2:06 AM
cyber
The UK High Court ruled last week that several of the country's Internet Service Providers (ISPs) must censor access to The Pirate Bay, following up from a verdict in February saying that it was guilty of sharing copyrighted material on a massive scale. Ironically the move already appears to be backfiring, with the popular torrent site announcing that the media coverage surrounding the events of its censorship has resulted in over 12 million more visitors from the UK public over the course of the last week.
As part of the High Court order, ISPs Everything Everywhere, O2, Sky, Talk Talk and Virgin Media were ordered to block access to TPB. It's worth noting however, that BT is still considering their position. Virgin Media responded first by blocking the domain for its customers two days later, spawning thousands of posts on multiple social networking services from those looking to bypass the court's ruling.
Despite not opposing the court order, Virgin Media did comment that "as a responsible ISP, Virgin Media complies with court orders addressed to the company but strongly believes that changing consumer behavior 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."
TPB responded in their usual fashion. "Thanks to the High Court and the fact that the news was on the BBC, we had 12 MILLION more visitors yesterday than we had ever had before," a Pirate Bay insider said in a statement to TorrentFreak. "We should write a thank you note to the BPI," he added.
The insider continued, "another thing that’s good with the traffic surge is that we now have time to teach even more people how to circumvent Internet censorship." The rogue torrent sharing service also has multiple domains which aren't yet on the block list. Whilst writing this article I'm able to access the site through my Virgin Media internet connection by simply using a different URL, which kind of side-steps the point of censoring it in the first place.
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