The Pirate Bay - Blocked in the UK

[Dazz]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17894176

File-sharing site The Pirate Bay must be blocked by UK internet service providers, the High Court has ruled.

The Swedish website hosts links to download mostly-pirated free music and video.

Sky, Everything Everywhere, TalkTalk, O2 and Virgin Media must all prevent their users from accessing the site.

"Sites like The Pirate Bay destroy jobs in the UK and undermine investment in new British artists," the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) said.

The BPI's chief executive Geoff Taylor said: "The High Court has confirmed that The Pirate Bay infringes copyright on a massive scale.

"Its operators line their pockets by commercially exploiting music and other creative works without paying a penny to the people who created them.

"This is wrong - musicians, sound engineers and video editors deserve to be paid for their work just like everyone else."

'Compelling alternatives'
In November 2011, the BPI asked the group of ISPs to voluntarily block access to the site.

The request followed a court order to block Newzbin 2, a site also offering links to download pirated material.

The ISPs said they would not block the site unless a court order was made, as is now the case.

Virgin Media told the BBC they will now comply with the request, but warned such measures are, in the long term, only part of the solution.

"As a responsible ISP, Virgin Media complies with court orders addressed to the company but strongly believes that changing consumer behaviour to tackle copyright infringement also needs compelling legal alternatives, such as our agreement with Spotify, to give consumers access to great content at the right price."

The Pirate Bay was launched in 2003 by a group of friends from Sweden and rapidly became one of the most famous file-sharing sites on the web.

It allows users to search for and access copyrighted content including movies, games and TV shows.

No 'extra pennies'
In April 2009, the Swedish courts found the four founders of the site guilty of helping people circumvent copyright controls.

The ruling was upheld after an appeal in 2010, but the site continues to function.

The Pirate Party UK, a spin-off from the political movement started in Sweden that backs copyright reform, said this latest move will "not put any extra pennies into the pockets of artists".

"Unfortunately, the move to order blocking on The Pirate Bay comes as no surprise," party leader Loz Kaye told the BBC.

"The truth is that we are on a slippery slope towards internet censorship here in the United Kingdom."

I love the fact that courts continue to basically dictate what we can and can't access, and at the same time in doing so look stupid. Nobody still uses The Pirate Bay, do they?
I thought that everybody used private torrent networks...

[NICKtendo DS]

Some providers in my country, the Netherlands, has blocked The Pirate Bay, including the one we have.
My younger brothers both found a way to effortlessly find a way around that system.
I do not endorse the use of illegally obtained material, or theft, and am not a fan of sites like Pirate Bay, but downloading illegal material isn't hard to do nor is it limited to just tPB.

[Joseph Styling]

How ironic.

[Sevenstitch]

"Sites like The Pirate Bay destroy jobs in the UK and undermine investment in new British artists," the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) said.

The British Phonographic Industry? What is this 1902? Made me lol

As for Pirate Bay, I wasn't aware they even existed anymore. I haven't used that site for well over a decade. If anyone really wants to end "Piracy," they might as well block Google. I'm sure that will go over smoothly.

[~Axis~]

If the UK wants to stop piracy, might as well shut down the internet. No matter what website they close down, people will always find a way to get what they want. Why not shut down crack and keygen sites then? However, in the country I live in, Ethiopia, no one really cares what you download or how you download it. As long as you don't (publicly) sell copyrighted matirial, you won't get into any sticky situation.

[puggsoy]

If the UK wants to stop piracy, might as well shut down the internet. No matter what website they close down, people will always find a way to get what they want.

Everyone knows this. The UK is far from trying to stop all piracy ever, they're just handicapping it largely by blocking one of the most popular piracy sites out there. I'll bet that there are people out there who don't know of any other way to download illegal software.

[TGE]

The whole discussion about TPB is just bullshit. Why? What does 1 site with illigal content matter if there are thousands of others. Sure TPB is one of the biggest but there are alot of them like isohunt, btjunkie, torrentz etc etc...
Goverment at times of these especially with the Economic Crisis going on makes up total bullshit. In the Netherlands, almost everyone will be cut short.
Normal people get less money, Rich people get less money and hell, even poorer people get less money because they need to save money. And you know what is the worst? People that give and take away the money from people, get more income. How is that?

[Raz]

It's not so much the fact that they've blocked The Pirate Bay, it's HOW they've blocked it. The assumption was that the block would be DNS based much like the block BT had set up for newzbin, put simply they block the domain name but not the IP Address; This does not appear to be the case though. The simple solution would have been to simply change DNS provider from Virgin Media's own to OpenDNS or Google's DNS and that would effectively bypass the block altogether. That did not happen. The consequence of this is that it means Virgin Media are doing more than DNS filtering and indeed must be doing highly invasive deep packet inspecting in order to filter TPB. Sadly from this deep packet inspection it's only a short ways away from some of the strictest bandwidth shaping that could potentially block all peer2peer traffic, or any traffic VM deems to be too substantial that it's affecting their network.

[~Axis~]

That... SUCKS!
There's no such thing as "fully encrypted" torrent downloads? Right?

[HandToeKnee]

Youtube will be next. You just wait and see

But about piratebay, there's work a rounds already, apparently.

What I mean is you type in a web address and it takes you straight to piratebay. I haven't confired this yet because I'm with SKY and piratebay hasn't been blocked by SKY... yet

[Gaia]

Then Deviantart, due to the TON of copyrighted material on that site.

But all-in-all, I never used it at all because of the malicious software that manages to sneak onto that site every now and then. A friend tried it, only to download a virus and had to rebuild it from the ground up.

However, this piracy paranoia is no diffrent than the illegal drug businesses.... Yet how does THAT fly under the radar and pirates are stopped dead in their tracks?

As long as you don't (publicly) sell copyrighted matirial, you won't get into any sticky situation.

That also includes fangames and games made in illegally obtained program making tools, too.

[DemonicDragon93]

I hope piratebay never goes away. I love that site way to much..

[TGE]

And after that, TSR itself due to "Copyright Infringement.".

[~Axis~]

And after that, TSR itself due to "Copyright Infringement.".

What do you mean...? I don't get it...

[Petie]

It's not so much the fact that they've blocked The Pirate Bay, it's HOW they've blocked it. The assumption was that the block would be DNS based much like the block BT had set up for newzbin, put simply they block the domain name but not the IP Address; This does not appear to be the case though. The simple solution would have been to simply change DNS provider from Virgin Media's own to OpenDNS or Google's DNS and that would effectively bypass the block altogether. That did not happen. The consequence of this is that it means Virgin Media are doing more than DNS filtering and indeed must be doing highly invasive deep packet inspecting in order to filter TPB. Sadly from this deep packet inspection it's only a short ways away from some of the strictest bandwidth shaping that could potentially block all peer2peer traffic, or any traffic VM deems to be too substantial that it's affecting their network.

I think this is probably the single most important thing said in this thread. The site itself is irrelevant but the methods used do not bode well for what may come next.