In October 2011, a court in Finland ordered local ISP Elisa to block The Pirate Bay to stop copyright infringement among its subscribers. Today, the blockade - which covers many domains and IP addresses - took effect, but behind the scenes there is an effort to unblock the site and render the court order useless. Meanwhile there is already collateral damage - the court order has succeeded in blocking a domain linking to Electronic Frontier Finland.

In May 2011, the Copyright Information and Anti-Piracy Centre (CIAPC) and the Finnish branch of the music industry group IFPI filed a lawsuit the District Court of Helsinki.

The groups demanded that local ISP Elisa should be forced to protect the copyrights of their members by stopping their subscribers accessing The Pirate Bay. Initially Elisa refused, described the blocking demands as “unreasonable”, but a subsequent court order left them with no choice.

On October 26th 2011, the District Court of Helsinki ordered Elisa to block a range of domains and IP addresses associated with The Pirate Bay. Although Elisa has contested the decision by filing with the Helsinki Court of Appeal, in the meantime they have to comply.

Today, Elisa has confirmed it has begun blocking the domains and IP addresses listed below:

thepiratebay.org, www.thepiratebay.org, depiraatbaai.be, www.depiraatbaai.be, piratebay.am, www.piratebay.am, piratebay.net, www.piratebay.net, www.piratebay.no, piratebay.no, piratebay.se, www.piratebay.se, suprnova.com, www.suprnova.com, themusicbay.com, www.themusicbay.com, themusicbay.net, www.themusicbay.net, themusicbay.org, www.themusicbay.org, thepiratebay.am,www.thepiratebay.am, www.thepiratebay.com, thepiratebay.com, thepiratebay.gl, www.thepiratebay.gl, thepiratebay.net, www.thepiratebay.net, www.thepiratebay.se, thepiratebay.se, www.piraattilahti.fi, piraattilahti.fi, thepiratepay.org.nyud.net

IP addresses to be blocked:

194.71.107.15

194.71.107.19

194.71.107.18

“During the war between Finland and Russia some Swedes decided to help Finland. They said ‘The Finnish cause is ours’,” a Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak, signaling their intention to circumvent the block.

“TPB originates from Sweden, so TPB will see the Finnish cause as its own. Only this time, it’s against the copyright Russians,” he concluded.

And it appears the battle for the ’cause’ has already begun. The last domain in the list certainly piqued our interest and not only because it includes a typo. The nyud.net domain belongs to the peer-to-peer based Coral CDN service which links to IP-addresses all over the world, which is generally a good tool to make blocked sites accessible again.

Ironically enough, the domain in question reveals a very easy way to bypass The Pirate Bay blockade in Finland. Just use one of the alternative domains associated with The Pirate Bay, add nyud.net (e.g. depiraatbaai.be.nyud.net) and the most resilient torrent site becomes accessible again in Finland.

“While this block can temporarily stop the basic filesharer from using The Pirate Bay, we already see a surge of interest in blocking technology, censorship, net neutrality, copyright legislation and court practice in the media,” Joonas Mäkinen of Finland’s Pirate Party told TorrentFreak.

“This probably ends up being beneficial to filesharing and shows the blocking attempts to be counter-productive. Side-effects will be that the more blocks there are, the more workarounds people learn. This could severely hinder solving important crimes in the future,” he concludes.

Party secretary Harri Kivistö shares these concerns.

“These blocks are nothing. People adapt, as they’ve always done. They learn to use new methods, they discover new websites, they circumvent,” he told TorrentFreak. “Loads of money are thrown into lobbying and legal action and nothing else is accomplished but limitations to civil rights and preliminary structures for a police state.”

Interestingly there is another domain in the list which does not link to The Pirate Bay at all.

Anyone (Elisa customers excluded) clicking piraattilahti.fi will see that the domain is not linked to the world’s most resilient torrent site at all, but digital rights group EFFI – Electronic Frontier Finland.

“The decision from Helsinki Administrative Office for Enforcement was quite surprising considering the decision SABAM v. Scarlet from The Court of Justice of the European Union and the fact that the decision itself is currently under appeal,” Ville Oksanen, lawyer and researcher at Aalto University told TorrentFreak.

“It’s hard to see why the enforcement has to start before the matter is finally resolved – especially considering that the given decision is quite ineffective , e.g. it misses www.thepiratebay.ee and all the different proxy and open DNS-services. Even more ironically, one of blocked the addresses actually is a forward to www.effi.org, which is ‘the Finnish version’ of Electronic Frontier Foundation,” he concludes.

In the last hour we’ve learned that there are even more blocking circumvention options coming soon meaning that this cat and mouse game could go on forever.

Update (January 11): Elisa updated the list of blocked domains and removed the piraattilahti.fi domains.

“The enforcement order was narrowed so that the removal of domain names www.piraattilahti.fi and piraattilahti.fi have been canceled in Elisa’s network,” the ISP states.