Despite court-governed blocks and its founders being jailed, The Pirate Bay's traffic has doubled since 2011.

The world's most infamous peer-to-peer file-sharing site shared these stats with Torrent Freak, adding that nine percent of all visitors use a proxy to access the site and that the US continues to be its biggest source of traffic (last year it was revealed that the US was responsible for a third of traffic to the site). That's despite the majority of copyright complaints about content shared on The Pirate Bay coming from US record labels and Hollywood studios.

An increasing number of countries around the globe block the site by forcing Internet service providers to directly block access. In 2011, Advocate General Cruz Villalón of the European Court of Justice said that forcing an ISP to filter Web traffic would infringe upon its fundamental rights. The installation of such a filter would be "a restriction on the right to respect for the privacy of communications and the right to protection of personal data." In addition, "such a system would restrict freedom of information, which is also protected by the Charter of Fundamental Rights." Essentially, forcing ISPs to block Web content by their own expense and indefinitely breaches rights of citizens and companies. This view was upheld by the court.

Nevertheless, a few legal modulations later and it has become pretty standard practice across Europe. In 2012, the UK followed suit, and The Pirate Bay promptly setup a new website. The effect of the block? According to a chart attained by Torrent Freak, there was a peak in traffic toward the end of 2012, a nice little jump in otherwise steadily rising traffic. The fact that only nine percent of traffic is through proxies does suggest, however, that much of the other 91 percent could be coming from countries that do not have ISP blocks in place. Nine percent is nevertheless a lot of people potentially bypassing their country's laws (page impressions are thought to be in the hundreds of millions).

And not every legal entity in Europe is convinced that the tactics are having much of an effect at all. Earlier this year, a Dutch court of appeal ruled that ISPs should not block The Pirate Bay at an IP and DNS level because those measures are ineffective—despite the country ordering ISPs to do just that a few years prior. The ruling was partially based on academic research that showed the same thing.

Of course it's worth noting that since 2011—the starting period from when The Pirate Bay has calculated the doubling in traffic—awareness of the file-sharing site has rapidly increased because of the masses of media attention surrounding various legal challenges and the arrest of its founders.

This story originally appeared on Wired UK.