All around the world the copyright lobby is pushing for increased censorship of ‘pirate’ websites, The Pirate Bay in particular. Thus far this has resulted in court-ordered blockades in several countries including the UK, the Netherlands Finland and Belgium. However, instead of stopping people's download habits these blockades have resulted in an influx of visitors to Pirate Bay proxies, turning these sites into local heroes.

Over the past year several ISPs have been ordered to censor The Pirate Bay.

In the UK, the Netherlands and several other countries these blockades prevent the majority of the public from accessing the infamous BitTorrent site.

At least, that was the idea.

The reality is that most users simply continue to visit The Pirate Bay. It helps that bypassing the ISP filters is dead simple, as it requires nothing more than updating a bookmark, pointing it to one of the many dedicated proxy sites.

Initially, the Pirate Bay proxy run by the UK Pirate Party became the go-to site for many stranded pirates. However, this didn’t last. Due to its popularity the Pirates were dragged to court by the music industry, and they eventually saw no other option than to shut down their service.

Again, this appeared to be just a mere nuisance to many Pirate Bay users. As soon as the Pirate Party proxy went offline, new ones came in to replace it, while other proxies grew in size.

At the moment Pirateproxy.net is one of the most visited Pirate Bay proxies, with a few million visitors a month.

Going up.

When we look at the regions where proxies are most popular, the countries with court imposed blocks come out on top.

This is no surprise, but that just one of the many proxy sites is among the top 250 most visited sites in the UK, the Netherlands and Finland is quite an achievement.

New local heroes are born.

Of course, the music industry could also go after Pirateproxy.net, trying to shut it down, but then history will simply repeat itself and another proxy will quickly take its place.

It’s a game of whack-a-mole that will be very difficult for the copyright lobby to win.

Proof of the ineffectiveness of Pirate Bay blockades was previously highlighted by several Dutch and UK Internet providers, who claimed that BitTorrent traffic didn’t decline after the blockades were implemented.

The only viable way to stop the Pirate Bay is by taking it down physically. However, recent shutdowns of popular file-sharing sites such as BTjunkie, Demonoid, Megaupload and others have shown that this isn’t going to achieve much either.

In the end it’s more effective to take away people’s motives to pirate, not the means.