UK Pirate Party Pressured Into Taking Down Proxy... Leading To Other Proxies Opening Up

from the if-you-need-to-whac-a-mole dept

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community. Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis. While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

It's really quite ridiculous how much time, money and effort the various arms of the entertainment industry have spent trying to get certain countries to "block" The Pirate Bay. Every single time it happens, it seems to drive up traffic to the site. Those who want to use it don't suddenly decide "gee, now I'm going to start buying what I formerly pirated." They just think "where's a proxy to get to the site" and they find one easily enough because they're. The industry then goes on a wild goose chase seeking to take them all down which is. So they get a few morale-boosting wins... and everyone still gets to go to The Pirate Bay. Couldn't that time be spent more effectively?The latest is that, over in the UK, where BPI (the UK equivalent of the RIAA) was threatening to sue the leaders of the UK Pirate Partyfor setting up a proxy, the Party eventually shut it down knowing that the costs of fighting such a legal battle would be extreme and damaging.But, of course, it's unlikely that actually stopped anyone from reaching TPB, which is available through a variety of other means. In fact, soon after the UK Pirate Party took down its proxy, the Pirate Parties in some other countries put up their own proxies (and, of course, there are tons of general proxies out there). BPI can try to go after these political parties in other countries, or it can demand that ISPs block those proxies also, but more and more will just keep popping up. And none of that will convince a single person to buy something they weren't planning to buy in the first place. It just makes you wonder what they think they're accomplishing.

Filed Under: bans, free speech, pirate party, proxy

Companies: the pirate bay