The Pirate Bay could be blocked in the UK, after a High Court judge ruled that the torrent site and its users are committing copyright infringement.

The case was brought before the court by a coalition of major record labels, including Sony, EMI and Universal. They want the court to force internet providers like Sky, BT, TalkTalk and Virgin Media to block the website. No operators of the Pirate Bay were in court for the hearing.

This follows from a landmark ruling in July 2011, where BT was ordered to block access to Newzbin2—a site that aggregates links to copyrighted content. The judge ruled then that BT must use technology designed for blocking child pornography to make the site inaccessible to its customers.

Now, with the court finding that operators of The Pirate Bay "incite or persuade" users to commit copyright infringement, the record labels want the 'Bay to succumb to the same fate. The Guardian says that the high court is expected to rule in June as to whether ISPs should prevent their customers from accessing The Pirate Bay, too.

Newzbin's block wasn't too successful for rightsholders. According to Torrentfreak, a BT-Cleanfeed-busting client was released soon after the block was enacted, allowing anyone to access the site just as before. Newzbin2 founder "Mr White" said "just over 93 percent of Newzbin2's active BT users are reported to have downloaded the anti-censorship software."

The Pirate Bay has changed some of its policies recently to dodge litigation. It changed its domain name from thepiratebay.org to thepiratebay.se because, "The United States of America have decided that they control the internet and can dictate it. We wanted to move away from that scenario."

In January, The Pirate Bay also said it will soon no longer offer downloads of .torrent files, and will only provide magnet links to users. These are lightweight files that are pretty much just bare-bones torrent hashes that a client can read and use to seek the addresses of peers.

An added bonus of using magnets is that the tiny files can be downloaded in bulk and stored. Pirate Bay user "allisfine" grabbed the title, id, file size, seeds, leechers and magnet links of the site's 1,643,194 torrents and zipped them up in a 90MB file.

Listing image by Photograph by Peter Gerdes