The Pirate Bay

Britain’s High Court — not the highest, but well up the ladder — has officially ordered Internet service providers to block Sweden-based file-sharing site The Pirate Bay. That means top British ISPs must shut off access to the site as soon as possible. ISPs Everything Everywhere, O2, Sky, TalkTalk and Virgin Media have said they will, while a sixth, BT, has asked for a few weeks to mull over whether it will comply or not.

The Pirate Bay hosts “torrent” files that let users connect with each other to download or share information — in principle, a legitimate activity. But The Pirate Bay has become synonymous since it launched in 2003 with sharing copyrighted information, ranging from music, games and TV shows to e-books, audiobooks and illicit camera recordings of theatrical releases. In 2009, the site’s founders were found guilty of promoting copyright infringement by a Swedish court and sentenced to several months in prison as well as multimillion dollar fines (Sweden’s Supreme Court refused to hear their appeal in February 2012). And according to the British Phonographic Industry (via BBC News), “Sites like The Pirate Bay destroy jobs in the UK and undermine investment in new British artists.”

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Debate over the whether file-sharing-related piracy actually impacts jobs or roils investments is ongoing. Some have counter-argued that sales declines over the past decade, say in the U.S. music industry, have little if anything to do with piracy, and that it’s virtually impossible to find reliable correlations between creative output and industry employability (that, and it’s difficult to mobilize public support for anti-piracy legislation when, for instance, ticket returns for the most pirated movies still break box office records).

Then there’s the question of who’s responsible. Blocking a site like The Pirate Bay at the ISP level remains controversial because the site in principle hosts none of the copyrighted information, instead allowing users to share links with each other. Once a user begins sharing (or downloading) information, that transaction occurs peer-to-peer, independent of The Pirate Bay’s servers. The site acts more like a dynamic map of who’s sharing what and where to find it, after which the transactions occur privately. File-sharing advocates worry that government-mandated blocking of sites like The Pirate Bay amounts to censorship — that it’s tantamount to punishing the vehicle instead of its driver. They argue that it’s a short walk from shutting down file-sharing sites to censoring anything deemed offensive, say political speech.

According to Open Rights Group executive director Jim Killock, the U.K. High Court ruling “will fuel calls for further, wider and even more drastic calls for internet censorship of many kinds, from pornography to extremism.” Killock adds that he believes Internet censorship is on the rise, but that it “never has the effect desired” and instead “turns criminals into heroes.”

BPI chief executive Geoff Taylor doesn’t see it in those terms, writing that the High Court’s ruling confirms The Pirate Bay’s culpability as a copyright infringer “on a massive scale.” BPI had asked the ISPs to voluntarily block access to The Pirate Bay last November, but the ISPs said they would only do so if ordered to by the court.

This isn’t the first time The Pirate Bay’s been blocked. Over the past few years, courts in countries across Europe have ruled that ISPs block the site, resulting in IP and DNS based filtering. But since it’s relatively simple to circumvent such measures using proxy servers or other methods, opponents of court-ordered filtering argue it’s doubly problematic, sacrificing file-sharing principles while propagating defective, slippery-slope solutions.

How long before the issue’s taken up by U.S. courts? We’ve already seen companies like Facebook and Microsoft block outgoing links to sites like The Pirate Bay, and Google reportedly blocks autocomplete search returns on related terms (type “The Pirate Bay” into Google’s search field and you’ll get back virtually nothing — now add a space after the term and see what happens), so there’s already precedent for voluntary private action. With controversial bills like PIPA and SOPA (though postponed), as well as CISPA (which just passed the House last week), expect the debate over whether the U.S. government should legislate (or at the judicial level, officiate) the way the Internet works to reach a boiling point soon.

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