UK ISPs Secretly Start Blocking Torrent Site Proxies

An anonymous reader writes "Several UK Internet providers have quietly added a list of new sites to their secretive anti-piracy blocklists. Following in the footsteps of Sky, the first ISP to initiate a proxy blockade, Virgin, BT and several other providers now restrict access to several torrent site proxies. The surprise isn't really that proxies have been added to the blocklist, but that the music industry and ISPs are failing to disclose which sites are being banned."

Comments

Re:This isn't news

[xenobyte]

Although you may not like the BPI or their motives, nobody can argue that TPB's rasion d'être is anything other than contributory copyright infringement on an industrial scale; not with a straight face, at least.

I'll bite, and do so with a straight face.

I understand if you're unable to access TPB due to government censorship but then let me enlighten you. The founding reason for TPB was to facilitate unlimited and unrestricted file sharing and to use civil disobedience to fight the misuse of copyright for commercial purposes (like using local monopolies to drive up prices). The argument has always been that a copy costs nothing for nobody and nobody loses anything while everybody have the chance to gain something.

The copyright MAFIAA has always presented the argument that each copy is a lost sale (one-to-one) but the few times this argument has passed through court rooms it has always been struck down for two primary reasons:

1) A significant portion of those using the pirated copy cannot afford the genuine article. This is especially true with overpriced software like AutoCAD.

2) An even more significant portion are unable to buy the genuine version of the pirated article because it's not for sale where they are located. This is especially true for movies and tv-shows.

As the rights holders control both pricing and distribution, they're directly responsible for a large amount of the piracy, and have the ability to remove most of the foundation for piracy with a stroke of a pen. They create the demand but are unable to fulfill it so people have to resort to piracy.