An ISP in Finland has failed in its quest to have a court-ordered blockade of The Pirate Bay challenged in the highest court in the land. At the behest of a local anti-piracy group ISP Elisa was ordered to block the torrent site, but it complained from the start, describing the censorship strategy as "flawed". Now the Supreme Court has announced it will not be hearing the case, so the blockades will stand and more will surely follow.

Faced with what appears to be an almost immortal beast, during the past couple of years there has been a growing movement by some of the world’s biggest entertainment companies away from trying to kill The Pirate Bay, and towards cutting off its traffic.

They hope to achieve this by taking Internet service providers to court and forcing them to implement filters which stop their subscribers from accessing the site through normal means.

Blockades are now in place all around Europe, notably in the Netherlands, Italy, the UK and Finland. While the UK’s ISPs largely allowed themselves to be “ordered” to block The Pirate Bay, ISPs in the Netherlands and Finland have been putting up a fight. The Dutch ISPs have now largely lost their fight and now it appears those in Finland have too.

The main battle, involving ISP Elisa, dates back to May 2011 when the Copyright Information and Anti-Piracy Center (CIAPC) and the local branch of the IFPI announced that they had filed a lawsuit at the District Court in Helsinki.

They demanded that the ISP should block The Pirate Bay, but Elisa refused to give in without a fight. The censorship strategy was flawed, they argued.

Despite the protests, in October 2011 the Helsinki District Court ordered Elisa to block the domain names and IP-addresses of the world’s most-visited torrent site. Faced with fines of 100,000 euros a day for non-compliance, Elisa had little choice but to censor Pirate Bay.

Shortly after the ISP announced an appeal, but in June this year Elisa was met with yet more bad news. The Court of Appeal had rejected the ISP’s application and upheld the District Court’s ruling from October 2011. Elisa again pushed back, this time with an announcement that they would take the case all the way to the Supreme Court.

But now it looks like the end of the road for the appeals process. The Supreme Court has just denied Elisa permission to appeal the June decision of the Court of Appeal. This means that the October 2011 decision of the Helsinki District Court stands and Elisa must continue to block The Pirate Bay.

“We are of course very delighted about the Supreme Court’s decision on this matter,” CIAPC managing director Antti Kotilainen told TorrentFreak this morning.

Elisa say they are disappointed by the ruling and believe that an opportunity to move forward has been missed.

“The case is juridically very complicated and difficult, which is why we would have wanted the adjudication to be made by the highest court,” said Elisa’s Business Director Henri Korpi.

“In our opinion, legislative measures are required to clarify the situation, where the officials solve the issue of how to reconcile copyright law and users’ right to communication. The solution found by the officials must be implemented at the same time by all ISPs.”

And, as Elisa has insisted all along, part of that solution must be availability of content.

“More importantly, however, is that all the players should focus on measures that can truly and effectively reduce piracy. This requires content to be distributed on the web at a reasonable price and at the same time as other distribution channels,” Korpi concludes.