Another investigation into Pirate Bay child porn
PrintMuch ado about nothing?
Posted in Law, 3rd September 2007 14:05 GMT
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Swedish prosecutors have launched another invesigation into suspected child pornography, shared through the controversial bittorrent site The Pirate Bay. However, this time police aren't theatening to blacklist the Swedish website. "The Pirate Bay are not suspects," prosecutor Cathrine Rudström told Swedish newssite The Local. Police have requested logs from The Pirate Bay, including IP addresses.
The moderators of The Pirate Bay were aware of the material for almost two weeks, but decided not to remove it. "I don't give a shit if you folks are upset," moderator Himod said on the site's forum. "Me and the other moderators job are NOT to have an opinion about if it is immoral or not."
The Pirate Bay seems utterly confused about how to deal with child pornography. Its co-founders have repeatedly said that when alerted to child pornography administrators will immediately remove any links to those files, which happened a couple of times. However, at the same time The Pirate Bay boasts a no-censor policy, arguing that it is almost impossible to monitor 600,000 files and that The Pirate Bay is just another search engine, not a file server.
In July the head of the National Criminal Investigation Department's IT crimes unit, Stefan Kronkvist, threatened to blacklist The Pirate Bay after complaints about child porn being traded on the site. But Fredrik Neij, one of the site's founders, said that the police never contacted The Pirate Bay. "The whole idea of police threatening to censor us seems to be moral panic from high up within the ranks of Swedish politics," The Pirate Bay lamented.
This was after a Swedish hosting company owned by Pirate Bay's Fredrik Neij and Gottfried Svartholm Warg, refused to take a web page down which defends paedophilia. Svartholm Warg told Stockholm morning daily Dagens Nyheter that he disagreed strongly with the content in question, but preferred an open debate.
Even more controversial is the recently launched censorship-free image hosting website BayImg. Here, users can assign a 'removal code' to uploaded images, in case they want to delete the files after a while. Pirate Bay also plans a censorship-free video streaming service that will "potentially compete with YouTube".
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