Irish SOPA Used To Block Pirate Bay Access

ObsessiveMathsFreak writes "Ireland's own SOPA Act has finally struck home. Today, the Irish High Court ordered all ISPs to begin censoring the The Pirate Bay. After earlier attempts were struck down, this case was brought by EMI, Sony, Warner Music and Universal music under new copyright laws brought in last year. This follows the largest ISP Eircom already having voluntarily blocked the Pirate Bay after previous legal action. Despite some early indications that some ISPs would appeal the decision, it now appears that like Eircom, they have quietly given up. Pity; IT was one of the few industries Ireland was getting right."

Comments

Re:Making it harder to pirate?

[Rik Sweeney]

All the downloads on TPB are legal.

Serioulsy how fucking hard

[future assassin]

can it be to take the lawyer money and build the damn distribution websites aleady. If people with no money can do it in their spare time, I guess the answer is the studios dont want to. Then WTF are you in the business for? Seriosuly are these mother fucker so out of touch with reality?

Re:Serioulsy how fucking hard

[Rod Beauvex]

This not about money. It never was. It is about control.

Re:Serioulsy how fucking hard

[X.25]

Huh? If you want legal access to movies and music there are a plethora of distribution sites; Amazon, Netflix, itunes, etc.

I mean, what really hurts is that Amazon are cunts and don't bother informing you about geo restriction until you actually try to watch/download something (they let you go through trial setup and also set auto-upgrade option on, even though you might not be able to use Prime at all - I presume they'd just charge me $79 after a free 'trial' if I didn't disable this 'feature'). I just tried it again, and still works the same. Argh.

And they still wonder why many people download "free" things from the trackers/etc? It's not because they are free, but these brainless droids still haven't figured that part out.

Sigh.

Re:Making it harder to pirate?

[Anonymous Coward]

Its pretty hard to find any downloads on the PirateBay.
Since they don't host anything..

Precedents, not specifics

[intermodal]

I'm more concerned with the precedent this could set than with specifically seeing the government block TPB.

Re:I don't know why they even bother

[gravis777]

so (and while TPB is undoubtedly a large tracker, it is hardly the only one),

For them to be a tracker, they would have to host torrent files, and they haven't in years.

Re:Making it harder to pirate?

[mcgrew]

I've never had problems finding legal content there. Have you ever looked? If you did look and found nothing you're doing it wrong.

The Paxil Diaries is there, I seeded it myself. Musician friends' work is there; they, too, seeded it. I've been begged by folks to release The Paxil Diaries in hardcover so they could buy a copy. Guess where they heard about it? The internet. Guess where they got a copy? I emailed it to them for free or they got it from TPB. Now that folks kinda know me they'll buy the next one.

I wouldn't have that dozen Asimov books on my shelf had I not read his stuff for free at the library.

The MAFIAA knows that piracy doesn't hurt sales, study after study has shown this. However, if you buy two indie CDs from my musician friends, that's ten bucks you don't have to buy a MAFIAA CD and the MAFIAA did lose a sale; we don't have unlimited supplies of cash.

Competition hurts sales. The fight against piracy is a fight to keep their independent competitors invisible. As Doctorow says, nobody ever lost any money from piracy but many have starved from obscurity.

That's why the internet is so scary to the old media. Nobody needs them anymore because of it.