About The Pirate Bay and child porn

[Kasper Hviid]

I was wondering what you people throught about the recent child porn allogations against The Pirate Bay?

Personally I'm pretty pissed at the site. Some things just ticks me off at an unbeliveable degree.

Here is my personal thought and info:

As a response to the allegation, Fredrik Neij, one of the site's owners, said: "During my time here there have been 7-10 cases, and in those we have gone in as soon as possible and removed the files. And we usually get a great many responses from our users if there is any child pornography,"

This is a direct lie!

Until recently, the official policy of The Pirate Bay was this:

"we do not remove _any_ content, what-so-ever, if it is not wrongly labeled. Seriously, NO content will be removed. Whatever it is. Do not even write to us about it."

I contacted them, and asked if this meant that they would not remove child porn from their site. They confirmed: It was not their policy to remove child porn. According to them, removing child porno would be to violate their users "freedom of expression". However, it seem like they have been forced to change their policy. The text now says:

"Seriously, NO legal content will be removed. Whatever it is. Do not even write to us about it."

They were persuaded to change their policy by the swedish police, which very directly explained that they better be deleting some child porn, or their site would be included in their new child porn filter.

Fearing that this would have a negative effect of the sites very nice takings, the owners deleted an unknown number of torrents. The police stated that the child porn had been removed, and that no further actions would be taken.

A blog on The Pirate Bay said this:
"I want to point out that still to this day, the police has not given us one single hint on what content on the site has been containing child porn - and the things we have filtered out has been proven not to be child porn either."

A lot of sites have used this quote to conclude that the child porn allogations were false. But let us take a second look at that sentence. Pay attention to the bold letters:

"I want to point out that still to this day, the police has not given us one single hint on what content on the site has been containing child porn - and THE THINGS WE HAVE FILTERED OUT HAS BEEN PROVEN NOT TO BE CHILD PORN EITHER."

What, pray tell, are the files that The Pirate Bay DID delete, to avoid getting shut down for spreading child porn?

I'm asking you, because The Pirate Bay went awful quiet when asked that very question.

There are still a lot of erotic photos of child models floading on The Pirate Bay. So the deleted content must be something far more nasty than this.


CHILD MODELS

I contacted The Pirate Bay about some torrents featuring "child models". It was photos taken from the following sites:
(The word COW inserted to avoid that the site gets more google hits)

[links removed by moderator]

Peter (brokep@thepiratebay.org) answered:
"this is probably not even child porn, since it's a site rip. probably is art or just models that are young but that doesn't mean it's child porn."

Let us take a look at one of the sites:

First, when a site claims very loudly that its "100 % legal" that its "Not childporn". One cannot help but draw some conclutions. Also, the sites lets you chose between "Join now", "Members area" and "Free Tour". PRECISELY the same choice of words as in any porn site.

And who would pay for 30 days of access to a site with photos of children? It is very hard to find a target group. Except, of course, the pedophiles.

Despite that the sites are porn sites, and that they are using children, they are not "child porn" in the legal term. By claiming to be an "art site" or a "model site", a lot of child porn websites manages to escape the law. There is nothing surprising in this. But it is surprising that The Pirate Bay openly use the exact same excuse for hosting the shit.

There is something very wrong, when parents wants to make money on letting their children be photographed for a pedo site. It's no surprise that many of the "models" on sites like this have a tendency to reappear in hardcore child porn.

Legal or not, this shit is simply wrong. Legal or not, The Pirate Bay could still chose not to host it.


I know that The Pirate Bay is branded in a extreme degree that companies like Microsoft and Coca Cola wouldn't even dare to dream of. For this reason, the majority of the sites users are unable to cope with the fact that it is just a very rich firm with some real shitty ethics.

Running a site like thepiratebay.org are very cheap, since it is the users who are providing the actual content, not the site itself. A torrent file only takes up about 15 kb. The commercials you see before reaching the torrent takes up twice as much space. With several millions of users, this gives a really nice income. To this you should add that The Pirate Bay also accepts donations to "keep the site runnning".

Basic psychology: if I owned a site which brought in shitloads of money with no operation cost, (since it was the users themself which did the work) I would only dare to accept donations if I considered my users to be some fucking retards.