Pirate Bay create the DDo$ attack.

[weemadando]

Now I won't endorse piracy, but I will endorse creativity and douchebaggery.

Pirate Bay Founder Devises DDo$ Attack

Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm (aka anakata) recieved a bill for the 30 million SEK that he, along with Peter Sunde (aka brokep), Fredrik Neij (aka TiAMO), and Carl Lundstrom, was fined in the verdict of the Pirate Bay trial just over three weeks ago. The bill inspired anakata to devise a plan involving sending money to Danowsky’s law firm, but not to pay the fine of course which they say will never be payed. Anakata’s clever plan is called internet-avgift, internet-fee in English. Anakata encourages all Internet users to pay extremely small sums around 1 SEK (0.13 USD) to Danowsky’s law firm, which represented the music companies at the Pirate Bay trial. The music companies will not benefit from this, instead it will cost them money to handle and process all the money.

The plan can be called a Distributed Denial of Dollars attack (DDo$). The plan is an away-from-keyboard DDoS attack. DDoS attacks involve lots of users overloading the victim with internet traffic damaging their ability to provide services. Money, instead of Internet traffic is used in this case. The victim is Danowsky’s law firm which represented the IFPI at the Pirate Bay trial.

A friend of anakata told Blog Pirate that the bank account to which the payments are directed has only 1000 free transfers, after which any transfers have a surcharge of 2 SEK for the account holder. Any internet-fee payments made after the first 1000, which includes the law firm’s ordinary transfers, will instead of giving 1 SEK, cost 1 SEK to the law firm. Since Danowsky & Partners Advokatbyrå is a small firm, all the transactions are handled by hand. Handling all payments will be time consuming, costing the law firm in productivity. Maybe it will even affect their success in other cases.

Make direct payments to
Danowsky & Partners Advokatbyrå KB. Plusgiro 79 31 21-5.

Additionally if after paying the internet-fee you determine that your payment was erroneous, Swedish law states that you can request the money back, putting an additional load on Danowsky’s law firm.

Since the Pirate Bay crew was provided with such clear, logical, and well explained methods for calculating the damages in the trial, an explanation on how the internet-fee was calculated is provided. Use the formula below, substituting anything anywhere, to check that the internet-fee really is 1 SEK.formel



The name internet-avgift, as well as the layout of the site is based on tv-avgift and they layout of its site. Radiojanst, a state owned company, is responsible for collecting TV license fees in Sweden.

[Darth Hoth]

Later news: The law firm in question has lodged a complaint against them for harassment. Additionally, they have stated that individual "donators" may also suffer prosecution, if they go along with this.

[Darth Holbytlan]

Brilliant. It's not like courts ever get pissed off because someone tried to evade their rulings. I'm sure this won't backfire and result in an additional judgment against them for the time and money spent cleaning up after this attack.

Later news: The law firm in question has lodged a complaint against them for harassment. Additionally, they have stated that individual "donators" may also suffer prosecution, if they go along with this.

Oh yes. I almost forgot about them. Nope, this isn't going to be a royal cluster-fuck at all.

[Keevan_Colton]

Brilliant. It's not like courts ever get pissed off because someone tried to evade their rulings. I'm sure this won't backfire and result in an additional judgment against them for the time and money spent cleaning up after this attack.

Later news: The law firm in question has lodged a complaint against them for harassment. Additionally, they have stated that individual "donators" may also suffer prosecution, if they go along with this.

Oh yes. I almost forgot about them. Nope, this isn't going to be a royal cluster-fuck at all.

Which would cost them more...which is rather the point and would achieve nothing at all for the law firm save more wasted time and money.

[Ryan Thunder]

Cute. Can we hunt them down and publicly humiliate them for contempt of court rulings?

[Pablo Sanchez]

Brilliant. It's not like courts ever get pissed off because someone tried to evade their rulings.

Cute. Can we hunt them down and publicly humiliate them for contempt of court rulings?

Under Swedish law, the jail terms and payment of damages are suspended until after an appeal has been heard, a process that could take several years

They're not evading or showing contempt for anything because the ruling will not even go into effect for several years, and only then if they lose the appeal. Given this, it was pretty stupid and offensive for that law firm to send them a bill for the 30 million kroner. What they're doing is suggesting that their users engage in harassment of the law firm that represented the plaintiffs, which is a new crime that will have to be dealt with separately, in a new proceeding. The penalty in Sweden for nonviolent economic harassment is probably going to be pretty low, like a small fine.

[Edi]

The law firm can bluster all it wants about people being prosecuted, but they'd need to file criminal charges first, then have the police process them, then the prosecutor must judge whether to prosecute or not, serve each individual so charged with the summons to court, then the case must go to trial.

Starting from the Swedish police having a lot of much better things to do, this is NEVER going to happen, because the courts are so shorthanded and overloaded, just like in Finland. Each defendant would also be liable for such a trivial sum that for practical reasons this couldn't be pursued. So this is a foolproof way to get back at them unless something about the money processing procedure changes.

[Ryan Thunder]

Well that's just unacceptable. I can feel their little bitch smugness from all the way over here!

[Beowulf]

Blah blah blah

What's wrong with having the users of the service pay the fine? Sure, it may not be the most efficient way that they doing. In fact it's deliberately as inefficient as possible. But it's being paid. If you brought in a wheelbarrow to pay
a fine with pennies, that would be perfectly legal.

[Covenant]

Can't the law firm simply decline to accept or process those donations, or simply suspend or close that bank account?

It's obviously organized harassment, and I'm sure there could be fines for it, but it's hardly damaging. You shouldn't be offended at the waves of smug--it's not like you should be getting emotionally invested in these court proceedings. Even if you're a member of the most conservative brand of copyright protection thinking, this ruling does literally zilch to address the problem of copyright infringement, and this kind of legal tactic is not going to fix it. So either applaud or decry the objective merit of the ruling, and assume they'll get justice served to them eventually.

[Darth Holbytlan]

Looking closer at this, it looks like the suggestion is just to send money via mail to the lawyers. Dealing with that will be no worse than any other flood of mail, assuming Pirate Bay gets enough participants in the first place. The law firm can either ignore small payments or gather them up and make an agreement with the bank to bulk processes them on the cheap. Requests for refunds due to "erroneous" payments would be pretty clearly fraudulent, so I wouldn't expect those to do any damage.

[Darth Wong]

What if the freeloading users of TPB are true to form, and don't send this money anyway?

[Teebs]

The law firm can bluster all it wants about people being prosecuted, but they'd need to file criminal charges first, then have the police process them, then the prosecutor must judge whether to prosecute or not, serve each individual so charged with the summons to court, then the case must go to trial.

Starting from the Swedish police having a lot of much better things to do, this is NEVER going to happen, because the courts are so shorthanded and overloaded, just like in Finland. Each defendant would also be liable for such a trivial sum that for practical reasons this couldn't be pursued. So this is a foolproof way to get back at them unless something about the money processing procedure changes.

Assuming the Swedish court systems are anything like the UK's (I realise that's not a given) they could presumably do it through civil suits which don't involve the police.

[Edi]

The law firm can bluster all it wants about people being prosecuted, but they'd need to file criminal charges first, then have the police process them, then the prosecutor must judge whether to prosecute or not, serve each individual so charged with the summons to court, then the case must go to trial.

Starting from the Swedish police having a lot of much better things to do, this is NEVER going to happen, because the courts are so shorthanded and overloaded, just like in Finland. Each defendant would also be liable for such a trivial sum that for practical reasons this couldn't be pursued. So this is a foolproof way to get back at them unless something about the money processing procedure changes.

Assuming the Swedish court systems are anything like the UK's (I realise that's not a given) they could presumably do it through civil suits which don't involve the police.

They could, I suppose, but they'd need to get hold of the defendants first and the flood of cases would probably mean they'd get in trouble for frivolous lawsuits.