The release went viral and by now more than 200,000 people have installed the add-on. ICE wasn’t happy with this and asked Mozilla to pull the add-on from their site. However, Mozilla denied the request, arguing that this type of censorship may threaten the open Internet.

Today MAFIAAFire delivers a new release that aims to thwart the increasing censorship efforts in countries worldwide. Named “The Pirate Bay Dancing,” the Firefox add-on undoes local DNS and IP blocks by routing users through a series of randomly picked proxies.

The MAFIAAFire team told TorrentFreak that the development of the plugin was partly motivated by SOPA and PIPA, the pending anti-piracy bills in the US.

“DNS and IP blocking is probably the most dangerous part of SOPA/PIPA in terms of ‘breaking the Internet,’ so we tackled that first. We will be going after the other parts of SOPA in later releases but probably not in ‘our usual plugin form’ – the other parts require different solutions that we have already started work on,” we were told.

Although the add-on carries The Pirate Bay in its name it also works with other sites such as Newsbin2 and BTJunkie which are blocked in the UK and Italy respectively. In a broader sense it can also be used to bypass national “firewalls” such as in China, and soon perhaps the US.

Putting the add-on to work only requires two clicks and is completely free.

After the add-on is installed users can specify the websites for which they want it to work, and these sites then trigger a response from the plugin. If someone from Italy for example chooses to unblock The Pirate Bay, the add-on will save this preference and load the site through a proxy on the next visit.

MAFIAAFire is using thousands of proxies which will be rotated constantly, hence the (dirty) dancing. The current version is fully working but TorrentFreak was told that the functionality will be expanded in future releases.

The MAFIAAFire team told TorrentFreak that they were eager to help The Pirate Bay out, as the site’s operators have been an inspiration to them. The Pirate Bay team on their turn will soon feature the add-on on their homepage.

“Saving TPB was a big deal to us, we love the site and how it has stood the test of time while dozens of others fell, bent over or were run over. The MAFIAA have been trying to take down TPB’s sails for years, country by country, this extends its life a little more to give it smooth sailing,” TorrentFreak was told.

“In the bigger picture, other than the US’ SOPA we also have each country experimenting with its own mini-firewall. This makes all those blocks in all those countries, and all the millions the MAFIAA have spent to get to there, useless,” the MAFIAAFire team added.

While the latest MAFIAAFire add-on shows how easy it is to bypass these censorship attempts, supporters of the measures would argue that it will nonetheless stop the vast majority of casual pirates.

The creators of “The Pirate Bay Dancing” are not ignorant of this, but aside from delivering a working product, one of their main goals is to send a signal that censorship is never the right path to take. Judging from the recognition they’ve received so far, they sure have succeeded on that front.

Source: ‘The Pirate Bay Dancing’ Add-On Killls DNS and IP Blockades

Nevertheless, two of the largest opposition parties in Danish parliament think it is a good idea , despite the ineffectiveness of the block , to streamline the process, making it quicker and easier to do. A proposal (Danish) before the government seems to create a tribunal to handle these cases.

Whereas in the past cases have involved a rights holder suing an ISP and forcing a block through the courts, this proposal creates a tribunal to do it instead. This tribunal will apparently consist of members appointed by government ministers, who will then rule on blocks with no judicial oversight. Any sites blocked would have to go through the courts to appeal and the site would remain blocked unless and until successful.

If that was not bad enough, there is also talk of a secretariat that would handle ‘simple’ cases, so the appointed tribunal would not even have to hear the majority of cases. Cases would be put to the tribunal by copyright holders that feel they have had their rights infringed by the target site. As with the court cases, though, it’s extremely unlikely that the accused site will be invited or even made aware of any such proceedings, and allowed to state their case.

“This is a wet dream for organizations like IFPI,” is the view of Ole Husgaard, chairman of the Danish Pirate Party. “This isn’t even a law proposal, so there is not all the work usually done in our parliament when passing laws; this can be passed in a month or two. If it is, I would guess that we will have at least 2000 sites on the blocking list within 12 months – without a single court case having been decided, if any get started at all.”

He’s not alone in his pessimism. “It’s blatant censorship of course.” is the opinion of The Pirate Bay’s brokep. “It’s not in the interest of the citizens, so I hope the government understands that if they go against the people like that, they should be replaced. It is also not a huge step before they start censoring other stuff – let’s say political parties that have thoughts about changing the current government.”

As analysis of the Pirate Bay block has found it contrary to EU laws, it’s curious as to the motivation behind this proposal. The only rational one would be bribery , either legal or not , and so the question we are forced to ask is, are Danish politicians cheaper to buy than those in New York?

Source: Danish Copyright Censorship Proposal Revealed