Instead they decided to target ISPs, companies that are responsive to legal threats in most corners of the world. In time, court orders rendered The Pirate Bay and similar sites blocked, but not for long. Proxy sites enabling access to the world’s largest torrent indexes soon began to thrive, but their time would also come.

The biggest proxy battle anywhere on the planet is taking place in the UK, a country where it’s become almost a formality to have sites blocked at the ISP level. Today we can report that yet another silent round of blockades are being put in place.

One of the main targets is PirateProxy, an extremely popular proxy service that’s particularly well known in the UK. The site was previously accessible at PirateProxy.net but moved to a new domain earlier in the year after its domain was blocked.

The site switched to PirateProxy.in during April and successfully maintained its traffic. As can be seen from the Alexa chart below, PirateProxy is the 125th most popular domain in the entire country, an impressive feat for a site that offers nothing but a Pirate Bay block workaround.

Notable too is the site’s placing in Ireland, where The Pirate Bay is also blocked by ISPs. As of this morning PirateProxy was the country’s 131st most-popular domain.

However, visitors to the site through the major UK ISPs are now beginning to see the familiar “domain blocked” message. The example from Virgin Media, which confirms the existence of a court order, is shown below.

Also under attack are the various proxy services available through Come.in, a portal which facilitates access to a wide range of torrent and other similar sites blocked by numerous European ISPs.

In addition to sundry others, at the moment the site’s PirateBay, KickassTorrents, ExtraTorrent, YTS/YIFY, TorrentReactor, BitSnoop and 1337x proxies are being subjected to UK blockades.

This is the second time this year that multiple Come.in proxies have been targeted by rightsholders. Back in June its EZTV and YTS proxies were blocked in the UK but were re-established by the site’s operators who vowed to keep putting up new services to maintain service.

While blocking proxies continues to be a key weapon of choice, proxies with UK-based operators have greater concerns. As reported in August, City of London police’s PIPCU unit arrested the operator of Immunicity and several other proxies.

According to a police response to a Freedom of Information request obtained by TorrentFreak, he now stands accused of a wide range of crimes including breaches of the Serious Crime Act 2007, Possession of Articles for Use in Fraud, Making or Supplying Articles for use in Frauds and money laundering.

While plenty of proxies still exist (including several which rotate at the bottom of The Pirate Bay homepage under ‘proxy’), others aren’t doing so well.

Visitors to sites including TorrentProxies, Torrenticity, FenopyReverse, FirstRowProxy, GetPirate, H33tUnblock, KatProxy, LivePirate, Metricity, ProxyCentral, KickassUnblock and YifyProxy are greeted with a message from PIPCU that the domains are under police investigation.

Finally, and despite efforts by the BBC to have all VPN users labeled as pirates, use of such services to evade blockades and enable geo-unblocking continues.

The BPI, PirateProxy and Come.in were not immediately available for comments but we’ll update this report when they arrive.

Update: The operator of PirateProxy informs us that a new domain is up and operational at PirateProxy.bz

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

These court-ordered blockades requested by the music and movie industries are becoming widespread, but even more common are tools to circumvent them.

One of the most straightforward and popular ways to unblock a site is by using a reverse proxy. There are dozens of them online and they are as easy to use as a regular website. So what makes these sites tick and what motivates their operators to keep them online?

TorrentFreak caught up with dhxr, an operator of PirateReverse.info, one of the largest torrent site proxies.

Censorship – necessary evil or something to be fought against?

“Personally I am against censorship at all levels bar extremities. Essentially there should be no censorship of the internet except for content such as child pornography. These views extend to mediums such as books and other publications,” dhxr explains.

“In the UK the IWF maintains a list of such content that has been blocked for a number of years – but as with every other instance this can be abused and used to block content on political or copyright grounds.”

Dhxr notes that in some cases censorship is acceptable, at work for example when you’re there to a job and not sit around on Facebook all day. But when we get home and are paying for what is now becoming a limited service, things change.

“One might say the definition of being able to access the internet is having the ability to at least connect to all 4,294,967,296 IPv4 addresses and 3.4*10^38 IPv6 addresses if your ISP provides IPv6,” he says.

As each week goes on, however, it’s clear that’s not what we’re getting.

What motivates to create and keep anti-circumvention tools online?

“For me, it was the realization that censorship of this level is wrong and cannot be tolerated. Why should we have some corporate interests govern what we can and cannot see?

“Unfortunately that is the way it is going – because fundamentally it is all about money, despite the many studies that claim blocking sites has little to no effect on record label and film company profits.

“I think most people who run proxy sites also share this realization and wish to help the effort. There can never be too many proxy sites,” dhxr observes.

Why are proxies and reverse proxies so important?

“Proxy sites are important because they are the easiest to use. There is no setting anything up for the user, just type in a URL and see the site you’re used to seeing. Their place in online society has only been formed out of necessity. If no torrent sites were blocked, then little to no torrent site proxies would exist. As it happens, with censorship rife in many countries, the need for accessible proxy sites is ever increasing, and with the more sites being blocked around the world, demand will continue to increase,” dhxr predicts.

Reverse proxies – how do they work?

“The term ‘reverse proxy’ relates to how the servers are configured. Typically a ‘forward proxy’ takes requests from clients (such as a web browser), fetches the content, and sends it back,” dhxr explains.

“An example of this is Immunicity. By requesting and relaying the content from an unblocked server, it allows unrestricted access to specific resources. On the other hand, a ‘reverse proxy’ does the same but rather than being setup in a web browser as a proxy, it is setup as a website, so all the user needs to do is type in a URL and the server requests content from the original site, then sends it back to the user.”

Maintaining a reverse proxy

“Daily maintenance is slim, it consists of checking everything is working as intended. Most other system admin tasks are automated. We don’t log so this removes a large maintenance hurdle of rotating the logs and managing disk space. We cache responses in memory because it’s faster than writing to disk, which is an important part of the process because without it, the proxies would be slow,” dhxr reveals.

Overcoming challenges

“As part of our almost daily routine, I check TorrentFreak and see if blocks against any new sites have been announced. Typically I like to get the domains sorted as soon as the sites are mentioned as candidates to be blocked, then I can get to work proxying them and ensuring they work fine, well ahead of when the blocks are due to be implemented. This can sometimes be challenging because from a technical level every site is different,” dhxr notes.

Interestingly there is one particular site that causes more problems than most.

“We don’t really know why, but Kickass’ servers compress all their content and you can’t ask for it uncompressed like most sites. This makes it very difficult, as many other proxy operators have experienced, to rewrite Kickass’ URLs so images and CSS load from an unblocked domain,” dhxr explains.

“At first we wrote a script that would manually ungzip content but it was slow and inefficient. Now, after much research and testing, we use Apache inbetween our web-facing servers and Kickass, which is configured to decompress content ready for the URLs to be rewritten so the site loads as the user would expect.”

Hardware – the thirst for more power

Initially PirateReverse used a small VPS server located inside the UK but that was soon moved to Sweden where it operated for several months. But due to an increase in demand, an upgrade was in order. Dhxr told us that two additional servers were obtained in Spain and the Isle of Man but a 16Gbps DDoS attack caused the site’s host to lose patience with the service.

“We took this opportunity to move onto our own dedicated hardware, which is what we’re still using today as it provides more than enough capacity which helps ensure our proxies are always fast regardless of how many people are using them. We currently have two web servers, each configured in parallel. There are other servers behind the scenes too that help keep everything running smoothly,” we were told.

PirateReverse are connected with the Immunicity unblocking service, so even more hardware is needed there.

“We have a few servers running the Immunicity website, the load balancer and configuration broker. Then we have two gateway servers, currently running in parallel.

“We have hardware pending installation, which when configured will replace the existing gateways. These new servers are more powerful and will keep Immunicity running for the foreseeable future at least, with 16GB RAM, 2TB HDD and 3.4GHz Intel Xeon E3 processors each,” dxhr reveals.

Looking to the future

Finally, what happens next month and next year? Dxhr says he’s not optimistic and fears for the health of the Internet.

“What was once thought to be open, has slowly started to become compromised by corporate interests. It is hard to predict specifically what will happen, but I think encryption will become a key element in what we do online in future,” he predicts.

“As for proxy sites, they can easily be blocked, and they are. Many of our domains for example are now blocked by UK ISPs. Whatever happens though, there will always be technical ways to circumvent censorship – success of these methods can often be down to the complexity, and the laws surrounding their use,” dxhr concludes.

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

In the past sites such as The Pirate Bay, KickAssTorrents (KAT), H33T and Fenopy have been blocked by court action, but the list this time is particularly ambitious.

A total of 25 sites are listed including some of the world’s largest torrents sites – 1337x, Bitsnoop, ExtraTorrent, isoHunt, Monova, TorrentCrazy, TorrentDownloads, TorrentHound, TorrentReactor and Torrentz. In fact, if the current action comes to fruition, only one of the current top 10 torrent sites will remain unblocked in the UK.

However, in the torrent scene news travels very quickly indeed and if there is one thing users hate more than a badly-seeded torrent, it’s censorship, and the signs are that the proposed blocks will be met head on with potent circumvention tools.

PirateProxy.net is the world’s largest Pirate Bay proxy site whose growth has been nothing short of phenomenal. From a standing start in the second quarter of 2012 the site has achieved amazing things. According to Alexa, PirateProxy is the UK’s 137th most popular site, just ahead of its Netherlands ranking of 145th. To give an idea of scale, PirateProxy’s traffic can be compared with that currently achieved by Kim Dotcom’s Mega.co.nz.

“Once I read that TF article, I started configuring and testing new proxies sites for Torrentz, Isohunt and Extratorrent,” the admin of PirateProxy told TorrentFreak.

“I have already created proxy sites for other blocked torrent sites such as KAT, Fenopy and H33T. Katproxy.com has become really popular in the UK recently too and i’m hoping to add these proxy sites to a new section on proxybay.info.”

As noted in our previous article, the world’s second most popular Pirate Bay proxy is PirateReverse.info. An admin there say they’re also well prepared.

“At the moment we’re looking to proxy all the torrent sites that were mentioned and we’ve already acquired such domains,” TorrentFreak was informed. “We’re always willing to invest in the proxies we provide to make them as fast and accessible as possible, and we’re planning some hardware upgrades shortly.”

However, in addition to the torrent sites the BPI list also contains other domains related to file-hosting searches (FilesTube, Filecrop) and MP3 sites (Grooveshark, MP3Skull, BeeMP3 etc). Early signs suggest that these aren’t the main priority of proxy providers since they are more difficult to set up.

“It would be particularly difficult to proxy the file sharing sites however, because of all the protection they use to stop people hot-linking the downloads, same goes for Grooveshark and the MP3 services,” PirateReverse explain.

“We will be looking into it, but for the moment the torrent sites are our priority. They will all be listed on torrentproxies.com when available, which we’re working to make the number one hub for torrent site proxies.”

PirateProxy’s admin says that any non-torrent site proxies will be driven by demand.

“I set up Proxybay.info a while back to collect good working proxies for The Pirate Bay. I am planning on doing a re-design that will allow proxies of other sites to be included as well. Currently, I am only planning on unblocking popular torrent sites, however, I may move onto other types of sites if there is enough demand.”

While both sets of proxy admins work separately, they share the belief that censorship is not only ineffective but also counterproductive.

“The current censorship regime in the UK just shows how technology is always a few steps ahead of government. They will catch up eventually, but by that time, we will find other ways to circumvent these blocks,” says PirateProxy’s admin.

“We think the way to combat piracy is to offer simple to access and good value alternatives. At the moment it is genuinely easier to torrent a movie or album than to buy it DRM free and keep forever online. Censorship will never work in this case,” says PirateReverse.

“However, our concerns lie that in the future we, the proxy operators, may be targeted. It is easier for us to move around into different IP spaces but it will be a tiresome and expensive game of whack-a-mole. In the long-term though, we think it will prove that censorship doesn’t work. Perhaps we will see the ISPs put up more of a fight – it costs them money to implement the blocks.”

PirateProxy’s admin says that there is a message to be sent – and hopefully plenty of determination to send it.

“Looking at the bigger picture, I hope these proxy sites can send a message that censorship on the Internet is pointless and counter-productive. I will continue to run these proxy sites until these sites are unblocked and accessible everywhere,” he concludes.

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

Thus far the blockades haven’t been very effective. Instead, they caused a traffic shift from the main Pirate Bay site to the many proxies or other torrent sites out there.

In an attempt to turn things around, local anti-piracy group BREIN has been going after Dutch proxy-site owners. While their efforts were successful against many sites, including one run by the local Pirate Party, not every approach has run smoothly.

Tristan, the owner of several proxies including Kuiken.co, refused to give in despite two preliminary injunctions and a pending court case.

Turning up the pressure, BREIN has now seized the bank account of the proxy site operator, which he discovered yesterday when checking his balance. Because Tristan wasn’t informed about the seizure he decided to contact his bank, who replied with the following message:

“A bailiff has seized your bank account. As a result the funds in your bank account are currently unavailable, until we receive instructions from the bailiff on how to proceed.”

After requesting more information the bank informed Tristan that his funds had been seized on behalf of BREIN.

The anti-piracy group confirmed the seizure today and told Tweakers that it relates to penalties connected to the preliminary injunctions handed down earlier. Since Tristan kept the site online and refused to pay the penalties, BREIN has now come to collect.

But that’s not the end of the matter.

Later this month BREIN and Tristan will go to trial. BREIN wants the proxy operator to shut down his site Kuiken.co. In addition, they want the court to prevent him from linking to other proxies or encouraging the public to access The Pirate Bay in any other way.

In February, Tristan started a crowdfunding campaign to pay for his legal costs, and he has since raised more than 7,500 euros. The campaign ends in four days and it’s unsure whether any of the defense fund money has been caught up in the seizure.

TorrentFreak asked both BREIN and Tristan for a comment on the recent developments but we have yet to receive a response.

Update: BREIN has posted a statement on its website explaining that in addition to the Dutch bank account Tristan’s Paypal assets have also been seized.

Update: Tristan explains that the Paypal issue means that he doesn’t have acces to his legal funds. He believes BREIN is actively obstructing his legal defense.

“The fact that they want to get their hands on the money for my defense makes clear that they don’t want me to defend myself. For the very same reason they probably didn’t send me the amended complaint about the court case which starts at June 5,” Tristan told TorrentFreak.

“This latest move and the fact that they chose for ex parte procedures in the past makes quite clear they don’t want the judge to hear me. You might call it obstruction,” he adds.

“Unfortunately my Indiegogo campaign doesn’t function at this moment, because of the problems with my PayPal account. People can send donations directly to my lawyer. (Account name: Wisemen B.V. IBAN: NL78 ABNA 0422 3081 53 Subject: Verdediging Tristan Pol.)”

Update: Apparently Tristan can still withdraw funds from his Paypal account.

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

The blockades were ordered by the High Court last month and require BT, Sky, Virgin Media, O2, EE and TalkTalk to block subscriber access to KickassTorrents, Fenopy and H33T. Previously a similar order took down The Pirate Bay in most of the UK.

The music industry had asked for these blockades hoping to make it harder for people to access pirated music. To a certain degree this may be working, but large groups of people are bypassing the court orders by switching to proxy sites.

As soon as the ISPs put up their filters people searched for alternative ways to access their beloved torrent sites. The graph below shows the Google search trend for the term “KickassTorrents proxy,” which surged on Thursday.

This increased demand led to a huge surge in traffic to several dedicated proxy sites, some of which had barely launched. Sites such as Kickassunblock.com, Kickassproxy and Katproxy have welcomed many new visitors over the past few days.

Most interest goes out to KickassTorrents proxies, which is not surprising. After the Pirate Bay was blocked last year Kat.ph became the most popular torrent site in the UK, earning a spot among the 50 most-visited websites in the region.

H33T and Fenopy have a smaller audience but are also catered for by dedicated proxy sites. H33T remains accessible in the UK through H33tunblock and H33t.uk.to among others, and Fenopy also has several dedicated proxies including Fenopyproxy and Unblockfenopy.

The above shows that for every website that’s blocked, many new ones are likely to appear. Those who really want to download torrents will find a way to access KickassTorrents, H33T, Fenopy, or one of the many alternative torrent sites still available.

The notion that the blockades may do little to prevent existing users from using BitTorrent was previously highlighted by several Dutch and UK Internet providers. These ISPs claimed that BitTorrent traffic didn’t decline after the blockades against The Pirate Bay were implemented.

That said, the blockades may put off people who are new to BitTorrent, or those who stumble upon the blocked sites through search engines.

And so the Whac-A-Mole game continues…

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

In the Netherlands and several other countries these blockades are supposed prevent the majority of the public from accessing the infamous BitTorrent site.

However, thus far the blockades haven’t been very effective. Instead, they caused a traffic shift from the main Pirate Bay site to the many proxies out there.

These proxies render the court orders useless.

In an attempt to take these proxies offline, Hollywood backed anti-piracy group BREIN asked the court to declare them unlawful. Over the past month the group obtained injunctions against several proxy sites, and have used these to convince dozens of others to shut down.

Facing thousands of euros in penalties most Dutch proxy owners, including the local Pirate Party, were quick to throw in the towel. But not all have done so. Tristan, the owner of several proxies including Kuiken.co sails on for now, despite two preliminary injunctions.

“I ran a proxy long before BREIN got the court rulings against the major ISPs,” Tristan tells TorrentFreak. However, when the court order was handed down BREIN wanted Tristan to stop.

“After the court order they started to harass me with their minor successes in censoring the Dutch Internet. They wanted me to cooperate since they had some court rulings in their favor.”

These demands were soon followed by an ex-parte injunction against the operator, who has now been sued as he continues to allow people to bypass the ISP blockades.

In their complaint BREIN wants the proxy operator to shut down his site Kuiken.co. In addition, they want the court to prevent him from linking to other proxies or encouraging the public to access The Pirate Bay in any other way.

The anti-piracy group argues that The Pirate Bay is willingly facilitating copyright infringement, and profiting from it. Since the Kuiken.co proxy is a one-on-one copy of The Pirate Bay is has to be stopped as well.

On the other hand, Tristan believes that access to information should be free. He is therefore prepared to go to court and has launched a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo to support this effort.

“In the short run I hope to win this court case since it could create a precedent for similar sites, and defend people’s right to access information. It would most definitely prevent further censorship by private organizations,” Tristan tells us.

“I won’t step back for copyright monopolies who want to stay in the stone age forever, as long as it’s good for them. I believe we have the right to protect ourselves against tyranny, and as a pacifist information is my weapon of choice,” he adds.

Thus far the campaign has already raised nearly 5,000 euros thanks to a feature on the popular Dutch blog Geenstijl. This should be nearly enough to start building a defense, but more donations are welcomed by the proxy owner.

Tristan has chosen lawyer Mark Krul of Wisemen Solicitors to represent him in court. Krul is also working on the appeal of the Dutch Pirate Party, who were previously ordered to stop hosting or linking to Pirate Bay proxies.

Thus far the Dutch courts haven’t been very receptive of the arguments of those who say the Pirate Bay should remain accessible, but that won’t prevent Tristan from fighting.

“We shouldn’t condone censorship in any way. In the long run I hope we will have real freedom of communication,” Tristan says.

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

Music industry group BPI threatened legal action against six members of the party, who would each have to risk bankruptcy to fight for their ideals. Understandably, the party chose to fight another day.

The BPI claimed that justice has been served, but a few days later they can put the Champagne back in the fridge.

Pirate parties in Argentina and Luxembourg have been closely following their colleagues in the UK and as result have decided to spring into action. The parties have now started their own Pirate Bay proxies (ARG / LUX), sending a clear message to the copyright lobby.

“Due to pressure from lobbyists, politicians all over Europe are incited to expand the censorship infrastructure to prevent freedom of expression, the right to information and the free exchange of culture. With our proxy, we help to circumvent the Internet censorship of European countries,” Luxembourg Pirate Party President Sven Clement says.

The Argentinian Pirate Party is sending a similar message, and invites those who can’t access The Pirate Bay due to blockades to use their proxy.

“We wish the UK Pirate Party best of luck in their continued fight for free access to culture and knowledge. We have put up our own Pirate Bay proxy which is accessible from anywhere in the world, including the UK and other places where it has been censored.”

The above shows that for every proxy site that’s taken down, one or more new ones are likely to appear. It’s a game of whack-a-mole that will be very difficult for the copyright lobby to win.

Those who really want to download torrents will find a way to access The Pirate Bay or one of the many alternatives. Presently there are hundreds of active Pirate Bay proxies.

As John Gilmore once said: “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

Proof of the ineffectiveness of Pirate Bay blockades was previously highlighted by several Dutch and UK Internet providers, who claimed that BitTorrent traffic didn’t decline after the blockades were implemented.

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

In a matter of weeks the proxy became one of the most popular sites in the UK, and at the time of writing it’s listed among the 150 most-visited websites in the region.

The music industry, which fought an expensive legal battle to have the blockade put in place, is understandably frustrated with the Pirate Party’s service. Last week the BPI took action and asked the UK Pirate Party to take its proxy service offline.

No “threats” were made at the time, but this changed when the Pirates indicated that the proxy would remain available.

A music industry source told TorrentFreak that the BPI intends to follow-up their request with legal action, and just before the weekend the Pirate Party received word that they would be hearing from BPI’s lawyers.

“Geoff Taylor of the BPI has written to me to say we should expect a letter from their solicitors,” UK Pirate Party leader Loz Kaye told TorrentFreak.

Thus far, however, the Pirates have yet to receive the legal paperwork.

“As of Saturday, if paperwork has been filed then we are unaware of it. If the BPI choose to file a lawsuit then we will deal with that as we become aware of it. We would have thought they would have preferred to talk to us first, but it is their choice as to what they do,” Kaye says.

The threat of legal action is very real and could turn into a financial disaster, but the UK Pirate Party will do everything in its power to keep the proxy online. According to Kaye it is by no means clear that allowing access to The Pirate Bay is against the law.

“Obviously our position is clear, we have done nothing wrong, we oppose site blocking and think that the whole area is one that requires clarification through legislation. After all the Pirate Bay is not blocked by all ISPs, it is available via any number of services and we were running our proxy before it became blocked in the UK,” Kaye says.

In addition, the party highlights the collateral damage of these blocks, as we saw with the Promo Bay last week.

“Blocks now seem to have been used against services like Promo Bay, with the BPI being given significant power on deciding what they think should and shouldn’t be blocked. I would add that up until last week we had not been contacted by any party to ask us to take it down.”

While the Pirate Party may have the spirit to fight, it doesn’t quite have sufficient funds to do so. The Pirates don’t have the financial support of the major music labels, like the BPI, but rely on contributions from the public instead.

If this becomes a financial arms race, The Pirate Party is poised to lose and they are currently running a fundraiser to prevent this from happening.

Despite being up against a billion pound industry, Pirate Party leader Loz Kays says he and his fellow members will fight for their principles.

“It is clear that we are facing a significant threat, and we will have to fight it. And fight it well, not just for the sake of the Pirate Party, but because of the principles at stake. I have always believed that it is not just enough to have principles, you need to act on them too, even if it gets difficult.”

“I joined the Pirate Party because I passionately believe these are political issues. For every new person who starts to ask questions about digital rights, that’s a win. For every new person who stands up and gets involved, that’s a victory,” Kaye concludes.

Previously copyright holders successfully took the proxy site of the Dutch Pirate Party offline. The court forbid the Pirates from hosting or even linking to Pirate Bay proxies. The Dutch Pirate Party announced that they would appeal the verdict, but are still collecting funds to do so.

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

For millions of UK Internet users the service provided a much-needed lifeline for them to quickly and easily regain access to The Pirate Bay. As a result the Pirate Party’s website became one of the most popular sites in the whole of the UK.

During May, Google received more than 99,000 takedown notices against the proxy but as time passed the UK recording industry, led by the BPI, looked for a more comprehensive and sweeping solution.

Yesterday, TorrentFreak received a tip that the BPI would issue the Pirate Party with a demand to shut down their Pirate Bay proxy service.

Sure enough, an hour later a report appeared in MusicWeek and then a little later on the BBC, quoting from a letter apparently sent by the BPI’s Geoff Taylor to Pirate Party leader Loz Kaye.

Referencing the Party’s pro-freedom stance, Taylor apparently told Kaye, “Freedom of expression is not an absolute right. It comes with a duty to respect the rights of others, including those whose talent, hard work and investment help to create music and other entertainment.”

Speaking with TorrentFreak, Kaye says that while he has received an email from the BPI, he is yet to receive any letter.

“The first I was aware that such a letter had been sent was when I received requests for comment from journalists. The BPI have laid out their position and asked for our response, we intend to respond by the 6th of December,” Kaye explained.

However, Kaye did confirm that the BPI has indeed requested that the Pirate Party take down their Pirate Bay proxy service which has been in place since April.

“As we said in May 2012, we provided the proxy (tpb.pirateparty.org.uk) as a tool for users on networks where the Pirate Bay is blocked through filtering, and in support of our sister party in the Netherlands,” Kaye explains.

Kaye says the proxy service continues to be a “legitimate route” to The Pirate Bay for those affected by court orders issued to some, but not all, ISPs in the UK.

“While some providers continue to allow access to the web in an unfiltered manner, others are limiting access to specific parts of the internet,” Kaye explained.

The fight for free access to information clearly goes to the very heart of the Pirate movement, so just how important is the anti-censorship battle in the UK?

“The battle against censorship and indeed the use of site blocking to deal with issues like copyright infringement is disproportionate and not productive. Issues like these are at the core of why we exist and why we want to change the current system and stand up for internet users,” Kaye told TorrentFreak.

“Equally, last year the British government said it was not planning to implement the parts of the Digital Economy Act to do with site blocking. This was widely interpreted as that the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition was against site blocking. But we have still ended up with sites being taken down. It’s time once and for all that the UK government makes its view clear on this issue.”

But when it comes down to the basics, just how far are the UK Pirate Party prepared to go? We asked Kaye, presuming the currently polite request from the BPI has a legal threat behind it, whether the Party would go all the way to the High Court if necessary.

“At this point, all I have is an email from the BPI with a request. We are not aware of any legal action being taken by anyone against us. We will of course stick to our principles,” Kaye concludes.

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

But while some may find it entertaining to watch government and corporate websites collapse under the onslaught of tens of thousands of angry LOICs, this is a knife that cuts both ways and increasingly torrent sites are at the sharp end.

Suffering more than its fair share of attacks is The Pirate Bay. In mid-May the site collapsed under a huge denial of service assault after it (maybe coincidentally) criticized elements of the ‘Anonymous’ collective for carrying out a DDoS attack on Virgin Media, the first local ISP to follow court orders and block access to The Pirate Bay.

But while Virgin was DDoS’d for blocking access to The Pirate Bay, it is now the turn of the UK Pirate Party to pay the price for facilitating access to the infamous torrent site.

Although it is favored by UK citizens looking to circumvent the local ISP blockade against TPB, the reverse proxy operated by PPUK is used by people all over the world. But since Wednesday the site has been largely unavailable.

“We were hit by a DDoS at about 22:00 on the 29th,” PPUK’s Harry Percival told TorrentFreak.

The proxy had been hit before but this time things were different. Previous attacks were directed towards the site’s main IP but this time the target was PPUK’s main hostname. PPUK were in the middle of a new project when the attackers struck.

“We had been testing geographically aware DNS as part of an on going project, and have
different IPs for the UK and worldwide,” Percival explained.

However, due to the attack PPUK’s upstream provider blocked several of the IP addresses being utilized by the proxy. Yesterday all IPv4 addresses were blocked but now service is being restored and the site is returning to normal. IPv6 addresses remained online throughout and were not affected by the DDoS.

The Pirate Party informs TorrentFreak they are working with their provider to mitigate the issue and are also looking into advanced anti-DDoS technology to fight any future attacks.

After they launched the Pirate Bay proxy service the PPUK website was shot into the big time. In early May the site was ranked outside the top 100,000 most-visted websites in the UK. Three weeks into that same month Alexa listed it as the UK’s 1,550th most popular website.

Today their popularity sits at an all-time high. According to Alexa, pirateparty.org.uk is now the UK’s 255th most popular web location.

Separately, although of course there is the possibility that they are connected, The Pirate Bay has been battling a DDoS of their own this week. A site insider informs TorrentFreak that they have upgraded their pipes and can now easily fend off the attack.

In late July, Demonoid famously suffered a crippling DDoS attack, one that preceded its total shutdown. No one knows for sure if the events are connected, but fingers have been pointed at variety of suspects from the international music industry to the Russian mafia.

You can check if the Pirate Party Pirate Bay Proxy is back online for you by clicking here.

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