Italy blocks The Pirate Bay, inadvertantly increasing traffic to the site

By: Jillian C. York on 27 August 2008
Posted in Italy, Europe, Arrests and legal action, IP blocking

On July 14, the International Herald Tribune reported that an Italian judge had ordered all ISPs in that country to filter access to The Pirate Bay, one of the world's most popular file-sharing sites.

The Pirate Bay, based in Sweden, allows users to search for and download BitTorrent files (also known as "torrents"), small files that contain machine-readable information necessary to download data files from other users.

This is not the first time The Pirate Bay has experienced legal troubles. In 2006, Swedish police conducted a raid against The Pirate Bay's servers. Earlier this year, a court in Denmark ordered Danish ISP Tele2 to block access to The Pirate Bay. And just this month, the International Olympic Committee asked the Swedish government for cooperation in preventing Pirate Bay users from sharing video clips of the Olympics. In response, The Pirate Bay renamed their BitTorrent tracker The Beijing Bay.

This time, Italy's attempt to block access to The Pirate Bay stemmed from an investigation into copyright violation by an anti-piracy group in Milan and was backed by Italian record labels. The action was quickly criticized in the Italian blogosphere, leading to increased traffic to the site.

In fact, traffic from Italy to The Pirate Bay actually increased five percent during the first week of the block, according to Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde. Sunde also reported that he would be implementing a complex system that involved changing IP addresses and mirroring the site at Labaia.org (labaia="the bay"). However, Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak he was implementing "a really annoying system for them to filter" that involved changing IP addresses and mirroring the site at Labaia.org (labaia is Italian for "the bay"). He also encouraged users to use OpenDNS to circumvent ISP blocks.

As the debate about copyright infringement and online file sharing rages on around the world, it is interesting to note that P2P file sharing as a practice continues to increase, with some sources claiming that file sharing actually boosts music sales.

And as for the future of The Pirate Bay in Italy? The company filed a lawsuit against the decree [it] used to force Italian ISPs to block the site. A decision is expected within a few weeks.