The major record labels continue their efforts to drive The Pirate Bay underground with France being the next in line. A local music industry group has informed several ISPs that it has requested a court blocking injunction against the popular torrent site. In addition, more than a hundred Pirate Bay proxies are also being targeted.

The Pirate Bay is without doubt one of the most censored websites on the Internet.

Courts all around the world have ordered Internet providers to block subscriber access to the torrent site, and this list continues to expand.

Today, news broke that the French Civil Society of Phonographic Producers has filed for an injunction to prevent ISPs from providing access to The Pirate Bay website and more than hundred of its dedicated proxy sites.

NextINpact reports that the music association, backed by the major movie studios, filed a request in February. The French Internet providers Bouygues, Free, Orange and SFR have since been informed about the court proceedings.

The complaint is based on a provision of the Hadopi law which allows copyright holders to request measures from third-party services to prevent or stop copyright infringements.

Previously, a similar request resulted in a court order requiring Google to censor the search terms ‘Torrent’, ‘RapidShare’ and ‘Megaupload’ from its Instant and Autocomplete services. The court argued that Google indirectly facilitates copyright infringement by failing to filter these terms.

Late last year another court order required Google, Bing and Yahoo to remove 16 video streaming sites from their search results on similar grounds. For now, it is still unclear whether the current legal action to block The Pirate Bay is only targeted at Internet providers, or if search engines are covered as well.

The music labels have clearly learned from the blocking efforts in other countries, where proxy sites quickly picked up the slack. The record labels hope to prevent this from happening in France by listing all the Pirate Bay proxies they could find. Of course, it only takes one uncensored proxy to bypass the measures.

Whether the French blockade, if granted, will be successful remains to be seen. There are still plenty of alternatives and circumvention tools available. This includes TPB’s own PirateBrowser which has been downloaded millions of times since its release last summer.