Pirate Bay Block Initiates Streisand Cascade, Drives Record Traffic

from the well-that-worked-out-great,-huh? dept

When the news broke that the UK's High Court ordered ISPs to censor the Pirate Bay, we (like many people) pointed out that the block would be largely ineffective. But for now, with the ISPs starting to implement their blocks (Virgin has theirs up and running) and the Pirate Bay all over the news, it's having the opposite effect. TorrentFreak reports that the Pirate Bay just had their biggest traffic day ever. And, naturally, they're using the momentum to teach UK visitors how to bypass the block.

“Thanks to the High Court and the fact that the news was on the BBC, we had 12 MILLION more visitors yesterday than we had ever had before,” a Pirate Bay insider informed TorrentFreak today.



“We should write a thank you note to the BPI,” he added.



...



“Another thing that’s good with the traffic surge is that we now have time to teach even more people how to circumvent Internet censorship,” the insider added.

Of course, there will still almost certainly be a drop in UK traffic once all the ISPs have blocks in place, but in the long run it probably won't do anything to stop piracy or even to stop the Pirate Bay specifically. As EFF founder John Gilmore famously said in 1993, "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it"—and nearly twenty years later, not only does that still hold, it has become true of the people on the net as well.

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community. Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis. While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

Filed Under: censorship, isp, uk

Companies: the pirate bay