Slashdot Mirror
UK ISPs Quietly Block Sites That List Pirate Bay Proxies
An anonymous reader tips news that six ISPs in the UK are now blocking sites that simply link to proxies for The Pirate Bay. This follows efforts from copyright holders to block access to the proxy sites themselves — which they've done to limited success through orders from the UK's High Court.
[R]estricting access to proxies did not provide a silver bullet either as new ones continue to appear. This week the blocking efforts were stepped up a notch and are now targeting sites that merely provide an overview of various Pirate Bay proxies. ... One of the other blocked sites, piratebayproxy.co.uk, doesn’t have any direct links to infringing material. Instead, it provides an overview of short Pirate Bay news articles while listing the URLs of various proxies on the side. Apparently, providing information about Pirate Bay proxies already warrants a spot on the UK blocklist. ... It is not a secret that the High Court orders give copyright holders the option to continually update the list of infringing domains. However, it’s questionable whether this should also include sites that do not link to any infringing material.
Every site is linked to infringing material, somehow.
Perhaps they did not get the memo about the internet being a series of tubes.
Why don't they block google since it too returns a lot of torrents on its own?
You mean like, if, say, an AC posted a link on Slashdot to a Pirate Bay proxy link aggregator site such as Pirate Bay Proxy , would UK ISPs then block Slashdot?
Hmm...Let's find out!
Are you trolling? Do you know what "net neutrality" actually is? Did you read even the first sentence of the article you linked to?
"The law is designed to ensure internet providers treat all data equally"
"The European Parliament has voted to restrict internet service providers' (ISPs) ability to charge data-hungry services for faster network access."
It has nothing to do with copyright protection, nothing to do with blocking sites or censorship. It has to do with the practice of charging content providers on top of what they charge customers, and/or throttling some content providers to give other providers (usually themselves) a competitive advantage over the 3rd party service.
As in:
"gee customer... youtube sure is slow (because we throttle it without telling you) perhaps you'd like to try comcast-tube its much faster!"
Or
"gee youtube... if you want your data to reach our customers on the internet connections our customers are already paying us for... then you have to pay us too, whatever we want, or it will be miserable for them to reach your site and they'll stop using youtube. PS... have you seen our new comcast-tube? Its neat-o!"
1) Try to ban illegal downloads. That doesn't work. ...
2) Try to ban sites that link to illegal downloads. That doesn't work.
3) Try to ban sites that link to sites that link to illegal downloads. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say this won't work either.
X) Ban everybody who's ever heard the word "download." Shut off the internet. Everybody goes back to direct copying and it still doesn't bloody work.
Three things need to be realized and acted upon if there's any hope of reducing copyright infringement:
- Make legitimate viewing easy. Recent history with iTunes, Netflix, etc.. and hell older history in the form of things like 7-11.. have shown repeatedly that people are happy to pay, and even pay more if they have to, for the product they want to be on demand.
- Unnnlessss you price it too high. People will not pay 20% more for a one-time stream of a movie compared to buying the DVD. Its absolutely stupid to think they would. You can charge more for convenient access, but only for the part of the product that the consumer is receiving -- you must discount the cost of permanence, the cost of physical media/packaging, the cost of distribution, etc. If you don't people will just see it for the scam it is. (And of course there's an absolute maximum price point as well but that's standard economics and applies equally to the physical media.)
- Realize that reducing copyright infringement by 100% is not possible. I'm not saying to stop fighting all together, but when all of your strategies seem to be "all or nothing," you're going to end up on that "nothing" side every single time. Things like invasive DRM that stops infringers for all of about one day but annoy legitimate users until the end of time is NOT really helping the situation. When I have a better experience downloading a pirated copy of something I've already purchased rather than watching the legitimate copy, there's something wrong with the whole situation and it doesn't take too long to start skipping that whole "already purchased" step.