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High Court: The Pirate Bay must be blocked by UK ISPs

bbc.co.uk

11–20 of 221 posts

Re: High Court: The Pirate Bay must be blocked by UK ISPs

#12

Does anyone know when this comes into effect? Also, does it only affect the ISP's mentioned in the article or ALL ISP's? Guess i'll just have to use a TPB mirror from now on then...

Five ISPs - Sky, Everything Everywhere, TalkTalk, O2 and Virgin Media.

Sixth ISP, British Telecom, has requested a few more weeks to further consider its position and the claimant, BPI has agreed.

However, since these ISP, in particular Virgin Media, cover by far the largest broadband users in the UK, for most intents and purposes this affects the whole UK.

Re: High Court: The Pirate Bay must be blocked by UK ISPs

#13
post #11
post #5

Clearly this will stop piracy.

Probably not, but it will make it more difficult for users that aren't tech-savy. (I know that was sarcasm btw)

I don't believe so. Most people I know use Google for their torrent searches.

Googling "britney spears torrent" is just going to bring up a different torrent site than tpb.

The clear solution is for UK ISPs to ban Google.

Re: High Court: The Pirate Bay must be blocked by UK ISPs

#14
Within minutes of any major ISP implementing a "block" a few thousand people will post on facebook/twitter/blogs and websites links to the plethora of proxies/TOR tunnels/Open DNS settings and VPN's that will instantly negate any ISP level "block" (sarcastic quotes intentional).

This will cost british ISP's hundreds of thousands or millions of pounds to implement and manage, and will at best only delay any would-be knock-off-nigel 30 seconds or so while he learns about proxies et. al. and configures a browser.

Security theatre at its worst...THE EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES!

Re: High Court: The Pirate Bay must be blocked by UK ISPs

#17
The ruling is mostly full of shit:

  Sites like The Pirate Bay destroy jobs in the UK and undermine investment in new British artists
I'd like to see evidence to back this up, innocent until proven guilty and all.

  The Pirate Bay infringes copyright on a massive scale
No, it doesn't. TPB doesn't provide any content at all. Not only that, but it also provides links to non-copyright infringing material. Eg: Some of Nine Inch Nails recent releases have been legally made available over bittorrent in 24/96 high quality.

  Its operators line their pockets by commercially exploiting music and other creative works
According to wikipedia, TPB earnings in 2006 were $102,035.05 US, and expenses in 2009 were $112,590.40 US (couldn't find data for the same year) but they can't be making a huge amount of profit on those margins.

But the thing that really gets me is our government giving itself power to censor the internet.

Re: High Court: The Pirate Bay must be blocked by UK ISPs

#18

Are we trying to emulate China or Iran? Obviously a block like this for any tech-savvy person is absolutely meaningless.

Censorship is a bit like taxation: knowledgeable people will tend to find ways around it, but they are not the majority. As long as the majority complies, the politicians won't be too bothered. Similar with the BPI (and vested interests in the US). All they want to do is weaken file-sharing networks by stopping PCs becoming nodes on them, to remove their critical mass.
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