Legality of Proxies

CruelCoin

Afternoon all,

The major Irish ISP's have blocked The Pirate Bay among others, but i'm wondering on the legality of using a proxy to visit sites blocked in this way.

It's the easiest thing in the world to simply google: "targetsite proxies" and hey presto, you have a workaround.

Is it illegal to visit blocked sites, or is only to create a deterrence through irritation?

CC.

Orion

It's not illegal to visit sites such as TPB. It's illegal to share copyrighted data which torrenting does by its nature. So visiting the site and browsing it is perfectly legal. It's what you do then that may not be.

Mr. G

It's worth noting that "torrenting" isn't illegal, torrenting illegal content is illegal, since you're sharing websites.

Torrenting Linux ISOs etc that are open source and shared by the author is legal for example. Some artists share their content through TPB.

TPB is only a search engine.

Since we're talking about it, I don't believe in the blocking of websites since it opens a whole can of worms. I think that it is a form of censorship and we live in an open economy so blocking websites is a no no.

Lets face it, people that torrent and find a website blocked by their ISP are well able to google how to get around it. Blocking websites is ineffective, look at China for example.

A Dutch court rules that blocking The Pirate Bay was actually "ineffective".

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/29/pirate-bay-ban-lifted-in-netherlands-as-blocking-torrent-sites-ruled-ineffective

gctest50

Blocking TPB takes away the " my kid clicked on that it and it downloaded music and he loves songs and "

unlikely he accidentally

cfdisk /dev/hda && mkfs.xfs /dev/hda1 && mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/gentoo/ && chroot /mnt/gentoo/ && env-update && . /etc/profile && emerge sync && cd /usr/portage && scripts/bootsrap.sh && emerge system && emerge vim && vi /etc/fstab && emerge gentoo-dev-sources && cd /usr/src/linux && make menuconfig && make install modules_install &&emerge squid3 && emerge grub && cp /boot/grub/grub.conf.sample /boot/grub/grub.conf && vi /boot/grub/grub.conf && grub && init 6

Elektronske

piracy is theft

BopNiblets

Elektronske wrote: »

piracy is theft

Elektronske

stealing persons income

solomafioso

Elektronske wrote: »

stealing persons income

Lars Ulrich? Is that you? :pac:

larrymiller

I used it before and the amount of crap that came with it was unreal, slowed down my computer Aswel.
I uninstalled it.
Was I doing something wrong?

yoyo

Remember folks, no linking to torrent site mirrors or advice how to pirate content.

GarIT

BopNiblets wrote: »

If you don't pay the electrician it's theft, it doesn't make him disappear.

Mr. G

larrymiller wrote: »

I used it before and the amount of crap that came with it was unreal, slowed down my computer Aswel.
I uninstalled it.
Was I doing something wrong?

It may have slowed your PC down because you got malware or were seeding the torrent.

If you downloaded copyrighted content that is illegal. If you shared copyrighted content that is illegal.

There are legitimate reasons to use torrents and many people in the IT world do since it can be faster to download open source content for example through torrenting.

CruelCoin

Mr. G wrote: »

Lets face it, people that torrent and find a website blocked by their ISP are well able to google how to get around it. Blocking websites is ineffective, look at China for example.

Isohunt used to be my favourite untill they got shut down by the US supreme court.

It took all of 2 weeks for an almost identical website to spawn, which has now technically surpassed its predecessor, and which will take another 5 years to shut down.

What particularly annoys me is companies like Malwarebytes jumping on the "torrenting is bad m'kay?" bandwagon.
Last night i went to <snip>, only to meet a torrenting is bad pop-up from malwarebytes.

CreepingDeath

As someone once said, if "blacklisting" worked, then we'd have no junk e-mail, all the e-mail spammers would be blocked by now.

The reality is that it's easy and cheap to change domain names/ip addresses etc. So torrent sites can be copied and cloned.

yoyo

Follow up to mod note: Please don't mention proxy/mirror sites either by name or by link.

Maximus Alexander

CreepingDeath wrote: »

As someone once said, if "blacklisting" worked, then we'd have no junk e-mail, all the e-mail spammers would be blocked by now.

The reality is that it's easy and cheap to change domain names/ip addresses etc. So torrent sites can be copied and cloned.

Gmail says hi! I haven't had a spam email come through to my main account in a number of years. Blacklisting does work, if you give someone the power to control it and invest money in it.

That's why it's worrying that governments are starting to allow private entities to choose websites to block. If that trend continues, it could change the internet completely.

CreepingDeath

Maximus Alexander wrote: »

Gmail says hi! I haven't had a spam email come through to my main account in a number of years. Blacklisting does work, if you give someone the power to control it and invest money in it.

Ah, but there's a very clear difference.
GMail junk mail is likely CROWD-sourced, where people click the report spam button and it gets flagged pretty quickly.
Junk mail is something the majority are willing to proactively fight against.

Torrents/torrent sites are something that the majority of torrent users are for.

Although I read an article recently, where an independent company in the US was willing to legally threaten ISP subscribers for something like 10 times the value of the content they downloaded, and they would split the proceeds with the copyright holder. That there is a game changer.
They where scanning the IP's of torrents being downloaded, which is trivial to do, at least for public torrent sites and no VPN.