p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- “The Swedish minister of justice, Beatrice Ask [that’s her on the right ], told the Swedish national radio that she believed that The Pirate Bay did not give Sweden a good reputation :-/ (this time regarding the threats from IOC towards TPB),” says The Pirate Bay, going on
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We hope (and think) that’s wrong, so we now urge our users to tell her how they feel about the bay!

Please fill out the form below (and do alter the default text if you like) and press Send. Madame Ask will receive it as an official document, so please do be careful with what you write, as it will be a public document.

And we love you for showing us support!

Really?

Really.

And it all stems from the millions of videos of the 2008 Beijing Olympics which have been showing up on the site ever since the games started —- the efforts of the RIAA’s discredited ‘investigator’ MediaSentry to act as the official Chinese DRM company notwithstanding.

“The Pirate Bay does not have any servers in Sweden,” said a p2pnet Reader’s Write yesterday. It continues, “And in any case, torrent trackers do not host any actual content.”

Not only but also, “I heard they renamed the site Beijing Bay to poke fun at the IOC.”

It’s still http://thepiratebay.org/, but like they say, a picture is worth 1,000 words and TPB’s temporary new logo says it all

TPB also runs a copy of the IOC letter to TPB in which the IOC not only expresses its extreme displeasure of the fact the opening ceremonies reached millions of people around the world, no thanks to the IOC, but thanks to the unauthorized Swedish media dissemination site.

Now the IOC is wringing its hands over the possibility the closing ceremonies might be similarly treated, and also says it’s prepared to go well beyond its brief, asking, “how IOC can work with you to help prevent Internet piracy?”

“I especially like how they claim to have contacted The Pirate Bay,” says Brokep. “The phone hasn’t rung. And I guess their e-mail probably got caught in the chinese firewall, since TPB is blocked there.

“I’ve recently stated that I found IOC quite clever (but rude) to not contact TPB before going to the ministry. I stand corrected now - they are apparantly not clever enough to contact TPB but still rude.

“Being in China probably makes IOC adopt the style of the nations leaders. I.e. do not talk to the people involved, just have conversations with their government. That’s the ideal way of making money, without hassle and morals.”

Dated August 16 and from the International Olympic Committee legal department, it states »»»

On behalf of the IOC, I write to advise the Ministry of Justice of a serious case of piracy relating to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games that is occurring through the Swedish website www.thepiratebay.org (”Pirate Bay”) and to request your assistance in preventing further piracy of the Olympics in Sweden. As you may know, the Beijing Games commenced on 8 August 2008 with the Opening Ceremony directed by Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou. The Opening Ceremony has been rightly lauded as a magnificent cultural work and described as one of the greatest ceremonies in the history of the Olympic games. The intellectual property rights in the Opening Ceremony, and the Beijing games as a whole, ultimately belong to the IOC which works closely with licensees throughout the world to make the Beijing games more fully available to television, Internet, and other new media users.

Regrettably, shortly after August 8, unauthorized copies of broadcasts of the Opening Ceremony became available for download through the Pirate Bay whose operators and servers are located in Sweden. Our technical advisor informs us that as many as 1 million copies of the Opening Ceremony had been illegally downloaded worldwide, with the most significant activity taking place through Pirate Bay. The IOC has sent a notice to the Pirate Bay site administrators requesting that they cease and desist from facilitating further infringement of the IOC’s rights. We have received no response from the Pirate Bay and the opening ceremony files continue to be available and downloaded through Pirate Bay.

The rampant piracy of the Opening Ceremony directly harms the interests of the IOC and its licensees, who have invested significant time and resources into making the Beijing Games available through an unprecedented variety of platforms including television, Internet VOD, live Internet streaming, and DVD. We are also gravely concerned about the upcoming Closing Ceremony on August 24, as it is entirely predictable that illegal copies of that event will be immediately made available through the Pirate Bay. Moreover, aside from the Beijing Olympics, we are also concerned about the impact that the pirate websites such as the Pirate Bay may have on the IOC’s ability to develop legal new media platforms for upcoming Olympic Games.

As the pirate base operators and service are located in Sweden, the IOC asks for the assistance of the Swedish government to its authorities to prevent the rampant piracy of the Olympics by the Pirate Bay. We understand the Swedish government is already quite familiar with Pirate Bay and is currently even prosecuting a criminal action against the site operators. The IOC would be most appreciative if the Government could provide any assistance through its authorities in preventing further piracy of the Olumpics, and particularly the removal of unauthorized files relating to the Opening Ceremony from Pirate Bay and the prevention of uploads similarly illegal files for the Closing Ceremony.

Please let me know any steps that the government can take to assist the IOC in this matter to ensure its legal rights in Sweden and how IOC can work with you to help prevent Internet piracy.

Thank you files for your understanding and cooperation.

Yours sincerely.
Gunilla Lindberg, IOC Vice President, and Howard Stupp, Director of Legal Affairs.

But TPB doesn’t leave it there.

And here’s the form letter mentioned in the intro which TPB suggests people might want to sign for submission to Beatrice Ask.

It says »»»

Dear madame minister of justice,

It has come to my knowledge that you are worried about the image that thepiratebay.org gives to your wonderful country of social benefits, open skies and beautiful people.

I hereby want to express my most sincere assurances that thepiratebay.org gives me purely good vibes around Sweden.

I don’t know too much about Sweden, but to me thepiratebay.org is a lighthouse of joy, enlightenment and courage on the vast oceans of the web.

To me anakata, brokep and tiamo are some of the few true heroes of our times. They are building, maintaining and more importantly protecting the most important cultural distribution infrastructure that the human race has ever beheld.

Please don’t follow in the footsteps of Caesar, Aurelian, Theopilus and Amr ibn al ‘Aas who all in the old ages burnt the most important archive of their times, the library of Alexandria.

Instead I urge you to acknowledge the work of the piratebay.org and immediately award them immunity from persecution.

Also you should brag about your boys to all other important people you encounter.

Definitely stay tuned. And be sure not to miss the Closing Ceremony

Jon Newton - p2pnet

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 20th, 2008 at 6:00 am and is filed under Freedom, P2P. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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