The blocks are somewhat effective, at least in preventing subscribers from accessing the domains directly. However, that doesn’t mean that the sites are completely inaccessible.

With every site that is added to the blocklist several reverse proxies are launched. These proxy sites give people access to the blocked sites and effectively bypass the restrictions put in place by the court.

The copyright holders who demanded the blockades are well aware of these workarounds and continue to ask ISPs to expand their blocking efforts.

This weekend the ISPs quietly added several torrent site proxies to their blocklists. TorrentFreak was able to confirm that Virgin Media and Sky are now blocking access to YTS proxy ytsre.come.in as well as the EZTV equivalent on come.in.

Interestingly, the other torrent site proxies, including ones for the Pirate Bay and Kickass, are still accessible.

Whether these measures will be effective has yet to be seen. The Come.in homepage is still accessible and the team behind the site has already replaced the blocked domains with new ones.

“We just set up new proxies and will be watching for any upcoming measures from ISPs,” Come.in’s Nick tells TorrentFreak.

“We monitor such issues on a regular basis. Most of the time we can create new proxies only after current ones are blocked. Come.in visitors should know that we always publish fresh proxy addresses on our homepage,” he adds.

And so the whack-a-mole continues, with copyright holders adding new domains to the blocklists, and site owners hopping from domain to domain.

As with previous additions the newly blocked domains are covered by the High Court order, which provides the movie studios with the option to continually update the list of infringing domains. A Virgin Media spokesperson clarified that no additions are made by the ISP itself.

“We are only blocking those sites we are required to block by the court order,” we were told. “As a responsible ISP, Virgin Media supports the clear, legal framework put in place to protect against copyright infringement and we continue to comply with court orders specifically addressed to the company.”

While the recent additions are permitted under the High Court order, these changes are being made in secret without any form of public oversight, which means that we don’t know precisely how many proxies were added. The full list of blocked domains also remains unknown.

TorrentFreak reached out to both copyright holders and ISPs, but thus far they have refused to make the full scope of their blocking efforts public. It’s unlikely that this will change in the near future.

—

The full list of domains (that we know of) currently blocked in the UK is as follows:

Main sites: Megashare, Viooz, Watch32, Zmovie, Solarmovie, Tubeplus, Primewire, Vodly, Watchfreemovies, Project-Free TV, Yify-Torrents, 1337x, Bitsnoop, Extratorrent, Monova, Torrentcrazy, Torrentdownloads, Torrentreactor, Torrentz, Ambp3, Beemp3, Bomb-mp3, Eemp3world, Filecrop, Filestube, Mp3juices, Mp3lemon, Mp3raid, Mp3skull, Newalbumreleases, Rapidlibrary, EZTV, FirstRowSports, Download4all, Movie2K, KickAssTorrents, Fenopy, H33T and The Pirate Bay.

Proxies: Ytsre.come.in, Eztv.come.in, Fp.kleisauke.nl, Fenopy.5gg.biz, H33tunblock.info, H33t.uk.to, H33tproxy.co, H33tmirror.co, Katunblock.com, Katproxy.com, Kat.dashitz.com, Kat.kleisauke.nl, Katmirror.com, Kat.5gg.biz, Kickassunblock.info, Kickassproxy.info, Pirateproxy.net, Proxybay.net, Malaysiabay.org, Piratereverse.info, Pirateproxy.net, Campeche.zapto.org, Tpb.rubenstadman.com, Piratebay.interflective.com, Dashitz.com, Tpb.evrl.com

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

One of the main topics of discussion was Internet piracy, and how to prevent people from accessing and sharing copyrighted works without permission.

Website blocking is one of the anti-piracy tools that was mentioned frequently . In recent years the UK has become a leader on this front, with the High Court ordering local ISPs to block access to dozens of popular file-sharing sites, including The Pirate Bay and KickassTorrents.

MPAA chief Chris Dodd, who delivered a speech at the Summit, applauded the UK approach. The former U.S. Senator believes that these restrictions are helping to decrease the piracy problem.

“Here in the United Kingdom, the balanced and proportionate use of civil procedures has made tremendous progress in tackling infringing websites. To date, access to over 40 pirate sites focused on infringing copyright for commercial gain, have been blocked,” Dodd said.

According to Dodd these blockades have proven to be one of the most effective anti-piracy measures in the world, made possible by a provision in local copyright law.

“In particular, Section 97A of the Copyright Act allowing courts to issue injunctions against service providers who know their services are being utilized for infringing purposes, has been one of the most effective tools anywhere in the world,” Dodd says.

Despite the MPAA’s faith in website blockades, which is not shared by everyone, the movie group has never attempted to ask a U.S. court for a similar injunction. This is surprising since nearly all the sites that are blocked in the UK have far more users from the United States.

TorrentFreak asked the MPAA to explain this lack of action, but we have yet to hear back from them.

Previously we spoke to an insider who admitted that these type of ISP blockades are harder to get in place under United States law, which is one of the reasons why the copyright holders haven’t tried this yet.

The issue became even more complicated after the copyright holders’ push for SOPA failed early 2012. In part, SOPA was designed to give copyright holders a shortcut to request injunctions against pirate sites.

Putting the law aside, the MPAA has made it clear that it’s keen on maintaining good relationships with the Internet providers. ISPs and copyright holders are taking part in a voluntary agreement to “alert” pirates, which will undoubtedly be harmed if additional blocking demands appear on the table.

For now, it seems that the MPAA and other industry groups will continue to press for more voluntary deals in the U.S. Interestingly, Dodd specifically calls for a cooperation with search engines to indirectly block pirate sites, instead of asking for a more direct blockade from ISPs.

“If we convince these search engines to join our efforts to shut down illegal sites, it would be a significant step forward in our ongoing efforts to protect creators,” he said.

Thus far Google and other search engines have refused to remove pirate sites from their search indexes. Also, one has to wonder how effective that would be. Thus far Google has removed more than two million pages from The Pirate Bay, but the site’s traffic continues to expand regardless.

But then again, even an ISP blockade is easy to circumvent, and perhaps not as effective as the MPAA claims.

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

Without prior warning or official announcement, the country’s Ministry for Culture and Information ordered local ISPs to block access to The Pirate Bay. In addition, several other torrent sites were also censored, including Torrentz.eu and Rarbg.com.

The reason for the blockade remains unknown, but piracy concerns seem plausible as the measures are coming from the Ministry of Culture, and not the Communications Commission which administers the country’s regular filters.

As can be seen below, the blocking notification for The Pirate Bay is also different from the green notice that appears for sites that are blocked in violation of the Islamic religion.

Interestingly, the measures come two months after several copyright holder groups urged the U.S. Government to place Saudi Arabia on its priority watchlist. MPAA, RIAA and others suggested that the country isn’t doing enough to stop online piracy.

The blockade is currently active on nearly all ISPs, but TF has learned that Zain customers can still access the site. Zain does block Pirate Bay’s porn category, but that’s nothing new.

The Pirate Bay is among the 50 most visited websites in Saudi Arabia, and the blockade has caused quite a bit of uproar on social media. The topic is currently trending on Twitter where many people are voicing their frustration.

TPB block trending on Twitter

However, as with all censorship attempts there are plenty of ways to circumvent this blockade. The easiest option at the moment is to simply use the https version of the site. Other workarounds, such as VPNs or Pirate Bay proxies, work fine too.

The Pirate Bay team is not impressed by yet another country blocking access to their website. A few months ago they released Pirate Browser which allows users to access the site without restrictions. It has been downloaded millions of times since.

Update: The Saudi Arabian Ministry of Culture and Information has now confirmed that the blockades are copyright related. 22 domain names have been blocked in total.

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

Opponents of this censorship route often warn that the measures inhibit free speech and risk overblocking. However, music industry group IFPI disagrees, pointing out that the rights of creators to protect their work trump these concerns.

“Despite misrepresentation by some anti-copyright campaigners, courts have consistently found that the blocking of sites providing illegal content achieves an appropriate balance of fundamental rights,” IFPI writes in its latest Digital Music Report.

IFPI points out that the ISP blockades in several European countries are having effect. Drawing on information supplied by data intelligence firms comScore and Nielsen, they report that “BitTorrent usage” decreased 11 percent in countries where pirate sites are censored, while it increased elsewhere.

“Website blocking measures implemented by ISPs have been effective. Between January 2012 and July 2013, European countries where blocking orders are in place saw BitTorrent use decline by 11 per cent, while European countries without such orders saw BitTorrent use increase by 15 per cent.”

The data further shows that this blockade effect is most pronounced in Italy and the UK, where the most torrent sites are blocked. In Italy BitTorrent traffic dropped 13 percent and in the UK the decline was even larger, 20 percent.

The report doesn’t make it clear whether actual BitTorrent traffic was measured, or only page views at popular torrent sites. Regardless, IFPI notes that there’s still plenty of work to be done.

The blockades are currently limited to fixed lines, for example, and should be expanded to mobile networks as well. In addition, IFPI says that the blockades should be expanded to other countries worldwide.

“The industry believes that website blocking is an effective tool to help tackle digital piracy and should be available in more countries worldwide. It also needs to be extended to cover mobile networks,” IFPI reports.

The music industry group doesn’t name any countries, but perhaps they are hinting at the RIAA to push for “voluntary” blockades in the United States. In any case, if it’s up to IFPI the number of ISP blockades around the world will continue to increase.

The results reported by IFPI run contrary to a decision from the Dutch Court of Appeals earlier this year, which concluded that the Pirate Bay blockade was “disproportionate and ineffective.” As a result, Dutch ISPs were allowed to lift the access restrictions.

Photo: Michael Theis

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

This conclusion was in part based on a working paper from researchers at the University of Amsterdam and Tilburg University. After the publication of the paper this week in the Telecommunications Policy journal, TF caught up with the authors to discuss the results as well as the wider topic of Internet censorship.

The researchers are happy with the peer-reviewed publication. It affirms that BREIN’s attempts to defame their work during the court hearing were unfounded. The court already concluded as much, as the findings were at the basis of the ruling to unblock The Pirate Bay.

“Our research, together with research by TNO showed quite indisputably that the measure has little to no effect,” says Joost Poort, lead author of the Baywatch paper.

“We do not want to take sides in the case by calling the decision the right one in a legal sense. However, we are very content with the fact that the effectiveness of blocking access to The Pirate Bay was taken into account in the decision,” he adds.

The Baywatch paper shows that censoring The Pirate Bay had no lasting net impact on the overall number of downloaders from illegal sources in the Netherlands. On the contrary, local piracy rates went up.

According to the researchers the Pirate Bay blockade could be easily circumvented. Thanks to the many readily available proxy sites online, users only had to update their bookmarks to gain access.

“Basically, the required knowledge to circumvent the blocking is no more advanced than the knowledge required to download from illegal sources, and the emergence of new mirror-websites and proxies is something that regulators can hardly keep up with,” Poort tells TF.

Researcher Jeroen van der Ham adds that people could simply move to other torrent sites, or move to other download platforms. They found that, in line with previous research, the initial effect of such anti-piracy measures wears off in about six months, as people turn to alternatives.”

While the researchers focused on the Dutch public they believe that their results should apply elsewhere too. This includes the UK, where numerous file-sharing sites have been blocked in recent years.

“We believe that the results can probably be generalized to any service that has a widespread user-base. Internet users have shown to be very inventive in circumventing blockades, or moving to similar services if that is not possible,” Van Der Ham says.

Censoring websites has no lasting effects on piracy. On the contrary, the researchers say they these measures may reflect negatively on the image of the entertainment industries. At the same time, the blockades threaten the open Internet.

“These measures bear a risk of alienating customers from the content industries and giving them incentives to adopt covert technologies such as dark nets, IP-spoofing and VPN,” Poort tells us.

“The interventions threaten the transparency of the Internet, effectively introducing censorship, Van Der Ham adds.

So how should copyright holders combat piracy? According to the researchers there is some evidence in the literature that harsher punishments and strong enforcement may be effective.

However, this also introduces the risk that customers will become further alienated from the entertainment industries. This could result in more customers going “underground” and consuming even less. Ultimately, the researchers believe that the piracy problem can be best solved by offering superior legal options.

In their Filesharing 2©12 report Poort and colleagues saw a decline in file-sharing for music over recent years, while sharing films and TV series increased. They are currently analyzing this data set to find out whether a change in legal offerings may explain these developments.

“All in all, the best strategy seems to be to arrange reasonably priced, up-to-date and easy-to-use legal supply,” Poort concludes.

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

Filters of most kinds are incredibly blunt instruments that lack the finesse to deal with the complex nature of the online world. Sadly, it didn’t take long for them to live up to that billing.

During the past few months dozens of innocent sites have been blocked – TorrentFreak included – a situation that really hits the credibility of what the government has been trying to achieve.

Blocking entities such as charities and drug advice sites obviously leads to terribly bad publicity, so the government has been looking at ways to deal with the problem. According to the BBC a working group has been looking into accidental blocking with a view to finding a solution. They believe one has been found.

The idea is that some kind of master white-list will be drawn up containing sites that have already been wrongly blocked or might find themselves subjected to wrongful blocking in the future. That list would then be passed around Internet service providers so that filters could be tweaked to avoid the censorship of innocent domains. Charities are involved in the creation of the list so it appears public service sites may be a priority.

Also under discussion is the creation of a mechanism which would allow the owners of regular but wrongly-blocked websites to contact ISPs in order to have their sites added to the white-list.

“There’s a feeling that some sites sit in a gray area and more needs to be done for them,” a spokesman for the Internet Service Providers Association told the BBC.

While it is commendable that the government is looking into the problem of over-blocking, one has to question why the filtering mechanisms being put in place aren’t erring on the side of caution. If some sites are in a “gray area” then they should be given the benefit of the doubt, not found guilty until proven innocent.

If a system can’t tell the difference between a sex education charity and a porn site there must be something seriously wrong. A white-list is probably just a Band-Aid.

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

In 2010 Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN went to court to try and force Ziggo, the Netherlands’ largest ISP, to block The Pirate Bay.

Ziggo were later joined in the case by rival ISP XS4ALL, fighting the action together in the hope of avoiding a damaging precedent.

Initially the court decided that blocking all subscribers went too far but BREIN wasn’t satisfied and took the case to a full trial, which they won. Both Ziggo and XS4ALL filed subsequent appeals, arguing that the blockade was ineffective and denied subscribers’ free access to information.

Today the Court of The Hague released its verdict which sides with the Internet providers.

In its ruling the Court states that the Pirate Bay blockade is disproportionate and ineffective, citing TNO research and the Baywatch report of the University of Amsterdam. As a result, the blockade was found to hinder the Internet providers’ entrepreneurial freedoms.

The court based its decision on the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, which both includes “freedom to conduct a business” and “right to property.” In this case the entrepreneurial freedom outweighs property rights, because the blockades are disproportionate and ineffective.

Based on the above, the appeal court overturned the blocking order and ordered the Hollywood-funded anti-piracy group to pay 326,000 euros ($445,000) in legal fees.

Commenting on the ruling, XS4ALL says that the verdict allows them to keep the Internet free from censorship. The ISP will disable the blockade effective immediately.

“We are very pleased the court’s verdict. This guarantees freedom of access to information. That is good for Dutch citizens, good for the Internet and good for ISPs who can continue to fulfill their important role neutrally,” the company states.

Ziggo is also happy with the outcome of the case and says the court found the right balance. “We’re not a police officer,” spokesman Erik van Doeselaar told Tweakers.

BREIN is disappointed in the court’s decision but noted that it agreed with the anti-piracy group on several issues. The anti-piracy group notes, however, that the court agreed that traffic to The Pirate Bay had reduced, even though BitTorrent usage in The Netherlands didn’t.

“The court’s ruling is detrimental to the development of the legal online market which requires protection against illegal competition,” BREIN director Tim Kuik says in a response.

“The purpose of blocking The Pirate Bay is obviously to reduce copyright infringement via The Pirate Bay. It is paradoxical that although the court finds that this goal is indeed achieved, it rejects the blockade because users are going to other sites,” Kuik adds.

Besides Ziggo and XS4ALL, several other Internet providers were ordered to block The Pirate Bay based on the original ruling. The appeals of these ISPs are still pending, and will be decided on later this year.

Needless to say the verdict is a major win for the Internet providers. Unlike their counterparts in the UK and elsewhere they decided to appeal the case to the bitter end – and won.

Update: added response from BREIN as well as some context.

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

While most of the discussion has focused on porn, Sky’s filter – and those operated by other ISPs – actually block a much wider range of content. Below are the options Sky users are given at the moment, showing that if people want to block porn, they also have to block various other categories.

The 13-years-old-and-over setting is ticked by default, which also includes dating, anonymizers, file-sharing and hacking.

In other words, those customers who don’t opt out from the ‘porn filter’ will also have file-sharing sites and services blocked. A quick round on the internet reveals that this category is rather inclusive, and not limited to ‘pirate sites.’

Among the blocked sites are BitTorrent.com, who work with Madonna and other artists on a regular basis to release free-to-download content. The same is true for other BitTorrent clients including uTorrent, Transmission and Vuze. Tribler, which is developed at Delft University of Technology with EU taxpayer money, is filtered as well.

Websites which offer perfectly legitimate content via P2P downloads are also filtered by Sky’s default settings. This includes VODO, the distribution platform for indie filmmakers, the download page of the Linux-based Fedora, as well as the download portal Linuxtracker.

In addition, several websites that merely write news about file-sharing issues are blocked by the filter too, including TorrentFreak.

According to Sky, the decision to extend the filter beyond porn and other adult content was partly made based on input from subscribers.

“Our customers have told us they want the option to control the content that enters their homes. As part of this, they have also told us what sort of content they would like included in Sky Broadband Shield,” a Sky spokesperson told us.

The provider further points out that account holders have the option to turn the filter off or allow certain sites to be unblocked.

“We know that no single setting will suit everybody, so our product allows customers to make their own decisions about individual websites, overriding the pre-defined categories to unblock a particular site if they wish. This gives any Sky home the ability to fully customise their filters.”

The question is, however, how many people will be familiar with this unblocking option. There is little doubt that the filtered sites will see a drop in visitors, which may become problematic when more and more providers employ similar filters by default.

TorrentFreak spoke with the Open Rights Group (ORG), who have been very critical of the filtering schemes in the UK. According to Executive Director Jim Killock, Sky is not the only problem here, as other UK ISPs employ overbroad blocking schemes, including the older mobile network filters.

“Most of the filters seem to encourage parents to block anything that is related to anonymizers, hacking and filesharing. In short, the filters seem to adopt a strategy of stopping under 18s from learning how to do anything useful with a computer, in case that helps them get round blocks,” Killock says.

ORG stresses that the filters may prevent young people from learning much-needed computer skills, which could eventually hurt the local computer industry.

“It could damage the learning of a generation, and the competitiveness of the UK computer industry. Computer related websites and discussions should always be available to young people as it is part of their right to an education.”

To find out what is being blocked exactly, ORG has been building its own checking tools, as well as a website where false positives can be reported.

Whether anything can be done against the overblocking and false positives that are reported remains to be seen. For now all legitimate file-sharing services and sites remain blocked, including the article you are reading right now.

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

One of those sites is YIFY-Torrents, a particularly popular file-sharing site best known for its compact movie rips. Over the weekend TorrentFreak ran an article on the site which detailed its efforts to beat the censors.

Although we aren’t privy to exactly what was going on behind the scenes at YIFY, we do know that in addition to other tweaks they were experimenting with CloudFlare, a CDN and security company which, according to stats released by the company last year, is used by hundreds of thousands of websites.

What we also learned is that the main ISPs in the UK – BT, SKY, Virgin, TalkTalk etc – are each using their own techniques to try and render torrent sites unavailable to their subscribers. Tricks that worked on one ISP didn’t necessarily produce the same results on another, with YIFY managing to unblock Sky and TalkTalk seemingly quite quickly but with Virgin Media requiring more work.

This is where it gets interesting. By using CloudFlare’s services as a front-end to YIFY’s caching servers alongside other backroom tweaks, YIFY managed to beat the censors to became accessible in the UK over the weekend. But that came at a price.

As revealed by these extended discussions on Reddit and StackOverflow, sometime on Saturday Imgur was rendered inaccessible to all five million users of Sky Broadband in the UK.

There was much speculation, ranging from Imgur somehow ending up on the Internet Watch Foundation’s blocklist to Sky simply being a “terrible” broadband supplier. However, there was a more straightforward but ultimately bewildering explanation.

Sky employs an automated blocking system that polls torrent sites’ DNS records in order to quickly re-block them in the event they switch servers or IP addresses.

“Sky regularly pull IP addresses listed on our DNS servers and adds them to their block list. This block list is then used by an advanced proxy system that redirects any requests to the blacklisted IP addresses to a webserver that the ISP owns which returns a blocked page message,” YIFY explains.

Therefore, when YIFY began using CloudFlare servers in Australia, Sky pulled these IP addresses and blocked them in the mistaken belief that they were YIFY’s. Since Imgur uses the same IP addresses, Sky’s automated blocking took the site offline, to the huge disappointment of countless customers.

Unbelievably this isn’t the first time that Sky’s systems have managed to block entirely innocent sites. Back in August, Sky blocked TorrentFreak.com after EZTV experimented with its DNS settings and just days later it blocked RadioTimes and other sites following a screw-up initiated by the Premier League.

Of course, to some extent this whole blocking problem has been placed in Sky’s lap by the High Court, but by now one would have thought that the ISP would have mastered the process. Allowing their systems to be dictated to by other external systems over which it has no control can never be a good idea.

Sometime yesterday Imgur was eventually unblocked by Sky.

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

The current dispute involves Austrian ISP UPC Telekabel Wien and movie companies Constantin Film Verleih and Wega Filmproduktionsgesellschaft. The film companies complained that the ISP was providing its subscribers with access to Kino.to which enabled them to access their copyrighted material without permission.

Interim injunctions were granted in the movie companies’ favor which required the ISP to block the site. However, the Austrian Supreme Court later issued a request to the Court of Justice to clarify whether a provider that provides Internet access to those using an illegal website were to be regarded as an intermediary, in the same way that the host of an illegal site might.

In his opinion handed down today, Advocate General Pedro Cruz Villalón said that the ISP of a user accessing a website said to be infringing copyright should also be regarded as an intermediary whose services are used by a third party, such as the operator of an infringing website.

This means that the ISP of an infringing site user can be subjected to a blocking injunction, as long as it contain specifics on the technicalities.

“The Advocate General is of the view that it is incompatible with the weighing of the fundamental rights of the parties [freedom of information, freedom to do business, copyright protection] to prohibit an internet service provider generally and without ordering specific measures from allowing its customers to access a particular website that infringes copyright,” the opinion reads.

“However, a specific blocking measure imposed on a provider relating to a specific website is not, in principle, disproportionate only because it entails not inconsiderable costs but can easily be circumvented without any special technical knowledge. It is for the national courts, in the particular case, taking into account all relevant circumstances, to weigh the fundamental rights of the parties against each other and thus strike a fair balance between those fundamental rights,” the adviser notes.

The Advocate General also notes that operators of piracy-related websites and their hosts often base themselves outside Europe or take steps to mask their identities. This, he says, makes it difficult to bring cases before the courts. Nevertheless, whenever possible rightsholders must first issue claims directly against site operators or their providers.

The legal opinion is not legally binding and the Court of Justice is entitled to disregard it, but the Court often follows the AG’s advice in such cases. Deliberations in the Kino.to case are just beginning and a judgment will be handed down at a later date.

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