, Viacom, Fox, Sony, NBC Universal and Disney have turned to one of their favourite tactics: raising the spectre of kiddie porn in a ploy that’s extremely successful in the United States in particular. It was, and is, used by politicians ‘friendly’ to Hollywood to introduce vested interest legislation; and, as an excuse to try to close down sites the studios don’t like.
An online indexing site run by a handful of people with sparse resources is terrifying the impossibly wealthy corporate movie clan as it tries to hold back the tide in the name of corporate profits.
Like the music industry, dominated by EMI (Britain), Vivendi Universal (France), Sony BMG (Japan and Germany) and Warner Music (US), the studios take it for granted they can snap their fingers and have national police forces, funded by taxpayers, immediately placed at their disposal.
Using propaganda techniques refined by the Nazis during World War II, they’ve been able to turn a wholly civil concept, copyright infringement, into a new crime, file sharing, and through the mainstream media, elevate it to the level of rape and murder.
“This Friday, it became known that the Swedish Police Board will shut down The Pirate Bay, the popular file sharing site, by classifying it as a child pornography site in the blocklist that Swedish Internet Providers respect,” says a post on
Sweden’s Pirate Party site.
It goes on:
Some time next week, an update to the blacklist will include The Pirate Bay.
This means that anyone from Sweden visiting the well-known file sharing site The Pirate Bay will be greeted by a block page from the Police Board saying they’re not allowed to visit child pornography sites.
“This is a devastatingly ignorant abuse of the trust relationship between the Internet world and the Police that was created in order to stop child pornography”, says Rick Falkvinge, leader of the Pirate Party. “Once given the means to shut down unwanted sites, the Police uses the filter to shut down the Pirate Bay after the failed attempt last year. And just like last year, through abuse of procedure.”
“This is not worthy a democracy governed by law. The people who have made this decision cannot remain in our judicial system”, Falkvinge continues. “It also undermines the legitimacy of the child porn filter. This filter is not intended for subjective use by goverment officials to close down undesirable sites which do not break any laws.”
The Pirate Bay, which last year was raided in an attempt to find copyrighted material on the servers, is a controversial site and not highly regarded in the ranks of the establishment. When this happens, it is easy to come to the conclusion that The Pirate Bay is such an embarrassment to the Swedish Government, that any means available is used to stop it.
“Today, online censorship has shown its colors. This abuse of power places Sweden in the same league as China and Saudi Arabia. Now, we must kick out any and all parts of government that don’t understand the concept of free communication, and how it is fundamental to a functioning democracy”, Falkvinge finishes.
Says TPB spokesman brokep on his blog:
Working online gives you a lot of friends. Some of those gives you heads up when something big is going on, and sometimes really big things happen.
A couple of hours ago I got one of those – The Swedish Police is going to put The Pirate Bay in it’s child porn filter!
The filter is a voluntary system that the Swedish ISPs agree to use. They redirect DNS entries they find within this list to a page where it gives you information about why it’s blocked. The meaning of this filter is what? Real child porn is probably hidden somewhere, and we’ve been the victims of this filter wrongfully before! And you know what? It’s the same police officer that I was angry with for blocking the previous domain that is responsible for this blocking too.
(It’s three weeks ago..) And he doesn’t pick up the phone.
To make things perfectly clear – we don’t host any content. And I have never seen child porn on the bay. Our moderators work on all the reports we receive from the public and they contact ECPAT or other organisations if they found suspicious stuff. The police has never contacted us in any aspect regarding child porn! And who would put it up there?
TPB is the most visible place there is. People that distribute stuff like this put it on darknets and I would think they know that the risk of getting caught putting stuff on a public system like The Pirate Bay is really huge. It’s sexual suicide!
If the police would find anything wrong – shouldn’t they first contact us, then bring us in for questioning regarding the content, ask for our help or bring us to court for our wrongdoings?
By not acting this way it’s very clear what this is all about. It’s all about quieting a voice that is really uncomfortable for them since they don’t have any legal standpoint in doing it. It’s sabotage, it’s abuse of power given to them.
It will forever make our site associated with something as disgusting as child porn. They are labelling us – without being even tried for it in a legal system, remember – as having something to do with child porn!
So who’s abusing children? It’s the police, for using the same filtering system as to protect them, to gain from it themselves. For them, it’s good that children get abused, so they can shut down sites they don’t like. Yes, it sounds sick, but this is the way it has become.
I hope that the Swedish ISPs will take action against this and stop using the childporn filter! And that’s a bad thing because it could have some good effects, but they decided to go a bit too far with their filtering.
TPBs users create around 40% of the Swedish internet traffic due to file sharing – so stay tuned for an update, this is going to be a really big fight.
UPDATE: A press release from the police (soon published, I got the heads up again from a journalist) states that ‘it’s not decided that we’ll put The Pirate Bay in the list – if the content is still there next week we’ll put them there’. So, come on! What fucking content are you talking about? Still not a single contact attempt from the police.
The labels and studios give file sharing the same status as counterfeiting when in fact they have absolutely nothing in common with each other.
Making exact, or close, copies of something and then selling it for profit is most definitely a crime.
Sharing something you like is a social activity which has been, and still is, essential to the development of healthy cultures everywhere.
The first would definitely have an impact on revenues. Whether or not it affects them to the extent claimed by the industries is an entirely different question.
With sharing, though, no one is deprived of something he or she formerly owned, no money is made or lost and it’s never been even vaguely demonstrated that something which has been shared mean a sale has been lost, somewhere somehow.
However, this spurious contention is being hammered over and over again by the entertainment corporations as they spend hundreds of millions of dollars in their campaign to gain control of the Net, which they know will become the primary distribution vehicle of the 21st-century and which they believe they must therefore be able to control in the interests of their shareholders.
The people who are developing the P2P file sharing applications which strike so much fear into the hearts of entertainment cartel executives are the innovators of this digital century.
If the cartel’s were to use them against the counterfeiters instead of trying to brand them as criminals of the same ilk, together, they’d quickly stop the flood of counterfeit product.
Of course, the corporations would no longer have total dominance, but that wouldn’t matter. The Net offers mind-boggling marketing possibilities and opportunities never seen before, and there’d plenty for everyone.
Definitely stay tuned.
Also See:
Pirate Party – Swedish Police Shuts Down Pirate Bay – Again, July 6, 2007
blog – Swedish Police will CENSOR The Pirate Bay, July 6, 2007
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July 7th, 2007 at 8:51 am
a truly desperate move by the police. But how to do you classify a site as a “kiddie porn” site when there is no such thing on it? Even here in the US the authorities have to have some shred of proof to make such a accusation.
July 7th, 2007 at 9:19 am
This on the surface looks to be a political ploy by the good old boy network to do what it can not do legally. That is to say, remove TPB from the internet. The next best thing for their methods is restricting traffic and scaring the public. What the good old buy network can’t stand is the light of public scrutiny.
That’s one of the reasons Bush doesn’t want to be accountable and to be held above the law. So he can pay off his favors through the good old boy network and not worry about the pesky public exposures it would reveal. Can anyone say “Libby Thomas”? Libby Thomas was pardoned before he went to jail to serve his time after being convicted of illegal actions that indirectly benefited the Bush admin circle. It is rumored that Libby could tear down the house of cards for Bush should he spill the beans. Since he has not and remained loyal to the present admin, they have returned the favor to protect their own self-interest, knowing that if he does serve time, most likely he will make a bargain to get out of the deal and in the process, the good old boy network will have some of it’s dealings revealed.
The good old boy network works on scratch my back and I’ll do yours. Often the back scratching is against laws, rules, and regulations to accomplish the scratch. Here is police abuse, plain and simple, just as visible as the often surfacing phone video snips that prove it goes on. It’s so bad, that many cities have attempted to make it sound illegal for a citizen to do so. Again the good old boy network can’t survive public exposure.
So there is a reason the police haven’t contacted TPB. There is no law broken. The actions are being taken outside the scope of law. While they say they will check back to see if some item that “qualifies” is still there to justify the block, notice very carefully that no mention of what that item is made. If it were the true reason then they would be making sure that TPB knew what it was they objected to as there would be a law that applied. Since TPB has not had any contact, the item hasn’t been named, and yet a very public effort has been made to stem the traffic flow, it’s pretty obvious what’s going on.
The enforcement copyright cops are putting pressure on to do something; anything. With egg on their faces from the last two attempts, it’s pretty obvious again that it isn’t above board. The cartels who love to paint themselves as standing on the moral high road are again being exposed for just how dirty it is. They are working through the good old boy network because they can not stand the light of public exposure; a dirty trade with dirty methods and dirty dealings. The sooner the cartels die, the better for everyone. They’re like flies, buzzing around shit and always bothering people.
July 7th, 2007 at 1:50 pm
I will NEVER,EVER EVER Spend One Skinny little Dime On Movies, Music, Games AGAIN.
The Entertainment Industry Can Suck a fart out of my ass.
OH WAIT! This is old news!
I quit buying there shit back sometime around 2002.
Have not spent one dime on there entertainment.
But you know what, I still see all the latest movies and listen to all the latest music.
Got more music than a radio station and enough movies to stock a small town video rental store
Ha-Ha and not a dime spent.
And Not One file on the hard-drive Im Leech Supreme
Entertainment industry! Go Get A Real JOB!
July 7th, 2007 at 9:05 pm
I think they should fight this in COURT! I do not think the police would be able to prove anything and the judge would see this as another attempt to shut them down without cause.
I KNOW there is no child porn on TPB….because if there were…..as bad as the police want to shut that site down…..this would be all they need to have everyone running that site in handcuffs by now. But there has been NO charges….so if they do impliment the filter….then take those scumbags to court!
July 8th, 2007 at 1:29 am
Get this corrupted cop(s) and through him (them in jail for treason to Sweden! Te Citizen of sweden should do it themselve if they have too! Also Ban the RIAA/MPAA crap in sweden permanently! MAy be we should all do this in our countries! Power to the people!
July 8th, 2007 at 3:59 pm
Actually there is KIDDIE porn on the site, just do a search for teen, etc… and make sure pron is selected or if signed in make sure that view pornographic content and the offensive content is marked… However I do believe most of the kiddie and child porn are from the Big 4 themselves and so also the cops themselves as i’ve had more blocks of the bad guys on pg2…. I even gave urls to see the kiddie porn in the blog, but still It is there, but the no contact part, well I thought if the cop really cared they’d let them know by contacting them… first hand and gave some incidents…
July 9th, 2007 at 1:53 am
If there IS kiddie pron on there…then WHY are they not ARRESTED? They could be arrested for that surely….I think the cops are not arresting them for a reason….and that reason is that if there IS kiddie porn on there, then it must have been upped by people wanting to shut them down!
But regardless…it is the responsinbility of the POLICE to make sure the admins of the site are contacted about this….but they say so far not ONE policeman has called them or approached them about ANYTHING.
Now don’t you find that a bit strange? Frankly, I think if the police HAD the evidence that they could bring to court, they would shut that site down and arrest all the people running it, which is what they have WANTED to do from day ONE! So if they are handed such an easy way to arrest them and shut their site down….WHY DON’T THEy USE IT??
Something is very fishy here!
June 2nd, 2010 at 4:35 pm
There is kiddie porn on there and it is nasty.I love using pirate bay for other stuff But the people that upload and download the kiddie porn is going to mess it up for the rest of us.Then we will not be able to use pirate bay anymore cause they are the ones that have the disease of looking at child porn.