Virgin Media's blocking of the Pirate Bay: consequences

According to a report over at the BBC it seems like the hacker group Anonymous have taken down the Virgin Media website as a response to the company's blocking of the Pirate Bay. A tweet appearing to be attributed to @AnonCircle carried the hashtags #OpBayBack and #OpTPB, clearly referencing the infamous website.

VIRGIN MEDIA - Tango Down #OpTPB virginmedia.com #OpBayBack #Anonymous
— Anonymous Circle (@AnonCircle) May 8, 2012

Piracy research

Meanwhile, The Pirate Bay website is currently hosting a link to a research project ran by the good people at the Cybernorms Research Group (based at Lund University). In this follow-up study they are seeking to understand online norms and values in relation to effective laws and polices so are asking for help. This link will take you to a short questionnaire (no personal data or IP address info is collected). It really will take next to no time and will help contest the industry-led lobby-led research. More information can be found over at cybernorms.net.

TheSlyrateBay

I was also contacted via email by the founder of TheSlyrateBay -  a website currently helping online users bypass the Pirate Bay blocks. The founder suggests that the site allows you to log in to your personal Piratebay account without the need for any other external proxies or Virtual Private Networks (VPN). It's free and can be accessed form a browser. You use it at your own risk but it might help fill your Pirate Bay fix. At the very least, you can use it to get access to the non-infringing Pirate Bay blog.

EDIT: It seems like Orange are the second UK ISP to implement a block on the Pirate Bay judging by this post

EDIT #2: The Pirate Bay have taken to Facebook to criticise the DDoS attack on Virgin Media, critiquing the method as a form of censorship equivalent to web blocking.

Virgin Media blocks the Pirate Bay and how it doesn't even matter

As of yesterday Virgin Media customers were no longer able to reach the standard domain address for the Pirate Bay (thepiratebay.se/) after an earlier high court ruling demanded that the UK's biggest ISPs block access to the site on the grounds that it breaches copyright laws. This move has brought with it criticisms from several internet advocacy groups.

Speaking over at guardian.co.uk Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, said:

Blocking The Pirate Bay is pointless and dangerous. It will fuel calls for further, wider and even more drastic calls for Internet censorship of many kinds, from pornography to extremism ... Internet censorship is growing in scope and becoming easier. Yet it never has the effect desired. It simply turns criminals into heroes.

Part of the problem is that in an attempt to block access to copyrighted material, Virgin Media have also cut off access to the Pirate Bay blog - leading to a rather chilling effect on free speech.

It seems like the block has had an inverse effect as TorrentFreak carried a report in which the Pirate Bay stated they witnessed a surge in traffic to the site - after the block came into effect. Traffic levels saw a spike totalling an extra 12 million visitors as web users came to see what the fuss was about (a classic case  of the Streisland Effect).

Access to the site can still be achieved if web users are committed enough to seek out alternate ways to reach The Pirate Bay. The UK arm of the Pirate Party have a proxy server setup to help people bypass the rather clumsy attempt at enforcing domain level censorship. How long this link stays available remains to be seen.

Over on the Pirate Bay's blog is an overview of the different ways in which users can still access the site:

As usual there are easy ways to circumvent the block. Use a VPN service to be anonymous and get an uncensored internet access, you should do this anyhow. Or use TOR, I2P or some other darknet with access to the internets. Change your DNS settings with OpenDNS. Or use googles DNS servers... we could go on...

 There are a range of different VPN services - some free, some expensive - that provide web users with alternate ways to route around censorship. The very real danger in the future lies with the potential misuse of domain level blocking. The Pirate Bay has been blocked as a consequence of successful lobbying by the entertainment industry (due to hosting links to files that may violate various copyright claims), but as the web becomes more and more a commodified experience, one wonders how long it will be before censorship of domains occurs at the expense of websites that carry material other powerful lobbyists disagree with

In the mean time, the blocking doesn't matter. The video below shows one way round the block. However, the future of the Internet doesn't look quite so open today.

CENSORED

Today's the day that a number of high profile websites are demonstrating their opposition to the SOPA and PIPA bills currently pending in Congress. The upshot of these bills passing into law is that they are tantamount to giving powerful content industry groups the power to cut-off from the internet or censor websites that are accused of hosting material that doesn't belong to them. Bear in mind that these bills have been sponsored and co-written by representatives of the entertainment industry (eg the MPAA) and it's plain to see whose interests are being served here.

Under the proposed legislation the US Attorney General would have the power to demand ISPS so block access to foreign websites suspected of dealing in pirated content, as well as making search engines delist such istes from the search indexes. Other powers include the blocking of payement services to accused sites too (and we all know what happened to Wikileaks when its funding services where blocked). If these standards were applied to several prominent US-based sites many of them would be in trouble (eg Tumblr, Wordpress, Blogger, Google, etc).

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

There have been some last minute amendments to the proposed bills but they haven't removed the threat to free speech entirely. That's why it's good to see several prominent sites doing their bit to raise public awareness of the threats involved.

Over at TorrentFreak you can find a compilation of websites that are participating in a self-imposed censorship/black-out campaign. I'm going to add links or images to those already covered by TorrentFreak as I come across them. Please feel free to contact me either in the comments, via Twitter or email with any more.

Those sites known to be taking part are in today's black-out are:

Wikipedia

Wikipedia, the student's friend, will be down for 24 hours (except for the pages about SOPA and PIPA)

Minecraft

Insanely addictive browser-based game Minecraft is down

Reddit

The community-powered news site, reddit, is down

Open Rights Group

The Open Rights Group are UK digital activists and they are making sure people know about these heinous bills

Wordpress

The creators of the blogging content management system of choice, Wordpress, are censored.

TorrentFreak

Even TorrentFreak themselves are making a stand. Lord knows, they've been inaccurately accused of being pirates enough times

Wired

Ever-popular tech site Wired are in self-imposed blackout mode

Craigslist

The classifieds service, Craigslist, is also making a stand

Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The video game review site Rock, Paper, Shotgun is down

The Oatmeal

Satirical comedy site The Oatmeal is down

Humble Bundle

Online independent games retailer HumbleBundle have gone dark

Wikia

The alternate pop-culture wiki-based encyclopaedia, Wikia, is protesting

XBMC

Makers of the free media centre resource, XBMC, have gone dark

Zeropaid

Piracy-based news site Zeropaid has blacked out

Demonoid

Long-running torrent site Demonoid is blacked out

Boing Boing

Cory Doctorow's Boing Boing site has gone offline

UKNova


UK-based TV catch-up torrent site UKNova had an interesting message for its users

Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg kinda supports the anti SOPA business but Facebook isn't quite going dark

Absolute Punk


The punks over at Absolute Punk are against SOPA

Liberal Conspiracy

Those good folks on the Left at Liberal Conspiracy are blacking out their homepage

Destructoid

The gaming site for gamers, by gamers, Destructoid is dark

Know Your Meme

Not to be outdone by a spreading meme, Know Your Meme actually became part of what they normally document

This Isn't Happiness

The photography/art-based propaganda site This Isn't Happiness embraced the darkness

imgur


As the easy way to share images, imgur was keen to protest

XKCD

Popular online comic site, XKCD, ran a blacked-out sketch

The Verge

The technology-focussed site, The Verge, voiced their opposition

TechCrunch

The AOL-owned technology blog TechCrunch had a colour make-over

Fark

Home to all things satirical, Fark went for a white out

4chan


The home of weirdness (and haters of censorship!) saw some weird things happen, but hey, that's 4chan for you

Funny or Die

Funny or Die's comedy site got serious about the censorship

GoDaddy

Sometime supporters of the bills, GoDaddy, demonstrated their (customer's !?!) commitment to the opposition

More to follow. Maybe...

A timely piece of propaganda from the music industry

Yesterday morning, feeling sickened by the current developments surrounding the Digital Economy Bill, I picked up my laptop to read the news and was confronted by yet another report which sought to offer some definitive conclusions about the impact of copyright infringement. The report in question, "Building A Digital Economy: The Importance of Saving Jobs in the EU's Creative Industries", seemed perfectly timed to both support the ideological machinations behind the curent Digital Economy Bill and undermine the mounting public resistance to the Bill. The fact that the phrase 'Digital Economy' features in the title is surely a coincidence, no?

What do you think this perfectly-timed report suggested? You guessed it - it painted a picture of unmitigated disaster for the creative industries. It suggests that within 5 years the total number of lost jobs in Europe could reach 1.2 million and that the lost revenue for the industry may exceed €240 billion in the same period. As you might expect, this report was welcomed by anti-piracy outfits including the BPI and IFPI who will surely use it in their political lobbying efforts, as it matches their projected fears.

As Herman and Chomsky might put it, this was a perfect example of 'flak' - an attempt to diffuse any of the pressure being directed towards the Digital Economy Bill by groups like OurKingdom, TalkTalk, the ORG and 38degrees. Thank goodness that someone has took the time to read the report and point out the flaws and suppositions inherent within the report. Ernesto over at TorrentFreak has highlighted a few of the major problems with the report:

- The report suggests that there’s a direct correlation between Internet traffic growth and lost jobs. That is, the more traffic that is generated on the Internet, the more money will be lost. This correlation is 1 according to the report, which assumes that all growth in Internet traffic will increase piracy at the same rate.

- The report makes another bogus assumption by stating that more traffic will mean more piracy and thus more lost revenue. It does not account for the fact that people might consume higher quality files which are greater in file-size. All projections are based on bandwidth and not the number of pirated goods.

- The report cites some academic literature which suggests that piracy leads to a decrease in sales. Studies that reported the opposite or a null-effect were carefully left out. This bias defines the entire outcome of the report. If they used studies that found a positive effect they would have found that piracy would create hundreds of thousands of jobs in the years to come.

- The report uses fixed substitution rates. They assume that 10 downloaded albums results in one lost sale and this figure is not adjusted for the projected increase in piracy. One would think that the public’s budget for entertainment is limited and that the substitution rate would go down as piracy goes up

These are a few of the extracts - for more info read the original article here. You can also read the UK Pirate Party's response here, which includes some interesting material from the Terra Firma group who now own EMI.

Perhaps it's not surprising that such a report, originating from the aptly-titled BASCAP (Business Action to Stop Counterfeiting and Piracy), would be timed to coincide with the call for the general public to write to their MPs, asking them to prevent the passing of extreme Internet laws that can result in web censorship if it protects the interests of corporate power.

Let's not forget that the corporate pressure has already resulted in the BPI (the UK recording industry's lobbying arm) having their way with the Liberal Democrats peer, Lord Razzall, with regards to amendment 120A. This amendment was copied almost word-for-word from a lobbying paper prepared by the BPI, and has been widely criticised as giving copyright holders too much power to close down sites on limited evidence. In a column for guardian.co.uk, activist and author Cory Doctorow has tried to make some sense of the subsequent Liberal Democrat u-turn over this issue. He also points to the origins of the leaked memo from the BPI (dated 8th of January) which later became Lord Clement-Jones's 3rd of March amendment.

Clearly, there has been an orchestrated attempt by the recording industry to put their case forward at the expense of truth and also at the potential expense of the British public's rights. Using distorted and one-sided economic projections as fact helps maintain the momentum in the favour of the recording industry whilst attempting to write into law some of the most oppressive web censorship that the UK has seen. The real concern is with whether or not many people or news publishers actually took the time to read the original report before paraphrasing it's claims. The issue around the veracity of data is crucial here - if it gets passed unchecked then the damage is already done. Jim Killock, Executive Director of the Open Rights Group, sums up my feelings on the matter:

“I am fed up of hearing corporate propaganda being deployed in order to justify intrusions on our rights to freedom of speech, privacy and to a fair trial”

If this is democracy, I'm out.