But of course, as more and more copyrighted files such as music, movies and TV shows have been shared online over the years, rightsholders have employed varying techniques to try and bring that to a halt. Their latest tool is the blocking of entire domains by Internet service providers and thanks to the efforts of the music industry, the UK will today become the world leader.

As predicted by TorrentFreak back in May, the BPI have been building cases against more than 20 sites that they say are infringing their members’ copyrights. Today that work will come to fruition when six ISPs – BT, Sky, Virgin Media, O2, EE and TalkTalk – begin blocking them at the ISP level.

The range is the broadest so far, hitting BitTorrent indexing sites, a torrent meta-search engine, a cyberlocker search engine, and several MP3 search engines/download sites.

Torrent sites: 1337x, BitSnoop, ExtraTorrent, Monova, TorrentCrazy, TorrentDownloads, TorrentHound, Torrentreactor and Torrentz.

Others: Abmp3, BeeMP3, Bomb-MP3, FileCrop, FilesTube, MP3Juices, eMP3World, MP3Lemon, MP3Raid, MP3Skull, NewAlbumReleases and Rapidlibrary.

The list is almost identical to the original list sent by the BPI to record companies earlier in the year, but has a couple of interesting omissions.

Gone from the blocking proposals are music streaming service GrooveShark and music download service Dilandau. The former now holds several music licensing deals while the latter is the third most DMCA’d domain on the Internet according to Google’s Transparency Report. IsoHunt is also absent, having shut down earlier this month.

Speaking with TorrentFreak, the BPI said that over the summer they had contacted all 21 sites with a request that they “stop infringing copyright.”

“Unfortunately they declined to co-operate in any meaningful way, so BPI applied to the High Court, where the judge considered the evidence and decided that the sites should no longer be accessible in the UK. The new blocks will come into force by Wednesday, 30 October 2013,” a spokesman said.

The music industry group, which represents all the major labels, defended its action as both “fair” and “proportionate”.

“All of the sites were given a chance to stop infringing copyright before we went to Court, and the Orders were then only made once a High Court judge had fully considered our detailed evidence,” the BPI said. “We also believe that it is fair that the people who work to create music should be rewarded when it is downloaded, rather than sites overseas that are exploiting this music without permission.”

Interestingly, when conducting a review of the Top 10 Torrent Sites 2013 as published earlier this year, after today none of them will be directly accessible in the UK, either due to BPI blocking or in the case of H33T and isoHunt, being taken offline following legal action.

The BPI told us that they accept that blocking can never be 100% effective, and that is something the team at The Pirate Bay know quite a bit about. Earlier this year they released PirateBrowser, an anti-censorsip tool designed to facilitate access to any blocked site.

PirateBrowser has been downloaded more than a million times and will be in even greater demand after today. TorrentFreak is informed that a fresh update will include bookmarks for all the blocked sites so that users can gain easy access.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Blocked by court orders all over the world, The Pirate Bay is arguably the most censored website on the Internet. The PirateBrowser software allows people to bypass these restrictions, without having to use a proxy site or other circumvention tool.

It appears that the browser idea appeals to a wide audience as the number of downloads have been going through the roof right from the start.

Today, The Pirate Bay team informs TorrentFreak that they just served the 1,000,000th PirateBrowser download from its website.

The million downloads says little about how many people actively use the software, but according to TPB roughly 0.5% of all their visitors now uses the browser. This translates to hundreds of thousands of active users a week, mostly from countries where ISPs are blocking the site.

“I guess that a lot of people want to see the websites their governments and courts are trying to hide from them,” Pirate Bay’s Winston told TorrentFreak commenting on the success.

The browser is based on Firefox 23 bundled with a Tor client and some proxy configurations to speed up page loading. It is meant purely as a tool to circumvent censorship and doesn’t provide any anonymity for its users, as that would slow down the browser.

While the PirateBrowser continues to expand its user base, proxies are still the preferred way to circumvent ISP blockades. Currently 7% of all visits to The Pirate Bay go through dedicated proxy sites, some of which receive millions of visitors per week.

The Pirate Bay team informs TorrentFreak that they will continue to develop the browser. An updated edition with several improvements and Mac and Linux versions of the software are also in the works.

The team are also working on a special BitTorrent-powered application, which lets users store and distribute The Pirate Bay and other websites on their own computers, making it impossible for third parties to block them.

This “p2p browser” should be able to keep The Pirate Bay operational, even if the site itself is pulled offline. There is currently no estimated release date set for this second project, but it will take a few more months of development at minimum.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.