TorrentFreak

Within days the UK music industry will head back to the High Court with demands that the country’s leading Internet service providers should begin blocking three of the world’s largest torrent sites. Today, the owner of one of them describes the action as an attack on file-sharers and questions whether the process will be as straightforward as the one previously carried out against The Pirate Bay.

In common with many others around the world, the government of Norway see sites like The Pirate Bay as particularly responsible for the growth of file-sharing online but have had little success in stopping their activities. Following failed attempts by rightsholders to have the site censored by ISPs, this month the government will reveal its new proposals to tackle the problem. They are widely expected to include changes to copyright law to allow sites to be blocked, with The Pirate Bay at the top of the list.

A new study released by researchers from Boston’s Northeastern University shows that censoring “pirate” sites by blocking or seizing their domains is ineffective. The researchers looked at the availability of various pirated media on file-hosting sites and found that uploaders post more new content than copyright holders can take down. A better solution, according to the researchers, is to block the money streams that flow to these sites.

TorrentReactor is making a stand against the increasing censorship efforts targeted at BitTorrent sites. Less than two days after an Italian court ordered local ISPs to censor the popular torrent site, they have launched a free proxy to circumvent the blockade. The proxy, operating from the fitting domain “come.in,” works not only with TorrentReactor, but also with The Pirate Bay, KickassTorrents and Torrents.net.

On Sunday, TorrentFreak broke the news that several UK Internet providers were blocking access to The Promo Bay, The Pirate Bay’s perfectly legal promotion platform for independent artists. After a storm of protest the local music industry group BPI has now instructed the ISPs to unblock the site. While the BPI should be applauded for their move, the incident raises the question whether a private industry group should be in control of an Internet blocklist to begin with.

Several UK Internet providers are blocking Pirate Bay’s perfectly legal promotion platform for independent artists. The Promo Bay website is currently being blocked by BT, Virgin Media, BE and possibly several other providers. A plausible explanation is that the Promo Bay domain is listed on the same blocklist that’s used to enforce the Pirate Bay blockade. However. the domain itself has never linked to infringing material, nor is it hosted on The Pirate Bay’s servers.

If a copyright holder has a problem with content hosted on a website they are perfectly entitled to issue a copyright takedown request. Publisher Pearson did just that, after a 279-word list from one of its works dating back to 1974 appeared on an education blog. But rather than speak to the blog owner, Pearson DMCA’d its hosting provider instead. The end result was that hosting provider ServerBeach not only took down that blog, but around 1,450,000 other blogs too.