The Pirate Bay's Perfectly Legal 'The Promo Bay' Blocked By UK ISPs

from the blunt-instrument dept

Last week Techdirt wrote about the perverse attitude of the UK recording industry, which seems obsessed with "stamping out piracy" rather than making more money. Here's a story from TorrentFreak that looks to be another example of attacking first and thinking afterwards: Several UK Internet providers are blocking Pirate Bay's perfectly legal promotion platform for independent artists. The Promo Bay website is currently being blocked by BT, Virgin Media, BE and possibly several other providers. A plausible explanation is that the Promo Bay domain is listed on the same blocklist that's used to enforce the Pirate Bay blockade. However. the domain itself has never linked to infringing material, nor is it hosted on The Pirate Bay's servers. As that explains, The Promo Bay, which we wrote about back in January, is not offering any unauthorized copies of music, and is hosted independently from The Pirate Bay. So either it's been blocked because its association with The Pirate Bay is enough to goad the UK recording industry into unthinking action, or else it's happened by mistake.

Either way, the fact that a perfectly legal service offering perfectly legal material has been rendered inaccessible without warning and for no discernible reason is a reminder that site blocking is a really poor way to tackle unauthorized downloads, with the likelihood of collateral damage. Far better to offer good legal alternatives - like The Promo Bay.

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Filed Under: censorship, copyright, guilt by association, promo bay, uk

Companies: the pirate bay